The opposite is also true

Romanian villages were beautiful, and one or two historic city centres were attractive, too: but the average townscape consisted of concrete blocks of flats, and I didn't photograph them. This one is an exception, because it may not be pretty, but it does make a geometrically interesting pattern.

It would be easy to think of drab lives under totalitarian Eastern bloc régimes, and not entirely wrong: but the architecture is not so much Staliism as 1960s brutalism. The individual blocks are no worse than things that were built in Gateshead: but there are more of them, more monotonously - except where the urge to decorate breaks out in a sunflower picked out on the side of a building in different coloured brick.

Other than that, the small towns are characterised by broad avenues (lined with a mixtures of shops, some of them so closed and shuttered as to look abandoned: the mini-market, the café, the mobile phone shop, the bakery, the travel shop. There are squares filled with flowerbeds, and everywhere there are new churches.