When in Bucharest....

Bucharest, Romania

 

So I'm back from a weekend trip up to a town north of Bucharest called Brasov, more on that in a minute but first a bit about Bucharest. After getting in late on Wednesday night from Prague, I decided to spend Thursday checking out the city. Well, I'm sorry to all you Bucharest readers, but frankly, this city doesn't really do it for me. First off, the city is pretty spread out, there's no real core "downtown" where all the "cool" stuff would be if you were a tourist looking for the easy "old town walk", which just about every Western European city as (good or bad, I know). Here, the best you can do is to head down to the main boulevard and just start walking. It's mostly a commercial street, with very few buildings of interest along it. The color of the day in Bucharest is communist gray, or dark communist gray, sometimes there's a hint of light communist gray, but that's rare. The only other colors are from neon lights or advertising billboards.

 

I guess the "big thing", literally, to see in Bucharest is the "People's Palace". You can read all about it at your leisure, but the general idea is that it's the second largest building in the world (behind the Pentagon) and was built during the communist period of Romania. (If you take the tour, you'll learn that the Palace, like just about every church in Europe, is still being built... ) From the back, or side, depending on your perspective, the palace is pretty impressive looking. However, as soon as you start walking around it (which happens when you're not sure which street the entrance is on), you quickly realize that really only one side of the palace grounds is maintained. The other three sides are pretty run down. The building is fine, but the grounds are in disarray.

 

Once you finally find the entrance (it's where all the tour buses are parked), you'll find a rather small tourist booth inside that sells tickets for the tour for a rather ridiculous price of around 5$ (yes, that is expensive around here). As far as tours go, my was pretty lame. It didn't help that most of the people on the English tour where part of a Japanese tour. No problem there, except for the strange fact that every time we passed a washroom in the palace, a few would run off into it. This caused the guide to get all frustrated because you weren't allowed to just run off into any old washroom, not to mention the fact that we had to keep waiting for everyone to come back out. 10 minutes later, and the process would repeat itself. Very strange... But I digress. So the guide shows you 3 rooms that frankly could be in a very upscale hotel used for conferences, then talks about the marble in the hallways, the stairs, the size of the door you just walked through, the fact that everything comes from Romania (which, apparently, is known for it's marble, diamonds, crystal, oak and just about every other material used in construction). To make a long story short, the tour ends after about 45 minutes with most of the people looking at each other going "Huh, ok, well, that sucked."

 

(Oh and another weird story is that you have to go through a metal detector to get in. They kept scanning my bag, each time removing the item that they thought they had seen on the screen, like the camera, lenses, batteries, etc... Finally I clue in and realize that my pocket knife is in the bag and that's probably causing the problem. I take it out, show them the pliers attachment, point at the camera as if I'm turning a screw or something and they wave me on. If only they knew how much marble I stole using the knife accessory...)

 

From the palace, I walked back through the city, spending about 20 minutes at a monstrous traffic circle in sheer awe of the appalling traffic conditions and driving etiquette. It was staggering, but rather humorous when watched from the relative safety of a sidewalk. (I think I managed to capture a photo of it, but I'm sure it won't do the scene justice.) Simply put, I think the horn is attached to both the gas and break pedals in Romanian cars. It's the only explanation I can come up with to account for the amount of honking I heard, just insane. The other little nugget of etiquette that clearly isn't taught in Romanian driving school (is there such a thing?) is the idea that you shouldn't enter an intersection unless you're sure you won't be blocking cross traffic. This rule isn't even remotely adhered to, which creates just the most insane backups and traffic jams I've ever seen. Anyways, 20 minutes of the honking and the exhaust fumes had me with a wicked headache, so I kept walking all the way back to the hostel.

 

One side note, and again no offence to my Romanian readers, but when I was in Prague one person I met was rather blunt about his advice on Bucharest. He simply said: "You know what the best thing to do in Bucharest is?... Leave." So on Friday a fellow ex-computer guy from London named Dave and I headed to the train station to head back north to a town called Brasov, which is the second largest city in Romania and apparently much more tourist friendly. The local hostel in Bucharest set us up with a Brasov hostel called The Rolling Stone, and upon arrival in Brasov, we were met at the train station by Julius from the Rolling Stone. You see, unless you're a real local, taking a taxi is really an exercise to find out how much you'll get ripped off. I only paid 2x the locals price for my taxi from the Bucharest train station to the hostel, in Brasov, Julius was there to get us to the Rolling Stone for a reasonable price. In the parking lot, Julius cruises the taxis like someone shopping for a Christmas tree. Somehow you just know the first few are sketchy and skip them all. After a few minutes, Julius spots a taxi he likes, heads over there, talks with the driver, then ushers us into the cabin. Surprisingly, the meter is actually turned on (very rare for non locals) and from what I could tell, our driver got us to the hostel for around 2$US, so I don't think we got screwed.

