Burning Sunday

Sunday is a day for walking and some recurring activities, I have a schedule that I stick to and follow every week without being able to ignore it because my wife is watching me.

My wife is religious enough to want to go on Sundays to our favorite church, a small monastery, three hundred years old and located in the middle of the city where we live, Bucharest, quite far from our home. This involves a long journey, usually by metro or bus, because I gave up long ago to use the car because of the difficulty of finding a parking place.

This Sunday program has advantages and disadvantages, from my point of view. The part I don't like is that it happens every Sunday and the part I like is that it forces me to leave the boring suburb I live in and I can walk around the downtown area where things happen.

Summer has set in early and has begun to torment us with its excruciating heat.

Summer is just beginning, but climate change is being felt strongly and is manifesting with much warmer temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius. Walks are harder to take in the afternoon when the sun is overhead. We all seek shade...

City dwellers still don't think it can be that hot and still don't protect themselves from the sun's rays but instinctively seek shade.

Fortunately, Bucharest is a pretty green city. European statistics say that there is not enough green space but it seems to me that we have enough.

This is Victory Avenue, the downtown boulevard I like best. I like it even more on Sundays when the traffic is light and people can exercise without breathing polluted air.

Thank goodness, there's shade.

During this outing in the center, I discovered two ways to cool down the body heated by the heat outside.

In Bucharest there are hundreds of churches, I even asked AI how many churches there are in total, and, surprise, he couldn't answer this question except with this generalization "There are hundreds of churches".

I knew there were many hundreds of churches. In every neighborhood, in every area with several thousand inhabitants, there is a church. Churches were built over hundreds of years by rulers, nobles, rich people, trade associations, and different religious cults with their churches, but most are Orthodox Christian churches.

These buildings have thick brick or stone walls that mention the coolness inside, even on the hottest summer days. They are a good place for people to get away from excessive heat.

There are still places where the heat can be calmed down and where it's nice to walk, near the city's fountains. There aren't many fountains in Bucharest and they're not as beautiful as those in Rome, for example, but are places where city dwellers prefer to rest for a while, or just walk by...

The Fountains of Unirii Square!

Unirii Square is a famous place in Bucharest, located at an intersection of four important boulevards. This place was systematized in the last century at the wish of the communist dictator Ceausescu. At that time fountains were built.

Initially, there were fewer and fewer spectacular fountains but they have been redone and added colored floodlighting, which gives an impressive view at night, but I don't have night photos now...

A stroll through the water pools and fountains is enjoyable, especially when the soft, cool rain is cooling your skin.

These fountains are located on the axis of Decebal Avenue (a king of the Dacians, the ancient people from which the Romans are descended), an avenue that used to be called the Victory of Socialism and that leads to the former People's House, an enormous building, the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, built when Romania was a communist country ruled by a totalitarian regime.

This Sunday was different from the others mainly because of the walk among these fountains.

_{This was for #beautifulsunday and #sublimesunday by @ace108 and @c0ff33a!}