Advertisement
Published: July 14th 2006
View down the Bucharest "Champs"
Notice the EU and NATO flags...Romania is not yet a member of either.Since we last wrote from Istanbul we've travelled back in time through Romania and Hungary to an era when Billy Idol, White Snake and Boy George, rollerblading and mullets were all extremely fashionable. For anyone eager for a dose of 80's nostalgia should certainly pay a visit to a the former Communist bloc.
We bid farewell to our lovely Turkish hotel (and its crazy owner who repeatedly, but unsucessfully, requested that Alissa help him put his contact lenses in his eyes) and spent a full 24 hours (scheduled for 16 hours) twiddling our thumbs in a sleeper car through Bulgaria to Bucharest, Romania. Our first impression, made upon our arrival at 10pm, was that the city seemed quiet. Not busy with traffic, not full of people, not lit up with restaurants and cafes. We thought that perhaps Romanians just turned in early. We were wrong.
Bucharest is an enormous city. Everything from streets to parks to government buildings seem to be about 1.5 - 2 times larger than they ought to be. This grand scale is magnified by the fact that there really don't seem to be enough people to fill it up. For example, the boulevard stretching one
Palace of the People
For scale, notice that the balcony near the bottom (where Michael Jackson gave his little speech) is full of people. km out from Ceausescu's enormous "Palace of the People" was designed to resemble the Champs Elysees, but bigger. Rather than cafes and restaurants, or even Romanian gymnasts tumbling down the promenade, however, this boulevard is largely vacant and the remaining storefronts are occupied by opticians. The Palace itself is the second largest building in the world (second to the Pentagon), constructed with purely Romanian materials and labor. It was designed to be Ceausescu's citadel -- his offices and a place from which to address the grateful assembled masses-- but was only 30% complete when those masses murdered him and his wife on Christmas Day, 1989. The palace did come in handy for another man of the people, Michael Jackson, who stood on the former dictator's balcony in 1991 and proclaimed "Hello Budapest". Somehow Jacko avoided the former first family's fate.
Perhaps cities just aren't Romania's thing, though. We learned through museums and in conversation with the rare English speaking local that Romanian culture celebrates the rural peasant life as its purest strain. In fact, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant contains hours' worth of exhibits on just that. Churches and houses transported for display from the Transylvanian countryside, garments
and tools used before Communism, and many religious artifacts from what was, and what may still be, a very vibrant orthadox tradition. In the basement of this museum was a small room containing very different artifacts - statues of Lenin and Stalin and even a small photograph of Ceausescu. Brian asked a Romanian visitor how this exhibit related at all to the rest of the museum. "Upstairs is what these men destroyed," was the response. Later on in the day, after dining on a hearty stew and peasant bread in one of the city's rare restaurants, Brian was grateful that the Communists allowed the people to preserve at least some of their traditions.
We had only budgeted two nights for Romania an unforunately had no chance to visit the beautiful mountains of Transylvania. From our next (and slightly less delayed) sleeper train to Budapest, Hungary, we did see some absolutely striking mountain scenery, and Brian began to plan a ski trip to Sinaia.
Upon arrival in Budapest we absolutely fell in love with this city. Maybe it's that we have been able to do laundry for the first time since India, but this city is cosmopolitan, efficient, welcoming
and absolutely gorgeous. The communist Magyars clearly didn't embrace the Soviet school of architecture to nearly the same extent as their Romanian comrades. Unsurprisingly, English is not widespread, but paprika seems to be a universal word. We've gotten quite good at playing charades with our innkeeper (if you can call our college dorm an "inn") and have even navigated our way to the city's famous mineral baths. Bikinis do not have age limits. We'll leave it at that...until our next update.
We're off to Krakow in a couple of days. The land of pierogies and ponies, or so we hear. Until the next time...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.143s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 54; dbt: 0.1201s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Janina
non-member comment
you will be surprised
Hi you guys....you are off to my country Poland and you will be surprised that it is not about pierogi's and ponies. Krakow is an absolute must and just too bad that I didn't know about you visiting Krakow, because I have some very nice, smart and English speaking friends in Krakow, who could show you around.....if you need help, e-mail this friend: orlewicz1@wp.pl His name is Marcin and he is my God son and he speaks fantastic English. Good luck and can't wait for the report. Janina (Tania's mom)