Bucharest Romania
Our ship docked in a very small town on the Danube about an hour drive from the capital city of Bucharest. We all said our goodbyes to the Viking Primadonna and boarded buses for a tour for the day. We drove through very small villages with dirt streets and saw some things that took us back about a century. Lots of horse and donkey drawn carts loaded with hay and numerous farmers working in the fields plowing with wooden plows pulled by horses. It reminded us of pictures from the farms of the American farmlands of the late 1800's. We also saw a number of Gypsy wagons, as the population of Romania is about 20% Roma People (Gypsies). A real step back in history and cultural immersion for all of us.
When we got to the big city of Bucharest, it was quite a contrast as we saw more of the ugly Soviet style high rises and electric wiring just seemingly hanging everywhere with no regard to any planning.
Driving further into the center of the city we began to see a change in the architecture with lovely older buildings in the neo-classical style situated on wide boulevards with lots of traffic. Those were built prior to Communism. Our bus made a "mandatory" cathedral stop where we saw where much of the money has been spent in this city. This is the home of patriarch of the Romania Orthodox church resides since the fall of Communism in 1990. Very ornate but nothing compared to the Parliament Palace we toured. This is the second largest building in the world (over a 1000 rooms), second only to the Pentagon and was built as a palace for the former Communist dictator Ceascu (sp?) who was overthrown and given an ‘acute injection of lead bullets’ in 1989. He was a Mussolini type dictator who must have had an ego as big as this building as this took over a million of Romanians to build this building, all out of materials and labor from Romania. It also must have almost bankrupted the economy of this poor country with all of marble and gold used. This is one of the most garish examples of egotism that we have ever seen even though it is lovely. This building and numerous others in the same area are actually tributes to the Romanian artists with the beauty that they exhibited in their "forced" work. The dictator was assassinated before he was actually able to live there so later became the Parliament building of the new government. They have yet to complete the whole building but it is still lovely, if not overdone.
We checked into the nice Bucharest Hilton which was the final planned destination for all of the travelers on the cruise and we got the opportunity to walk around the city for a little bit. Since our flight leaving Bucharest today (Sunday) was changed from 10:30 am to 5:30 am, we decided to not stay out late. The taxi was scheduled to pick us up at the hotel at 3:15 am so we wanted to get a few hours of sleep so we went to bed at 9:30 after saying goodbye to many of the friends that we met on this cruise. We awoke this morning at the very early hour of 2:40 am. We took a small Hungarian plane from Bucharest, Romania back to Budapest, Hungary and are currently sitting in the airport with almost 7 hours before we board for our next adventure in Odessa, Ukraine. Rule #? Many of the eastern European countries are a combination of "the good, the bad and the ugly" and this is especially true in Romania.
Photos:
Atheneum concert hall (next to our hotel)
John and Donna with Victory Flvd in background
Visitators badge to Parliament Bldg
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