I don't work for Google nor do they pay me in any way, but when I recently learned about their Google Earth Pro for Free promotion, I jumped at the opportunity to take yet another trip to my primary school and what would be the second instalment of my ”Home Alone in Bucharest” series.

Before taking you in my trip back through the fabric of space and time, let me tell you about Google Pro free. Previously sold for $399 (and pirated both by those who needed it as well as those who didn’t know what they were getting but were getting it just because), it is now available with the license key GEPFREE at the links listed at the bottom or by clicking the screen capture above.

GEP was created with enterprise / business users in mind, so you probably don’t need it. Here are its “selling” points:

• Advanced measurements: Measure parking lots and land developments with polygon area measure, or determine affected radius with circle measure;
• High-resolution printing: Print images up to 4,800 x 3,200 pixel resolution;
• Exclusive pro data layers with Demographics and traffic count;
• Spreadsheet import: Ingest up to 2,500 addresses at a time, assigning place marks and style templates in bulk; and
• Movie-Maker: Export Windows Media and QuickTime HD movies, up to 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution.

Now you might say that Google Earth is nothing more than a glorified Google Maps, and that’s true if all you ever do is plotting itineraries and checking out periphery prostitutes with street view. But for me, Google Earth has an amazing feature that makes the lackadaisical street view feature fade into oblivion: geo-tagged Panoramio photos (most of them already published in the collage). These are not photos taken by me, but they are photos taken by others, mostly within the last 10 years, and they allow me to see the landscape of my childhood, updated with new cars and new “don’t step here” enclosures.

Taking a look at the photo above, the triplet buildings at the lower right were the “As”, more specifically, A3, A4 and A5 if my memory serves me well. They are the 4 (5) floors buildings I described in the first instalment and I used to live in one of them. The streets around them were Obcina Mare and Obcina Mica (“obcina” means “long forested hill” in Romanian) and I challenge you to get a “street view” for any of them with a Google product – I was only able to get “Raul Dorna”. The twin towers in the lower part of the screencap were the 10(11)-floors Zs (Z45 and Z46, but I could be wrong).  In the top right corner you can see the football (soccer) “sport terrain” of my primary school. That’s where I used to take a shortcut through when going to school (and meeting Scarlat), rather than go around on the alley (winter, spring and fall views), along that 10-floor perpendicular building that starts in the top middle, to the main school entrance. Behind that building there was the street for cars, with a green area on the right which later became parking lot.

The A buildings had storage lockers in the basement and in this photo you can see their vents, at ground level. Stray cats would often jump through those and Bote would grab their tails and stick pins into their balls.

As you can see, there’s no shortage of vegetation, growing everywhere between the buildings, wherever the incessant search for parking spaces hasn’t destroyed it.

The school, the final destination, looks freshly painted but also with fresh graffiti, which did not exist back in my day (interiour court). The entrance now has a fence. In my day, on the opposite site there was a little playfield with a tall chicken wire fence that only Adi could jump running. At that parquette entrance there were also lots of Gypsy women selling pumpkin seeds (“nature’s candy”).

I used to “drive” my bicycle a lot, so these photos mean a world to me: Compozitorilor, Comp2, Tunnels, perpend, winter.

*(*This article is unfinished – it was scheduled to appear in the hope that it will be finished before, but since this message is here and until it is removed, the article is to be considered work in progress*)*.

Sources / More info: gep-dl, gep-signup, gep-diff, /., pan-serban