Is the Romanian Delta our OG Garden?

In Summer 2024 I took a trip that now made me wonder..

Apr 08, 2025

about Romanian gardens and the media on our phones: how long will we manage to keep them clean for?

I am not trying to send anyone there, to be very honest

Because it felt like a sacred untouched place. Well, untouched by too many tourists. There were mostly local tourists, fishermen and fellow Romanians from neighboring towns. If I am lucky enough to visit places like these, I always ask myself if:

there would be more people/tourists there would it be better or worse?
I really earned the right to be there? (ugh)

Most of the time I don’t reach a final answer to any of these questions. I just travel, get back home and get on with my life like anybody would do.

Then, sometime later I dig up the pictures and videos from that trip - ooor: the Featured Photos algorithm shows me a media carousel of manufactured joy played on pretty bad stock music if you ask me.

Which option is better?

I’d rather dig them up myself but I am very curious what you think? For me, digging for media requires focus and strength to deal with memories that might be muddied or unclear. It requires a bit of more courage than being fed them in a passive manner. I think that’s why I prefer it (or I just like to overcomplicate things ughh).

I don’t always have the time to dig and dig though… I am still in the process of categorizing and cleaning media on my phone and I can honestly say it’s very hard to do it manually. So I choose a combination of automatic and manual, but by following this path I manage to lose pictures I didn’t want to lose in the first place.

So I don’t know what the verdict is for me

I just know that any photo or video holds a lot of power. We’ve recently seen the move Germany decided to make to deport foreign citizens over their involvement in Gaza solidarity protests. I am aware that I’m making an assumption here but they probably had photos and videos as ‘proof’ to make these cases against people that didn’t commit any crime. Who is making those photos and videos then?

Objective Surveillance

I’ve been carrying this book with me for a long time. It’s one of those books that caught my eye because the Escher inspired cover but the contents are more fascinating than a lot of books I started but never managed to finish yet.

I haven’t finished this one either (opsie), but made sure to have it with me during my trip through the Delta last summer. It’s about the power of careful observation. Reading it makes me wonder when is observation just that and when does it turn into surveillance? How do people know when to make the difference and how can we take a literal break from all of it?

For me personally, it’s a bit too much. The feeling of being watched is a lot when you don’t know what you’re being watched for, you know? That’s why places like the Romanian Danube Delta are such wonders. There, you mostly have fishes and birds watching you…and a random person or two.

I really can’t wait to travel to more places like this so I can ask myself again: