工事現場で見かけたこの男衆。最初はやや鋭い視線で私を見ていたが、写真を撮りたいと話しかけると笑顔になり、ネクタイを締め直さんとばかりにちょっとかしこまった風にカメラに向かった。「俺、もう日本で有名人だね」と、片言の英語で言うと、クシャと笑った。

ブカレストの人は優しかった。東欧の冷たいイメージが先入観という箱にすっぽりはまっていたので、一見険しく見える彼らの表情が、素朴な笑顔でくずれるのを見て正直拍子抜けした。この旅では、久しぶりに意識的に人を撮った。

旅が好きだ。知らないことを、知らないと言えて、知りたいことを探求できるから。生活することで得る知識や経験も素敵だけど、未知の文化に飛び込む感覚は、格別に刺激的だ。

These gentlemen I saw at a construction site were looking rough at first, but as soon as I talked to them asking that I wanted to take a picture, they smiled very gently. As if they were trying to fix their tie (of course they didn’t wear a tie), they straighten their back and neatly looked at the camera. “I am famous now, right?” A guy in a hoodie said and they smiled like a young boy.

People in Bucharest was very kind to me. Before coming to Romania, I was somehow strongly convinced that Romanian could be very hard because of the historical background. What I saw instead was kindness and smile (it can be very subtle sometimes though), and some laid back feel. As soon as I learned that they are happy to talk with me, I started to take a portrait in Bucharest.

I love traveling. I can talk to people just like that. I can say I don’t know to what I don’t know. I can explore what I want to know. Of course, it is nice to learn and experience something by settling somewhere. But it is very exciting to jump into an unknown culture.

photographed in mar/2019