Photos

It was a Monday night... looking westward. Next day I was going to wake up early and start my trip back, westward. I had spent that entire day with my loved ones, but I was soon going to leave them behind once again. Maybe next time I'm going to go home, I'll get home for good and never have to leave my family for so long and so far away... maybe.

This is a shot at the outskirts of my home town, the new outskirts. Nowadays, my home town too, as many other cities in Romania, is expanding far beyond the historical area it occupied not only through my lifetime but throughout the communist era and probably much, much earlier than that. During the communist regime a lot of people were thrown out of their mostly one floor houses and were moved into tall mostly gray apartment buildings that were being built over their land.

Now the vertical expansion has pretty much stopped and large areas of agricultural land are being converted and being built over, as this horizontal expansion took over. The Romanian real estate market exploded over the past several years, as it did in other places in the world, but much harsher. Today, there are areas in Bucharest which rival the most expensive cities in the world. In certain neighborhoods real estate goes for as much as 9000 Euro per squared meter!!! Most people not only cannot afford these prices, but they can't even afford the lowest prices on the market. For now, only a small minority of the population is involved in this real estate bubble, but hopefully once it bursts, as it did elsewhere in the world, Romanians will have access to affordable housing too.

Anyway... I was carrying two cameras at the time and I was shooting with both of them, as I was trying to capture the the sunset framed by the profile of those new buildings at the perfect moment... but this is still my usual camera, now held together by a rubber band :( It's still shooting fine, though.

Enjoy!