Re-build this city

Bucharest was badly damaged during the communist era. Entire neighbourhoods were demolished to make room for working class apartment buildings and the likes of "House of the People". Unfortunately this trend continued after the revolution, so high office buildings were built in house areas, next to beautiful churches. Houses classified as monuments (and thus forbidden to be demolished) are left to crumble and fall by their "nouveau riche" owners who just want to build another apartment or office building. When I found out (see the full story here) about this building

... I thought that maybe there is a hope to re-build this city. Since I went to Barcelona to see Gaudi's work and I also saw an exhibition about Hundertwasser in Budapest a few years ago, I will definitely go to Siriu street to see this beautiful building.

Orange did it again

After Paloma Faith and Mika, Orange produced a new advertisement having a very nice background song, from The Ting Tings this time:



Since I have very low expectations from a mobile operator at this point (just a phone with long battery life, a universal charger (sic!) and a reasonable candy-bar design + some national minutes) I would switch from Vodafone to Orange if they promise me (in writing) that they would provide me a very nice song every 3-4 months.

Llosa

It all started somewhere in high-school. I didn't read much at that time: I remember the Romanian language teacher asked us in the first class in ninth grade who is our favourite writer and most of us were completely puzzled, choosing in the end between Jules Vernes and Alexandre Dumas. Then a colleague passed me the Sven Hassle series and then I discovered the SF series of Asimov and Dune. But another group of my colleagues had some higher standards and were reading serious literature. And someday (in the tenth grade I guess) a "cult" novel started to circulate in this group of friends and they urged me to read it (remember everybody reading The Alchemist in 2001 or The Da Vinvi Code in 2004?). This was "The Storyteller" of Llosa. The style was new to me, I had to focus to follow the story line, but I liked the magical sensation created by the book and its message. Then "Conversation at the Cathedral" followed and I was already hooked. "Lituma in the Andes", "The War of the End of the World" (the revolution book), "In Praise of the Stepmother" (the wicked book), "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (the hilarious book), "The Feast of the Goat", I would read these books time and again. So do I have a favourite writer nowadays? Yes, it is Mario Vargas Llosa, with or without the Nobel prize.

P.S. I sometimes regret I didn't attend his lectures at George Washington University in the fall of 2003. It was after all only a couple of metro stations away from College Park...