I live in a city where walking is not allowed... or at least so it seems some days, when pedestrians have to walk on the road because cars took over the pathways, when construction sites melt down destructively and invade the streets, when you can't look up at the beautiful faсades because you're too busy watching the floor... However, I somewhat cannot be completely mad at a city with such huge and nice parks. Bucharest may be a highly polluted city, but I think it might be the greenest polluted city I've ever been.
When the streets push you out, and you don't feel like staying at home, there's two things you can do in Bucharest: either you go shopping or you go "parking". There's many parks scattered around the city: huge forests like Herastrau, wide meadows like Titan or Tineretului, English gardens like Cismigiu or Botanic Garden. Lively parks, all-age parks where you can find children and mothers, old people spending the day (sad people spending the night), teenagers, couples, dog owners and disowned dogs, birds, frogs...
Bikes everywhere; the very bikes you hardly see on the bycicle lanes. Teenagers playing ball, badmington: pensioners playing backgammon, draughts or chess. Ponds with boats and terraces and, very often, a small amusement park with some some roller coasters, jumping beds and bumber cars. On Sundays, an orchestra plays folk music at Cismigiu.
There's a couple of things I've seen people doing in Bucharest parks I hadn't seen before, not in Spain. Right now, I can recall three. One: Romanians do like a lot cotton sugar, not only children but also grown ups buy and eat it (I think I haven't since I was 10 or even less). Two: you can weight yourself, there's some people that sells sweeties, pop corn or sweet corn, there's painters and cartoonists, and there's also other people that let you weight yourself on a bathroom scale. Three: a weird "park" sport, like a tennis doubles match, but using a football ball and feet. I've asked around and none was able to give me a clue on the rules.
I love to wander around these parks, dodging bikes and scatters, listening the distant hum made by 20 games of chess being played at the same time in some clear beyond the trees, wondering if I am already too old to eat pink sugar cotton... or maybe just too Spanish.
Whoever invented skating is a genius, in my opinion. London gets in the way of every other sport. There are tiny little patched of green where you can play football, or golf, or whatever, and the concrete is trying to eat them away. So you play these games in spite of the city and, really, it would be better if you lived just about anywhere else, out in the countryside, or the suburbs, or some place like Australia. But skating you do because of the city. We need as much concrete and as many stairs and ramps and benches and pavements as you've got. And when the world's been completely paved over, we'll be the only athletes left, and there will be statues of famous skaters all over the world, and the Olympics will just be a million of different skating competitions, and then the people might actually watch. I will, anyway.
Entradas
.JPG)
