Out With The Old, Kind Of In With The New

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Coming from Istanbul, Turkey and reading that Bucharest is supposedly a "metropolitan" city, I sort of expected a bit more.  We were greeted at the train station by pushy taxi drivers, people wanting to take us various places, and gypsies that seemed to be the disgrace of the town as everyone around them that passed by gave them a look of dread. The train station is usually not a great area of any european city though, and our hostel ended up being fairly far away from it.  The hostel was small but had a great staff and set up.  They also had a Playstation 2 which was very unusual, especially since we were in Romania.  The town of Bucharest ended up being a fairly clean city, despite all the garbage filled countryside we saw on the way into town.  The downtown was filled with advertisements and the buildings seemed like they were in good shape.

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We managed to see everything we thought would be interesting in Bucharest in the two days.  The first day we spent looking at a pretty boring and uninforming museum about the Romanian peasants to start off with.  Then, as I headed towards a huge art museum, the other guys went to a history museum, both which turned out to be much better then the prior attempt.  We even managed to go to a great Romanian restaurant with traditional Romanian music.  The band even came around to the table to ask for money afterwards, so we though that was pretty cool.......

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The next day however, we went to go see the Grand Palace.  The building of this palace managed to displace around 40,000 homes and was directed by the dictator Ceausescu, in the early 80's.  It was never used for his house, since the 20,000 room, second-largest-building-in-the-world pad was a bit too much for him.  He used it as a place for his government, and it is still used for the same reason today.  So after being aw struck by the mere size of this one building, we wandered down the boulevard which Chesnov also thought would be a good idea.  But he needed it to be so grand that it didn't equal the Champs Elyse, but surpassed it.  He decided to make it 2 meters wider and a few kilometers longer.  the only thing is, is that it is a very boring street to walk down as there are barely any stores.  It is just a big street with a lot of trees which were pretty nice to look at since we had nothing else to amuse ourselves.  That evening, we decided to go to the Orchestra at the Concert Hall.  It was an incredibly painted, and designed concert hall.  A large needle point, it looked like, went all the way around the one floor, round hall.  The concert was great as they played some Mozart and Schuman, and afterwards we went for some cheap beers at the German Fest that was taking place right next to the concert hall. That night was the season openor for the canucks, and of-course being loyal fans, we stayed up from 2:00am to 4:30am listening to the game on the hostel computer.  And of course they did not dissapoint, but the whole staying up to sunset listening to hockey was probably an only one time deal.

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Bucharest ended up being a pretty interesting town, although I would not at tall call it "metropolitan".  The best part about it, and the rest of Romania was the amazingly cheap prices.