Brasov’s famous baroque thoroughfare
is called Republic Street and packed with mostly high-end boutiques, cafes, creperies
and banks. Little alleyways lead off to trendy underground bars. It is a place
to be seen not only for the genuinely well-off but also the vast majority of
locals who aren’t well-off but want to look like they are.
I’m actually staying in an apartment
in Republic. But it is not high-end nor, indeed, in any sense aspirational. It
is down a very narrow alley fronted by a big red sign saying Sex Shop in yellow
letters. You go through the iron gate, down the alley, past the brown wheelie
bins, Eli’s tattooing and piercing parlour, the little currency exchange booth,
past Sex Shop and then you get to my apartment, which is right next door. At
the far end of the alley live an elderly couple, the Popsecus. Mister P suffers
from excessive wind (I’ll find this out later – the walls around here are
paper-thin).
Monika manages Sex Shop. She
is tall, pale with a mass of carrot-coloured hair and wears jeans that have
leopard skin trim around the pockets. She
has heard me struggling to open the door of my apartment (it has one of those stupid
double-lock mechanisms). She has ventured out. The first thing she says to me
is: Do you fix the washing machines...?
No comments:
Post a Comment