IN THE second-poorest country of the European Union, on the southside of its capital, lies a collection of labyrinthine streets that together make up the city's most feared suburb.

Eyes widen at the mere mention of this neighbourhood, although on the map it looks entirely identical to the rest of the place.

Romanians, especially those who have spent much of their lives within the Eastern European city of Bucharest's bustling bounds, are wont to warn potential visitors away from this particular set of streets.

In fact, it was a network of almost perfectly parallel lanes next-door to this feared neighbourhood that had first captured my attention, orderly matchstick-like rows that seemed to say something different lay here, almost certainly a relic from Romania's Communist rule.

Such evidence was littered across Bucharest; in its monotonously grey buildings that lent the city a bleak air on overcast days, in lines of unadorned and blocky cubes of flats rapidly but poorly constructed under the socialist doctrine that everyone must be given an identical home, now flaking and crumbling around their residents.

Skeletons of huge partly finished buildings, projects abandoned after the fall of Communism in 1989 and now slowly going to ruin, pockmarked other pockets of the city.

I'd been in Bucharest just a few days and poverty, at times extreme, had already repeatedly shown its face.

It clashed uncomfortably with the outrageous opulence of despotic Communist ruler Nicolae Ceausescu's enormous marble and gilt-trimmed Palace of the Parliament, the world's second-largest administrative building and dwarfed only by the Pentagon.

It seemed a symbol of the dictator's disregard for his citizens, this ostentatious so-called People's House with its hundreds of rooms, which Ceausescu built in the 1980s while simultaneously subjecting his populace to exceedingly harsh food, medicine and electricity shortages.

Today much of the monolith lies empty and unused, its lavish rooms waiting in darkness lest the astronomical annual power bill drain more cash from its struggling society.

It was the day after I'd toured the palace that I unfolded my map and pointed out the neatly ordered neighbourhood that had first caught my eye to a young guide and asked what lay there. He reacted with alarm, warned it wasn't safe to walk there and urged me to reconsider.

I realised the misunderstanding: he had thought I was asking about the neighbouring quarter, a place it seemed of urban legend. My interest was piqued; I pestered friends until they reluctantly agreed to a visit.

This was Ferentari, the poorest district of Bucharest and apparently a haven for drugs and crime; I'd been told that even to drive these streets was perilous. And yet here we were on a sunny Saturday morning and the place seemed entirely innocuous. Young men strode the dusty streets, phones glued to their ears.

Children frolicked around primary coloured playgrounds built in the shadows of uniformly grey Communist-era housing blocks, much like any others scattered across Bucharest. Old ladies carried bulging bags of groceries home.

"It actually doesn't seem that bad," our driver observed in surprise. "Yeah, it's actually quite nice,'' his friend replied. I wondered what it was that these two Romanian 20-somethings, well-educated and middle class, had been told about this place they'd never before dared visit.

Certainly the city's poor congregated here, gypsies mainly, spat out by mainstream society and left to eke out whatever living they could on these streets. At times we passed abandoned houses, their caved-in roofs covered with plastic or scraps of old billboards, a sign someone now called the shabby ruins home.

On one street corner a homeless couple huddled for warmth near huge water pipes. At times the snarly traffic gridlock would suddenly step aside and allow to pass a gaunt horse pulling a rickety cart loaded high with flotsam collected from the rubble of vacant blocks, anything that could be sold for a miserable profit.

Rows of housing gave way to vast factories and power station stacks, a nod to the neighbourhood's industrial past. A flea-bitten and forgotten old dog, blood dripping slowly from its mouth, forlornly watched the world go by.

Yes, Ferentari was at times wretched. But so wholly dangerous? Perhaps it appeared safe only by day; we didn't venture back at night. But I wondered if the trepidation surrounding this suburb was less about fact and more symbolic of ingrained prejudices toward gypsies, the Roma, that marginalised section of society repeatedly blamed for the city's crimes. A bias passed down so strongly from one generation to the next that Bucharest's youth now avoided one suburb of their city entirely.

I hoped our little Saturday morning drive had at least left questions in two young minds.

Originally published as On the mean streets of Bucharest