Every day going to work I go along the Dâmbovița river. So I decided that it deserves some photos here. 

Actually this river isn't anything to be proud of. Bucharest never functioned as a port city, the river has never been navigable. The river was channeled twice: in 1883  and in the late 1970s, to aid in the replanning of the Central area and the construction of the Bucharest Metro. The photos below shows the fragment of a river in th city centre. 

To be honest, I have never seen such a polluted river in a capital city. But surprisingly, still you can find many 'fishermen' on the banks, as well as some small fish living in it. The water flows so slowly that it is really hard to guess which way it goes.

The view towards Piata Unirii

At the end of Piata Unirii the river appears again

the National Library of Romania

Recently the water level is going down and down, so the monster it getting bigger and bigger...

The fragment near my dormitory

Difficult legacy

It high time to start posting about the bucharest as a city. Every day I take a stroll to a random part of a city, away from Piata Uniri or Calea Victorei, to see how it looks like where tourists do not go (well, there are not too may tourist here though). The quantity of buildings representing Modernism or Art Nouveau is astonishing. It is really hard to express it with words only. And they all blend into one, very characteristic urban tissue of Bucharest. 

 

 But, I supppose that Bucharest is known rather for gigantic buildings erected for the glory of socialism. Palace of the Parliament is not the one that I have on my mind in this moment. Every day going to "work" I pass by a gloomy vidmo of Dâmbovița Center.

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A few words about this "creature" from wiki.org:

 Dâmbovița Center is an unfinished Romanian building in Bucharest, Romania, near Cotroceni, on the shore of the Dâmboviţa River. It was erected during the late 1980s by the Communist regime over the terrain which used to be the Bucharest Hippodrome before World War II, and was intended to serve as a museum of the Romanian Communist Party.^[1] The balcony (which no longer exists) of the unfinished building facing Ştirbei Vodă Street was used by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu on 23 August 1989 to watch the festivities marking Romania's National Day. It was the last Communist-style parade in Romania.

I admit, that I did not read much about this huge construction site in the centre of Bucharest. But just a quick glance is enough to know from which era it is and whose idea it was to build it. It's history doesn't matter. Every time I pass by I think but the amount of money already invested in this. And this amount of money is still nothing to compare with the millions of RON needed to either demolish it, or convert it into something different. Any kind of action will consume unimaginable funds. Try to imagime the scale of it

And yes, there are plans of creating there a shopping mall with hotels and theme park, you can read abut it here. I have little knowledge on this topic, but simply I cannot believe that this over 20 years old decrepit skeleton can be converted into anything. I am afraid that Bucharest will stay with this gift from communists forever.

 

But every walk with the view at this building is a real food for thoughts. Just imagine it as a cheap camping site for tourists, or a paintball/airsoft battlefield......