Bucuresti aka: Bucharest

…and went to lots of concerts. Had a great time mainly due to the incredibly friendly people and excellent music.

The architecture is fascinating once you understand the history, and quite tragic what happened during the communist era. Great swathes of the old city were demolished to create a nice view for Ceausescu from his window from the fantastically huge palace (now an admin building) he had built.

There are also some very large shells of unfinished buildings, started pre Dec 1989, but lack of funds now prevents their completion…maybe one day.

Meanwhile some old and wonderful villas still remain, but many are falling to ruin due to lack of money to keep them restored. ANd there a lots of beautiful churches and monastries surviving. It must have been a very beautiful city once, it was apparently known as ‘Little Paris’. Art Nouveau influences are apparent in many places such as the Art Gallery and notably the George Enescu Museum which is a wonderful building.

I certainly want to go back.

July 2003

In Bucharest you can have all…history,culture,fun…all what you want.You will have alaways something new to see.

I don’t want to be long, but I went to Romania with my family as kind of a family missions trip. It was a blast! It was great to see a truly different culture!

It was my first memory of a plane. I was five, and we were going to see my grandmothe. I missed her terribly, since she had been gone for three years. I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep on the plane. (And who could? We didn’t have enough money to fly first-class.) About half an hour before I got there, I nodded off to sleep… and awoke in my grandmother’s flat. It was small – only three rooms, including the kitchen. (Damn communists.) The place was so different from anything in the United States, that I was constantly surprised by everything – how dirty the streets were, the people in carts, and how impossibly tiny the cars were.

Every time I go back there, I still remember the Bucharest of 2000, with the newly introduced “Millenium Bill” that everyone was making such a big fuss about at the time. Now Bucharest has changed. The streets are much cleaner, there are less bums, and Romania’s entered the E.U. But it will always hold the same sentimental value that it did back then.