Romania

last day in Bucharest

/ kw1385 / Leave a comment

I’m currently on my KLM flight back to Amsterdam. I can’t say I’m that sorry to leave Bucharest, but I don’t regret going (just staying at the hostel whose bed bugs left me looking like I have chicken pox again!).

Today for the first time I was a solo traveler in a very different country. As I started to suspect in Brussels, and to my surprise given my independent and introverted tendencies, I do not much care for solo travel. It’s just that more stressful, and I get bored with myself! I think I managed pretty well today though.

I decided to hop on the subway to go back to Piața Victoriei to see the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, which turned out to be closed on Monday. Undaunted and uninterested in seeing either of the other museums there, I waited for the Bucharest City Tour bus to come by and sat down on its open air roof deck for a more comprehensive tour of the city. This is run by the transportation company rather than a tour company, so there wasn’t particularly spectacular commentary, but I still got some nice shots of different buildings, particularly the Palace of Parliament. I rode it for the whole loop and then took the subway back from Piața Victoriei to the old center to eat a gyro from a place I’d noticed on Saturday. On the way I got to witness a trash truck attempting to navigate the ultra-narrow, curved streets (I got stuck behind it for five minutes) and a woman who almost got killed by a careless construction worker who dropped some heavy steel cable from above (this resulted in a colorful shouting match). Ah, Romania.

Despite my until-then flawless sense of direction I managed to get a bit lost while taking a slightly different route back to the hotel, but with the help of the gps on my iPhone (which works even without a connection), I righted myself and got back, got into a cab, and got to the airport with no trouble.

Final observations about Bucharest:

  • Communism may have lost Bucharest its status as “Little Paris”, but its jumble of beautiful/old vs. communist/newer buildings is actually really interesting and unique if nothing else.
  • Bucharest isn’t known as being a particularly safe city, but I never felt uncomfortable despite the often shabby areas in which I found myself. I also only saw a few packs of feral dogs.
  • You wouldn’t know Romania was in the EU from being there. I think Bucharest reminded me more of Pristina (Kosovo) than any other city, which is not an impressive thing for Romania given that Kosovo’s recent history is significantly more turbulent. (and I liked Pristina a lot more.) Croatia feels much more modern and western even though it’s still not in the EU.
  • Romanian is harder to understand than the other romance languages – it makes more sense when I read it, but I had a very hard time understanding it when spoken. I think, however, that if you were to go through the other four languages when trying to say something (as in, say the word in all four), in 80% of the cases you’d be at least somewhat understood.

And finally, some of the best and worst of Bucharest. Look at the contrast.

Bucharest: Sunday (102 degrees!)

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I woke Sunday morning to the sound of Orthodox church bells ringing and the sight of some 30 bug bites in my legs and 10 on my arms. I think there are two truths at play here: first, and most obviously, I have finally stayed at a hostel with bed bugs; second, Mother Nature is making sure that my body doesn’t completely forget how to respond to bug bites now that I’ve been lucky enough to spend a summer in a place where my biggest fans, mosquitos, do not exist.

I obviously wasn’t motivated to stay in bed any longer, so I showered and woke up Greg. We ate a quick breakfast of bread and cheese before bracing ourselves for the day’s high of 100 and heading out into the city.

We hailed a cab in the Piața Unirii and asked it to take us to the Village Museum, the Bucharest equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. We learned on the way that despite having a reputation for being more than usually dishonest, there are some honest cabbies in Bucharest; I misunderstood the total and gave him twice what we owed, but he corrected me!

The “museum” is more like a gated park where the Romanian government has transplanted several hundred houses, huts, churches, windmills, and other structures from others times and places in Romania. Sadly, there are only pictures of people in traditional costume, but the rest of the “museum” is pretty cool. It also happens to be along the shore of Lake Herăstrău, so when we reached the end of the exhibits, we rented a rowboat, and Greg chivalrously paddled me around the lake. The water was just clean enough that you didn’t mind if a few drops of water hit you but also dirty enough that despite the heat we felt no desire to jump in. Instead, we spent about 30 minutes total sitting in the boat underneath the weeping willows along the lake. This was an excellent way to beat the heat – it really wasn’t that awful in the shade.

After returning our boat, we bought electric-blue slurpees which tasted nothing like the flavor advertised but were nonetheless refreshing, and I was able to use my cup to rinse off my feet and legs, which were at this point covered in a layer of dirt with the occasional piece of weeping willow slime (yum!). Thus cleaned up a bit, we walked about a mile down the long tree-lined boulevard (staying in the shade as much as possible) on our way to the Piața Victoriei. On the way, we walked alongside Herăstrău Park, which is apparently the largest city park in Europe. We also passed the Arcul du Triumf (Arche de Triomphe, like the one in Paris) and the Piața Charles de Gaulle. We had to stop and rest numerous times because we were so hungry and tired from the heat, but finally we made it to Piața Victoriei.

