Through the looking glass

Bucharest webcam

Technology is something else, innit? Whenever I travel to a new location in Johannesburg, my first stop tends to be Google's Street View: on the down side, wherever I go I get a bad feeling of de ja vu; on the plus side, I never get lost.

A couple of months ago I realised that I could do the same thing with Bucharest, and gave my wife her first view of Bucharest's streets in ten years. It was a brilliant experience: we couldn't afford the holiday, so we got a cheap alternative courtesy of the kind folks at Google.

This evening, another penny dropped: webcams! Not just for dirty old men online, lol. Another short Google, and voila, result: http://jurnalul.ro/webcam/1-mai-turda-126.html. Wow ... looking at the cars and (wow!) trams moving, I finally had a little viewpoint into this country which is taking up my every waking thought at the moment.

My journey didn't even have to end there: http://jurnalul.ro/webcam/poiana-brasov-bradul-419.html. Mountains, snow, people! Oh man, voyeurism at a whole new level. Do those little happy skiers think for a second that there's a South African watching them from continents apart, wishing for his own shot in their skis? If that sounds spooky, I'm sorry. There's a more positive side to this: I figure that people could send each other messages by writing messages in the snow in the view of one of these webcams. How cool - no pun intended - would that be?

Technology really does make the world a smaller place. Just because sharing is caring, here's a webcam showing Johannesburg: http://inside-joburg.com/webcam-johannesburg. And with that, it's back to the interactive Romanian pronunciation lessons from http://learn.transparent.com!