By the huge petro-chemical works at Braze I glimpse a family with a horse and cart, a mother with a bundled up baby sitting in the back. At the McDonald’s in Gara Nord Bucharest there is an old woman wearing a yellow and blue flowered headscarf and peasant style apron asleep at a table. I bet in tourist guides to Romania there’s a picture of someone like her.
The buildings near the station include grey, concrete blocks of flats and older one-storey houses. They nearly all show signs of decay.
It’s as if the people are more permanent than the buildings.