Cycling Romania: Bucharest

A boy playing soccer in the streets of Bucharest's old town.
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Taking our bikes on the train once again involved a bribe, but we more or less knew the system by then so it was no real trouble.  We had left our guesthouse at 5 that morning to ride to the train station, and our train finally rolled into Bucharest in the early afternoon.  As we entered the outskirts of the city, the sights mostly confirmed what we had heard about Bucharest:  that it's not a particularly attractive town.  We saw line after line of rundown project-like apartment complexes standing stark against the flat landscape.  Sadly, much of Bucharest has been destroyed in the last 80 years through a combination of war, earthquakes, and its own government.  Today it's a far cry from the "Paris of the East" to which Western Europeans flocked in the early twentieth century.  The long years under Ceausescu's "communist" government left many blights on the country, both visible and not.  One especially bizarre act by the dictator involved razing an entire historic area of Bucharest, one-sixth of the area of the city at the time, to build an immense palace and park.  Over 7000 homes and 26 churches and synagogues, many historic, were razed.  He had the audacity to call it The Palace of the People, but Romanians mockingly called it Casa Nebunului - The Madman's House.  Today, 17 years after Ceausescu fell along with the Berlin Wall, it's simply known as the Palace of Parliament because it now houses that governmental body.  Apparently, Ceausescu was something of a peacock, and felt the need to display his feathers by building a structure as large as the Pentagon.  In fact, the Palace supposedly is now the third-largest building in the world, but people in Bucharest are understandably not terribly excited by this bit of trivia.

Today, Bucharest is more or less a third world city with first world prices.  The train station, airport and some restaurants have squat toilets, which I'd never seen before outside Asia and Africa.  Some buildings in the downtown are quite beautiful, but it seems many more are rundown, with broken-out windows, peeling paint and garbage strewn about.  Even in the touristic old town area, where we stayed, the pedestrian streets contain perilous huge potholes and missing sewer grates.  The streetlights don't come on at night, leaving you feeling less than safe.  Most frustrating, though, is that it is still quite expensive to stay in Bucharest.  Hotels generally run upwards of $90 per night, which feels a little insulting considering the condition of the city.  We found a budget option for a little less, and to be fair, this particular place is a very, very cool hotel housed in a massive historic building.  The Hanul Manuc's rooms all face a huge, tree-filled courtyard that contains a popular outdoor restaurant.  Rooms are large with high, beamed ceilings and dark shiny wood throughout - definitely an old world feel.  Highly recommended if you should ever find yourself in Bucharest.  Also awesome is the Paradis Cafe, a ridiculously cheap and yummy Arabic restaurant near the old town.

more or less a third world city with first world prices

We spent all of two days dashing madly around Bucharest in search of bike boxes and packing materials.  For most of one afternoon we hung around bothering the very cool dudes at a branch of Himalaya Bikes.  They were cool enough to take us to their warehouse for boxes, since the preceding week someone seemed to have nabbed every single bike box in Bucharest!  After this, we finally were ready to ship the bikes and head off to the Danube Delta for one last hurrah before catching a flight to Spain.  A day in advance, I called DHL to get a quote for the bikes and arrange a time for them to pick them up.  The price was expensive, but not unreasonable - not really any more than we'd have to pay to take the huge boxes on flights to Spain, Boston, then South America.  But when the driver showed up the next day, he said it would cost 3 times more than the quote we'd gotten on the phone!!!  Indignant and mystified as to what to do, we arranged to leave the bikes at the hotel, and decided to try to figure it out during our trip to the Danube Delta.  We rushed to the station to catch our train for Tulcea, more or less the gateway to the delta.