Two ten-year-old girls ran up to me. "Got a cigarette?" The cute blue eyes of the blonde girl certainly didn't match any stereotype about socially excluded families. This isn't a world of stereotypes — this is reality. Defaulters don't come in a designated skin colour, hair colour, or eye colour. They're simply defaulters.
Hotel Condor seemed to be the only oasis of civilisation for miles around. Oravita turned out to be a town where nothing exists. (Lesson learned: pointing at a map and saying "we can sleep here because it's halfway to point Y" is not an ideal way to plan a trip.)
A pepper seller waves at me. "What are you doing?" "The gentleman wants a photo with the peppers." We wander through a fruit and vegetable market in a grimy town called Targu Jiu, which either had its glory days long ago — or never had them at all.
On the road from Pitesti to Targu Jiu, I noticed it for the first time. We were driving through villages that were essentially rows of houses lined up along the main road – no centre, no village square, nothing that visually defines a village. We wondered why there were no side streets – everyone lived on the main road. But we soon understood why.
We left Bucharest airport heading for Targu Jiu. Crawling through traffic on the motorway, surrounded by nothing — peeling walls, faded signs on neglected houses, and yellow fields of dried-out grass. That divine, romantic Romanian landscape was nowhere to be found in these parts. Just dust carried by the dry southern heat.
