I read in a traveling blog about a tour with a local guide in Bucharest called Beautiful Decay and ordered one at once. Unfortunately, the tour was not available anymore, but I did manage to rebook it to Alternative Bucharest and got the world’s nicest guide, Mircea, to show me around the lesser known areas of Bucharest with some inside information of historic, architectural and urban character. Street art, murals, hidden gems, dilapidated houses, different ways of building and creative approaches towards social equity for Roma people were a few of the subjects we discussed while walking our boots off around the city center.

This is our amazing sculptor, Brancusi, immortalized by a Portuguese artist by the Art Academy in str. Grivitei.

A cute cat advertising for the sale of its owner’s apartment in the most nonchalant way possible.

A huge mural contrasting with the house it was painted on, in a semi-secret garden where they project films on a huge screen during hot summer evenings.

Mahalaua Bucurestiului, a messy way of building without a plan,  nor facilities, typical for the Ottoman empire and still seen in today’s Istanbul.

Green houses, the air condition of the olden days, keeping the temperature inside the houses 4-5 degrees cooler.

An old lady selling flowers in the street.

This was the tour’s most interesting sight, Palatul Adevarul, a fantastic building left to rot  after being vandalised, in spite of its amazing historic value, as it was the cradle of Romania’s journalism, where the newspaper Adevarul (The truth) first saw the light of day.

This is Pasajul englez, where they caught the most heinous serial criminal of Romania, Ion Rimaru, at the time when the place was still a whore house.

The Art Academy, adorned with many a mural, full of young gregarious youngsters very different than myself, much more confident and less eager to become adults than we were at the time.

I hope you liked the tour, I myself loved it to bits!

xxx, Alina