Bucharest

Last week we hopped on a train and, instead of going north to the mountains as per our usual, we headed east in order to spend a few days in Bucharest.  
Silvia and Cornel, Vali and Simona, all residents of this city, have been asking when we would manage a visit but things were continuously derailing our plans.  Things such as the fact that I dislike Romanian cities and Mihai hates the heat and Bucharest is a hot, Romanian city.  Or so we thought (well, it's still a city, that fact remains).  
The last time I spent any length of time in the capital was in 2006 when various members of the Gogosanu family and I went on a 3-hour midnight walking tour.  Even at midnight the temperature was in the low 90s and as I recall, we hung out in the subway for no other reason than to catch the breeze from the trains as they rushed in and out of the station.  File that under "coping with the heat, Romanian style". 
Although it was a 3-hour walking tour, it was also midnight and dark, so I didn't get a clear picture of the city.
During a 2009 trip we again stayed with Vali and Simona in Bucharest for a few days but we hardly ever left their apartment because it was winter and we were having too much fun talking and eating Simona's cooking.  Going out into the cold and away from her food just to see some buildings seemed like a very silly idea.
This is my usual long-winded way of saying that I've never really spent much time in Bucharest and one day as I was talking to Silvia, who was born and raised there, and I realized we really should check it out.  It's the capital of the country, after all, and there are important bits of history we should see for the boys' educational benefit if nothing else.  
Which brings us to our visit last week.
To start with, Silvia and Cornel's house kind of blew my whole "Bucharest is a hot, noisy, dirty city in the summer" mantra right out of the water.  Believe it or not, their house is lovely and cool and quieter than our house in the little village of Obedin, population 375.  Yes, its true.  Unlike our place, their house is on a side street which gets almost no traffic, they have quiet neighbors and the only dog to be heard is their dog, Max.  
Max has a tongue that lolls fantastically out of the side of his mouth but do you think Max, being three, was interested in staying still for me to get a photo of this charming side-ways tongue?  Max was not.  
This is the only photo I have of Max that is not a blur of black...

We lounged on their patio under a canopy of grape vines and played games in the cool of the evening (well, some of us played and some of us drank beer and one of us had to stand and pace due to an annoying recurrence of sciatic pain).

And then we toured the city: the Historic Museum, downtown, the Athenaeum, Carul cu Bere (which I remember from 2006 and it turns out its just as much of a scene during the day as it was back then at midnight) and of course, Palatul Parlamentului.

When you stop and contemplate the history and significance of Palatul Parlamentulul, it feels somehow in bad form to tour there.  Granted, I've never been a fan of visiting government buildings or monuments (particularly the notion of paying money to gain entrance into buildings which my tax dollars have ostensibly already funded). I know there are some very well-intentioned people holding public offices but generally these large, overly chandeliered places remind me of the undeniable truth of "man dominating man to his injury".
I'm not an expert on Romanian political history.  If you want more details, ask Marius because he's the one who can really tell you.  Or ask someone who lived through the Ceauşescu years.  And that's what I mean, I suppose, when I say that touring his palace felt a little uncomfortable.  Because I know the stories of what was going on at the time and what Mihai's family, friends, and all of the other regular folk in the country were enduring while this colossus was being constructed.  Food shortages, power outages, petrol rationing, arrests, imprisonments...

So seeing the famous rug that weighs 5 tons, the marble columns and stair cases, the draperies made from silk, and standing on the balcony that looks out onto a replica of the Champs-Elysees (1 meter wider than the Champs-Elysses to assuage the ego of Nicolae Ceauşescu) ...well, left me with the sensation that I was rubber-necking at a crash site.  
It's one of those times when you tell your kids "See this thing? This is your object lesson as to why x, y and z are wrong" and hope that it really sinks in.  Unless they just end up spending so much time mimicking Fred Armisen's SNL skit about marble columns* that the big picture is utterly lost on them.  (Ah...the apathy produced by too much television strikes modern youth again.)


Socio-political lessons aside, the real point of our trip was to hang out with Silvia, Cornel and Max and this we did with great pleasure.  Along the way we at last got to see the city above ground in the day time and its really not half bad considering how many years it suffered under communism and the struggle to rebuild itself after the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc.   

When the tour was over we gave ourselves a break from thinking about deranged dictators and had a late lunch at a lovely restaurant in a park. It was cool and quiet in keeping with the overall theme of our visit. As the train pulled out of the station, taking us back home, we waved a grateful good-bye to Silvia and Cornel and thanked them for their kind hospitality and for changing my mind about Bucharest at last!

*Since you readers at home might not be up on your Fred Armisen skits, I am  including the link.  



http://www.clipjunkie.com/SNL---Marble-Columns-vid1119.html


(I hope it works and it doesn't connect anyone to anything unsavory.  I checked it out and it was safe and clean when I used it on this end of the globe.)