vali petcu .com

It’s so good to see you can still do things to make your parents smile, even if you are 29 and you think they have seen it all.

Sort of.

After a short vacation to Venice, i am in Oradea, preparing for TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival). Romania hasn’t change much, but i like Transylvania better than Muntenia, people are more relaxed and a few hundred years of Austrian occupation shows.

So, I have realised what my 5-year plan is.

1. Buy a new car. A Volvo S40 or V50. Or maybe a Subaru.

2. Settle to a country in Western Europe.

A good plan, right?

This is a popular topic these days. Everybody seems to have an idea about it, except the newspaper managers.

One I hear on a daily basis is “newspapers need to reinvent themselves”. No, they do not. They need to look at what they are not doing anymore, but used to do 2-3-5 years ago. Reporting. Investigating. That’s it. They had it and they lost it. Now investigations are done over the internet and over the phone. Gone are the days when 2 guards were running after us for taking a picture in a forbidden place and all i could hear was my mate shouting that if i lose the camera, we are doomed. Now, these are gone. Easy news are the new “Watergate investigation”.

Don’t save journalism. Let is crush, burn and grow up again.

Yesterday, while I was driving from Cluj to Debrecen, I spotted a little cabin, somehow resembling the one in the picture on the right, in a little hill village. Some windows, a little lawn, a big orchard in the back of the house. There was a banner on the cabin, saying “for rent/for sale”.

I feel bad I did not stop and ask the price. It would have been a nice place to live, i think, at  least for the summer. An internet connection, a car for shopping and a lot of quiet time. Maybe a dog. And a visiting bear, sometimes.

After living for 28 years in Bucharest, one of the loudest and crowded cities I have ever known, a lot of quiet is required.