Romania – Day One, Bucharest

Our first day and what better way to start than a sightseeing tour of the capital city. As today is Saturday the normally busy roads were very empty so a morning tour with the afternoon at leisure was a good start.

Apart from the harrowing pictures of children in orphanages, Romania is probably best known to most of us in the West for events in the final years of communist rule (being 1947 to 1989 in total) which were orchestrated by the last General Secretary of the Communist party, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was deposed in 1989. We visited the building which contained his offices as General Secretary and from where he attempted to escape in a helicopter when he realised that time was up for his brutal regime.

Apparently, 100,000 people demonstrated outside his office and 800 were killed which only added to the determination of the masses to get rid of Ceausescu and his communist cohorts. There are two monuments to the people killed located outside the office with the names of those killed inscribed on a wall of remembrance.

At the time Ceausescu was deposed, his vanity project was being built in another part of Bucharest. Four kilometres of an area of Bucharest had been cleared of houses with people being pushed out so that he could build what is the second biggest building in the world and the heaviest building in the world.

This Building is now home to the Romanian Parliament and has more than 1,000 rooms. The building is not yet finished and is still being worked upon 30 years after Ceausescu’s demise.

Modern Romania is a fairly new nation, was formed in 1859 and only declared independence from the Otterman Empire in 1877. Much of Bucharest was laid out to mimic Paris with wide boulevards and Bucharest’s own Arc de Triomphe.

There are many other fine buildings in Bucharest including churches which are highly painted inside so there is plenty to see for all tastes.

One place to visit in the Old Town, which is more unusual, is what has been called the “World’s prettiest bookshop”. It’s name is Carturesti and its is much nicer than your average Waterstones.

After the city tour had finished at about noon, and the temperature had reached 32 degrees centigrade, we headed off to the Dimitrie Gusti National Village museum which was 3.2 miles away. We decide to take the underground which was just 3 stops rather than walking in the heat. The underground is very easy to use and all journeys seem to be 5 leu. In fact you get 2 journeys for 5 leu (which is roughly GBP 1) whatever the distance you go. Seems a good system as once you had gone through the barriers to catch the train, you did not need a ticket to get out as the barriers opened automatically to let you off the station.

The National Village museum, which serves a similar purpose to our own Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex of preserving important historic buildings, was cheap to get in (only 8 leu for a senior) and has 60 buildings which are either houses, windmills, agricultural buildings from a wealthy family’s abode, to a hovel – literally as they had a Romanian hovel on show.

Definitely worth a visit as the large park area has restaurants and a cold beer was certainly needed today.

By 6pm the heat had got to us so we got the underground back to the hotel and went out to the old town for a bento box meal with some local beer.

Tomorrow we leave at 7.30 am for Sinaia, Bran and Brasov.