Bucharest

We arrived in Bucharest in the afternoon of our second day, but we started walking around just before evening, just in time to see the city light up, simultaneously hiding its ugly concrete blocks, and highlighting it’s beautiful (if extremely over the top) Gothic architecture. It has a very cool Gotham vibe to it, very nice but you know there’s something shady going on at all times. It’s as if you're having a good time, but in the back of your mind you know that, at this very moment, somewhere a politician is being corrupted or some art is being heisted.



The centerpiece of the city is the ridiculous Palace of Parliament, the second largest building in the world (after the Pentagon). It’s monstrous, pretentious, and ugly as hell, but still fascinating. Nicholas Ceausescu, Romania’s Communist ruler for so many years, spent all the country’s money and razed an entire historical quarter of the town to build it. The building is still apparently 10% unfinished. Leading up to the palace is a huge center filled with fountains and lined with restaurants and giant obnoxious flashing advertisements. It felt very much like a more spread out Times Square. It’s a cool place with a lot to do and see, but knowing what they did to the city to create it kind of takes away a bit of the fun.


Much nicer (and more to scale), was the city’s old town area, which still seemed somewhat new actually. It’s an area of old cobblestone streets that the city is currently restoring. Lined with cafes, bars, and restaurants, the area is close to a university and has very much of a student kind of feeling to it. It’s easy to get lost in the tiny back alleys in there, but also really fun to explore and stumble upon a hidden square with a gigantic, beautiful building just kind of sitting there as if it was nothing at all. While walking around in there, we also stumbled upon an active movie set and met the director in between takes. Apparently Romania is becoming a big place for filmmaking, not only because it is cheap and relatively well connected but also because the places in it are like ready-made sets. Everything in the town seems like it was made to be filmed or photographed.


Right near our hostel was this interesting little monument:


It’s not really on a main square or near interesting things, but it is a site of huge importance. This is the spot at which the public captured the Communist dictator and executed him. On the spot, they’ve built something vaguely resembling an olive on a toothpick (kind of a weird way to commemorate it), but it’s a cool place nonetheless. The area sums up Bucharest in one little block. The streets around it contain architecture from the 1800s, the time of Communism, and modern times. It’s a place of huge significance, but dwarfed by its completely out of scale surroundings, and memorialized by something so ugly and confusing you can’t help but feel amazed.

However, once you peel back the layers, something really special lies underneath this place to which I'm sure I'll return.