Cliché was the common currency of all Communist dictatorships, but they had the opposite effect to what the regime intended, for they cast an aura of forbidden fruit around the slandered New World metropolis, making it seem a glowing Olympus of modernity, an urban Everest of adventure. The few trips I was allowed to take as a citizen of Socialist Romania did, of course, have moments of rapture for me, novice that I was.