Manuela: ‘The drill is the emblem of living in a block of flats’. Bucharest, Romania
Manuela Aristotel is a Romanian pensioneer in her late 60s. She is married and has no children of her own. Over the last 30 years she has lived with her husband in a flat that she bought herself before marriage. This was during Communism, while she worked in a factory in the south of Bucharest. Manuela likes to cook, to travel and to read the many books she bought over the years in her apartment, that she always keeps nice and tidy. When her home life is interrupted, Manuela feels unhappy: ‘The drill is the emblem of living in a block of flats’, Manuela says, while she takes a few pictures of a drill on her kitchen table. In their 10-storey block ‘every week somebody renovates something.’ During the first lockdown, she enjoyed the lack of noise made by her neighbours or traffic, but as restrictions eased people became more active and construction work increased. Asked where would she rather be, Manuela replied: ’In Greece or Spain – and generally at the sea!’. For Manuela travelling remained a distant dream once green cards became mandatory.
