B is for Bucharest.

Beautiful Bucharest, it wasn’t known as ‘Little Paris of the East’ for nothing. Beautiful architecture stands proud against the hot contrasty summer light, solid and decorative in the oppresive sun. The majority of my memories of Bucharest are from the summer days, only once or twice did I venture there in February, mostly I went in summer or autumn, and mostly with the intention of going to shoot my photographs of roma gypsies.

I lived mainly in Piata Rosetti, a stones throw from the heart of the city in Piata Universitatii. Little Piata Rosetti was full of charm, bus stops along the southern side, a little grassy round-about in the middle, some bars and hotels, chalked political grafitti on walls, newspaper vendors, and gypsies selling flowers- usually piles of roses. On the corners old grandmothers who had made the journey from the countryside would stand with little posies of garden flowers, selling them for a few Lei. I always tried to buy flowers from them, the gypsies would charge too much, and the grandmothers always looked like they needed the sales more. Sometimes when their prices were just too low and it was late in the day, I’d buy a few posies enabling the old women to pack up and make their way home. I’d take the flowers back home to No.5 where I lived, and give them to Magda, the Matriarch of the house, and long suffering wife of Igor. Magda would smile, and laugh sometimes, and put the flowers in little glass vases and dot them around in the dark interior, and then she’d boil up a pot of espresso coffee and light a Marlboro or Kent. Together we’d sit drinking coffee as thick as the summer heat, we’d chat in my decent’ish Romanian learned from watching Dallas on TV, Magda would try her broken French learned from Edith Piaf, but rarely did we not understand each other. Sign language and a common understanding also helped.

One summer night, I forget which year, in the Milk Bar, a newly opened nightlife bar, I was in the company of young Romanian friends. I paired off at one end of the table with a girl who’d stepped out from a pre-Raphaelite painting. We talked in our own languages over our beers, and she slowly told me that if two people drink from the same glass then they’ll share the same dreams. One person who didn’t share the same dreams was her boyfriend sitting nearby, to another he commented, “let them talk, by the end of the night their hands will be sore with sign language”.

I made a lot of good friendships in Bucharest, many which have survived two decades now. Not least with Jason Eskenazi, whom I first met in the summer of 1990. I had seen him about, in the Intercontinental where all photographers ate in those days. He had a small Domke bag and a Leica. One day as I sat on a passing bus I saw him outside on the pavement, photographing a hedgerow with his Leica, I couldn’t understand the image, I thought he must be in Magnum. But slowly we met, we became pals, and we traipsed all over Bucharest in search of things to photograph. We’d jump on trams at random, never paying, and jump off again when something outside caught our eye. In that way we passed a few months, until money began to run out and media interest in Romania began to move on. It was that summer, 1990, in that heat, that I shot a portfolio of images which won me the inaugral Ian Parry Award, set up in memory of Sunday Times photographer Ian Parry who had died during the December 1989 revolution, in a plane crash as he was leaving the country to bring the images back to the waiting Sunday Times.

When the heat in the city was too much I’d take off with friends to Herastrau Park. We’d swim in the lake, diving to the muddy bottom to retrieve mussel like shellfish, which we’d cook and throw away with disgust after tasting. We’d drink home made tuica and wake the next day with sunburn and blinding headaches.

Bucharest was affordable back then, much cheaper than now. We- myself and other photographers there post-revolution, lived well. Food and beers were cheap, a car could be rented from a family for about 10USD a day, every car in the city was a taxi and could be flagged down- everyone was desperate to make money. In the early days an apartment I rented was about 100 USD a month, and slowly apartments came up for sale, old 1930′s apartments for a few thousand dollars. With hindsight it would have been a great investment, but then as a young freelancer starting out in his career I never had a few thousand dollars, and never had foresight.

With a group of UK photographers I once went to the famous Caru Cu Bere (beer hall), a beer hall in the classic sense of the name. The five of us sat down, ceramic tiles  on walls all around, the huge roof way above us. The waiter in black and white came to take our order, “5 beers!”. “We have no beer.” We laughed, “but this is a beer hall”. “We have no beers, only champagne”.  It was 1990, it was summer, it was cheap living, “Then we’ll have 5 bottles of champagne”. After all, it was Bucharest, the Little Paris of the East.