Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence

we want to celebrate. The curved skylights’ yellow light fills the Macca- Villacrossearcadewithamurky, viscous air, slowingdown the passers-by. Through a few broken windowpanes I spot an Egyptian shopkeeper restocking yogurt, and just hope the air won’t smell too much like wet dog amid the hustle and bustle down there. Under no circumstance do I want to spend hours cooped up in Flavian’s SUV talking about the old farts at his institute, our eyes fixed on the flashing-red raindrops, one of Bucharest’s classic traffic jams as a backdrop. Dinu, my previous boyfriend, had procured a blue police light for such occasions; as soon as he set it on the roof, the chaotic traffic parted, although not as neatly as it might have, so he had to honk the horn, too, and yell out the window: “What if it really were an emergency, you assholes?” Now that I’m on leave after the incident, I’m reading a book about Bucharest in the 1800s that quotes a British naval captain, Charles Colville Frankland, who on his way back from Constantinople found Bucharest full of golden carriages bearing boyars clad in crimson robes and fur. A French general raved about the city’s many coaches and new-fangled carriages with liveried coachmen, although he criticized the slow traffic, as “there were still some old Transylvanian carts, in which

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