You could call the city of Carturesti a cavern, but it just wouldn't do it justice. True, it is technically a gaping space in the heart of Bucharest, but it carries nothing of the damp darkness which we learned to associate with caverns. Shining white as the provoking pages of a virgin manuscript, the climbing passages across its walls take you along stacks and stacks of books, mottled receptacles of fantasies tiled by the inhabitants to signal each other the mood of the day, a prayer for the ancestors, their hidden love for a personal angel... Every shelf has its colorful code, impossible to decipher for an outsider. You will meet your likes on the winding paths of Carturesti: simple travelers, wide eyed children feeling their way on the brink of trespassing into the world of somebody else's dream, yet kept in this world by mundane plans and petty reasonings. At this hour the elusive locals are reading in the shadows of their secluded dwellings, entrances sealed behind fascinating book shelves, windows covered in colorful artwork because daylight attacks the support paper and then stories would begin to fade - the greatest sacrilege in the city of books. Only at night the stairs start creaking in another language, winds shuffling page after page in enlightened minds, the hearts of the people of Carturesti thumping in the rhythms of their encounters with the worlds of each other. But long after the city gates closed for the night, a lingering pine aroma with hints of grapefruit from your West Coast IPA will remind them of your passing and maybe tomorrow, some book stack will carry a new cover, sunny and rosy and offering the bookshelf inhabitants a fresh cue that our world still has something valuable to offer.