At this point we were so hungry that when we saw a sign for a McDonald’s, we immediately decided to go there. I think previously I had only been to one other McDonald’s abroad (in Italy) because it seems like a total waste of culinary opportunity, but going there yesterday was an awesome decision. It had air conditioning and wifi, and our cashier turned out to be a big fan of Boston sports (which made Greg very happy since he’s from Boston). For about $6 each, we ended up with a burger, fries, drink, ice cream sundae (free this weekend for some reason), and even a Euro 2012 souvenir glass. We were there for at least an hour and a half, during which I made the executive decision to book myself a hotel room for the night so as to avoid doubling my number of bug bites (plus to have air conditioning, as by that time it was 101 degrees).

Thus sated and cooled, we exited into the heat (which, for those of you on the East Coast who’ve dealt with these temperatures PLUS humidity recently, I have to acknowledge was dry and therefore not as bad) and decided to check out the subway as a means of heading back. The subway turned out to be a great example of how communism was both a blessing and a curse (an observation we made frequently): while the stations themselves weren’t very sightly (mostly drab concrete other than some marble flooring), the trains themselves were really nice and clearly made for transporting large sums of people. They were roomy and clean and continuously connected (no doors between cars), and they ran every seven minutes.

One stop later, we disembarked at the Piața Romana to see the copy of the well-known statue of Romulus and Remus with the mother wolf. Well, despite circling the plaza and looking very carefully, we found nothing. This has me convinced that one of two things is true. Either the statue has been moved since the Lonely Planet printed its last edition in 2010, or the LP was wrong about its location. We did see the same statue the previous night in the much smaller Piața Roma just off the main street of the old center…

Anyway, back onto the subway we went and again got off one stop later at Piața Universitate. There are a number of nice buildings here, but we were in search of the Piața Revoluționarii, the site of a Tienenman Square-like massacre in 1989 that precipitated the death of Ceaușescu and communism. Again, we struck out. We did find some protest signs in front of the National Theater and the small Piața 21 Diciembre 1989, but we saw none of the things described in Lonely Planet. Greg and I seem to be cursed with an inability to find interesting political sites when we travel; this brought back memories of looking for the Museum of the Power of the People in Caracas.

At this point the temperature was 102, so we headed back to the hostel, collected our stuff, and took a cab to my hotel. This cab driver asked where we were from and made a sound of annoyance when we said we were American. It turned out he was just mad at himself for not recognizing our accent. 🙂 by the way, cabs, like everything else in Romania are really cheap; even my 20-minute ride to the airport today cost less than $7.

I made a great choice with the Hotel El Greco, where we were warmly welcomed by the male receptionist and led to a room with a lush bathroom, free wifi, and plentiful air conditioning. I took an epic shower (including two rounds of scrubbing dirt off my feet) and emerged a new person, though I was still exhausted from the heat. After some lounging around, we set off in search of dinner, and since we were once again really hungry and lazy, settled for kebab from a stand several blocks away. It hit the spot, and after picking up some cold drinks, we went back to the hotel to check out Romanian tv before Greg left to catch his train.

My one word to describe Romanian tv would be “eclectic”. We found channels in Spanish, French, and English showing tv shows from the 70’s (including one featuring a barely recognizable William Shatner as a cop), Japanese extreme obstacle courses, Chinese ninja movies, and Mexican westerns. One could stay entertained for quite awhile, but with Greg’s departure, I succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep in my bug-free bed.

Thanks Greg for another great trip! 🙂 (There’s only one person with whom he’s been to more countries than with me. Travel buddies forever!)

Bucharest: Saturday continued

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Picking up from my last post… I was dozing in the hammock outside my hostel when Greg arrived. He immediately had two comments: “let’s get going!” and “I think this hostel is the base of some sort of criminal enterprise”. It is true that the inside hallway was decorated with various paintings of guns and that about five distinctly unfriendly Romanians were just hanging around, but beyond that I didn’t really share Greg’s suspicions.

We gamely headed out into the 98-degree heat and sun to start our tour of Bucharest. Our hostel is about 10 minutes’ walk south of the Piața Unirii, a huge square (although here they’re all circles) ringed with brightly lit billboards and with a beautiful mess of fountains in the center. (Sadly the streets go through the fountains, leaving no space for anyone to use them for heat relief.) Turning west from the Piața Unirii, you immediately see the massive Palace of Parliament, the second largest building in the world (by surface area). It is indeed huge, with ten floors and over 3,000 rooms. It took us about 40 minutes to walk the loop around the building!

