Having been born in Transylvania, you can imagine how many times I get asked "does it actually exist?" On the upside, it makes me hear all the possible and impossible Dracula jokes... I initially set out to write a memoir of the first 19 years of my life spent under a communist dictatorship (that of N. Ceausescu) as a Hungarian minority child, however it inevitably had to include in the end the surrealism of the post-Revolution years, too... The rapid and radical changes in the political/social system (including the system of values that everyday people use) have brought a level of chaos and corruption that even made my former homeland "win" the OCCRP's international prize for most corrupt European country. In addition to the analysis of the paradigm shifts that society has been going through, I also had to dedicate space to the surprising parallels and similarities between certain methods used by the former totalitarian regime and contemporary Romanian and British politics - Britain having been, for the past twenty years, my country of residence. The so-called "war on terror", irrespective of its sometimes genuine motivations, has been used as a pretext to create series of legislations and to commit acts that were seen by even the European Court of Human Rights as illegal. Recently, it turned out that British police has been using a certain part of the anti-terrorism act to find out, completely outside the judicial system, information about journalists' sources in matters entirely unrelated to terrorism. For someone, who sees strange echoes of time in such developments in a supposedly "free" country, it is virtually imperative to include an analysis of these distortions and re-interpretations of power. My major influences were J. L. Borges, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Ray Bradbury.