 

The hostel in Brasov was fine, nothing special. It is run by someone called Maria, who has two daughters, Diana and Sylvia. There's no other way to describe these three then to say they are on speed. They have to be, there's no other explanation. Within 5 minutes of sitting down to check-in, you'll know every restaurant, bus stop, train schedule, weather report, activity costs that are possible in Brasov, all in 5 minutes. It's simply overwhelming and comical at the same time. You really just want to reach across the table and hold either of them still but as soon as you move you get blasted with more information. All very friendly in an almost over-friendly way.

 

Brasov is north of Bucharest and in the Transylvania alps. It's got a much nicer feel to it then Bucharest. As a tourist, you basically stay in the old part of town. Which has an older European feel to it with narrow, cobblestone streets, churches, towers and what not. There's a decent sized hill on one side with a cable-car that goes to the top (no skiing). There's also a huge "Brasov" sign at the top, very similar to the famous Hollywood sign outside L.A. Off in the distance, you can see some snow-capped mountains that are just above treeline. Sadly, it doesn't take much effort to walk to the "other part" of town. The part with old cement block apartments, a seemingly endless number of power stations and just that entire "oh, so this is post communism" feel to it. Either way, Brasov is way above Bucharest and definitely the place to visit while in Romania.

 

The hostel was pretty busy that night with a group of 10 international students visiting from Budapest, a group of Romanian dancers in for some competition, some renovating going on upstairs and then just the general backpackers like myself. Dave recognized some people there from his earlier travels, so we quickly befriended Chris from Boston and Tanya and Darren from Perth, Australia. The 5 of us all headed out to some local restaurant, fancy by all standards, yet still reasonably priced. I managed to have a decent filet mignon, a cheese appetizer and a drink for about 12$US, which is living large on a travelers budget! The restaurant was pretty cool, downstairs in an old brick building with arched ceilings.

After dinner, we all returned to the hostel and started hanging out with the international students. By around midnight, about 10 of us decided to check out the Brasov nightlife. It took sometime to find anything even remotely decent, but in the end we found some club that was pretty much empty save a few people, but was free, had a dance floor and sofas (not too mention about a half-dozen, uh, dance poles) and was playing some decent music. We all stayed there till around 5am, before slowly walking back to our hostel and going to bed around 6.30am. We never saw the students again since they had to leave early the next day to catch a train to their next destination, I, on the other hand, slept in till around noon.

 

On Saturday, Dave, Chris and two other Americans that we met at the hostel, Tucket and PJ, both from Alabama, all went for a decent hike in the mountains. I took the day to just wander around town and explore the local streets. After some time online to investigate taking a ferry to Istanbul from Romania (nope, not till May 2006), I just spent the afternoon exploring the old part of Brasov. The weather was perfect, clear blue skies and around 10 degrees celcius. I met up with the guys later that night back at the hostel and we all went out for dinner again. Our intent had been to go out again that night, but after a long dinner waiting for service, we were all pretty tired by midnight and just wandered back to the hostel.

 

Sunday brought another day of perfect weather so we all decided to take a day trip to the town of Braun. Braun is a popular day trip to visit the Braun Castle, otherwise known as "Dracula Castle". This is supposedly the castle in which Dracula was written in. Personally, the castle didn't do it for me. I'm told the "real" Dracula castle, ie: the one that you think of, is in ruins in another town. I was hoping for a huge moat, towering spires and all that good ness. Instead, it was a pretty normal castle, as far as castles go and for around 4$US you took a very scripted tour through it. About 1 hour was plenty to visit the castle. Braun itself doesn't have much else, so after we grabbed a bite to eat, we took the bus back to Brasov. (Which would have broken just about every rule in the book concerning overcrowding, but remember we're in Romania so that doesn't matter.)

 

Sunday we all wandered out for dinner yet again, but returned to the hostel a little earlier to spend another night inside. Apparently the Sunday night social scene is a lot worse then the Friday night scene, so we figured that must mean nothing is open at all. We played some cards that night, caught up on "paperwork" (read diary) then just hung out in the common room watching HBO.. Gotta love satellite TV...

 

Today, Monday, I took the train back from Brasov to Bucharest and now I'm back at the Butterfly Hostel here in Bucharest. My plan is to leave either tomorrow or on Wednesday for Istanbul via the train since the ferry doesn't work and no one speaks highly of the bus (contrary to what the Lonely Planet says). Tonight I'll probably hang out in the hostel, meet the other backpackers and just get some rest before another long train ride to Istanbul...

 

Kenny