The Palace of Parliament is a good metaphor for Bucharest as a whole. The building itself is beautiful and grand, but the wall surrounding it on the sidewalk is crumbling in places and generally unattractive. At various points as you walk around there appear to be abandoned outbuildings (one looked like an underground garage) that look so forsaken it’s hard to imagine that they were ever used.

 

This is the tale with all of Bucharest that I’ve seen: there are many beautiful buildings, but many seem to teeter on the edge of neglect, an effect enhanced by the general state of disrepair of many of the roads and sidewalks. (We walked around an incredible number of holes and construction sites – which have been there for who knows how long – as we walked through about half the city yesterday.) it’s obviously sad, but it’s also interesting: I haven’t been in that many cities that wear their recent past so visibly.

This, for instance, is taken from another side of the Palace of the Parliament:

From the Palace of Parliament, Greg and I ambled through a park filled with bikers and rollerbladers and home to the coolest playground ever: it was a miniature castle! (pictures forthcoming when I get home.) this led us to the river (quite narrow and walled in by concrete), which smelled fine but boasted a heavy coating of oil and chemicals moving along the surface. (This made me question the wisdom of the couple of men fishing there.)

After crossing the river, we were in the oldest part of the city center, known as Lipscani (the name of one of the streets). It’s still very run-down but has apparently cleaned up significantly in recent years as it used to be a Roma slum. Now, its hole-filled streets are home to shops, clubs, and restaurants of varying levels of class.

Greg and I sat down to eat at a restaurant recommended as serving excellent Romanian food, and we found no shortage of intriguing options on the menu: beef brains in parchment, cock soup, pig killing feast, rooster on the sword, bear steak, and mutton cooked in lard. After learning they were out of bear, we ordered the pig-killing feast and the cabbage leaves stuffed with “forcemeat”, which I think was a combination of beef and liver. All of it was very tasty, though the pig-killing feast was not nearly as exciting as we’d hoped.

By the time we’d finished, it was about 10:00, and the long day and the heat had us both exhausted. Rather than join the Romanians for what I’m certain could have been a very interesting night out, Greg and I opted for heading back to the hostel, where I fell asleep almost immediately despite the heat.

Bucharest, two hours in

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It’s 2:50 pm, and I’m writing this on my iPhone while sitting in a hammock outside my hostel in Bucharest. There’s a little pavilion about 10 yards from me in the garden, and a group of people are listening to relaxing meditation music and watching a woman who occasionally leads them in yoga-like poses. It’s 90 degrees and climbing, but here in the shade with this peaceful music, my body feels fine despite two months in 65-degree weather.

I’m relaxing here until my traveling partner Greg arrives. Longtime followers of my travels will remember Greg as my companion through Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama two years ago. His attitude of “die by 30 or live trying” makes for a great balance to my naturally more cautious travel tendencies. I don’t think we can get into too much trouble given that Greg  will be here for a total of 30 hours before he heads to Japan (via Moscow and a universally infamous Russian airline). Greg got to the Hague on Thursday night, but we were on different flights out of Schipol. (He very kindly accompanied me to the airport at 7:00 despite the fact that his flight didn’t leave until 12:15.)

As per usual when Greg is involved, we don’t have any set agenda for Bucharest. There is certainly more to see than we can do (even though I’m staying until Monday afternoon). Our hostel, which has pleasantly confirmed my hunch that it is the Romanian equivalent of Luna’s Castle in Panama City (the best hostel I’ve stayed in to date), is located just south of the old city center, so I think we’ll probably stick around here tonight. The parliament building, built by Communist dictator Ceaušescu, is the second-largest administrative building in the world (after the Pentagon) and is quite close by.

Let me take a moment to celebrate that this is the first time I’ve flow to a completely new, non-English speaking country and found my way from the airport to my lodging all by myself. I’m as independent as can be, but I always find that process stressful even with others. I was slightly disconcerted but mostly amused when, upon inserting my Dutch bank card into an ATM, the screen showed a message cautioning me to check that no one had rigged the machine to steal my information. A careful, close examination followed (meaning I ignored the message for lack of other options), and I succeeded in withdrawing money. I had a few tense moments trying to buy a bus ticket as the woman helpfully refused to break my 50 lei (less than $50) bill and then had to do the transaction twice as she didn’t tell me to use my chip card. (I thought we’d escape the damn chip and PIN stuff here!) anyway, no harm done and onto the non-air conditioned city bus I went. I’ll save descriptions of the city for when I’ve been able to observe more of it.

The last thing I’ll say for now is that Romania is the ultimate destination for me as a Romance language dork. I’ve studied varying amounts of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, so Romanian is the last one left. I spent some time on the plane figuring out the pronunciation (which has elements both familiar and new) and enjoyed the bus ride for the practice it afforded for reading and silently pronouncing all the signs. I’m excited to learn a bit more in the next 48 hours!