Bucharest, Romania

Another day, another train.

Personally, I wasn't taken with Bucharest.  We've been to plenty of big, noisy, busy, dirty cities on this tour, but this was the first one I didn't really enjoy.  I loved all the others.  There were a few interesting sights, but generally I felt like there wasn't much personality to the place, and the people there were about as unfriendly as it got in the entire 8 weeks.

We were only there for an afternoon, again, so we went for a city walk with Tony and saw all the main attractions.

The first was the President's palace.  Sorry, it's been a few weeks now and a lots happened, including me sending my Eastern Europe book home, so my memory of what everything is and who everybody was is getting a bit hazy.  The palace was built by the last dictator, who basically surrounded himself with his family and friends in all the positions of power, then ran the country into the ground.  He spent an absolute fortune on building this place, and it is really, unbelievably, huge.

It looks big enough from here, but actually it's a square building.  I think there were over a thousand rooms in the place.

At some stage, someone decided they had to be the biggest and best at everything, so this is the Bucharest Champs Elysees.  It even has a street sign that looks identical to the one in Paris.  I believe the Bucharest one is 6m longer.  Sweeeet.

How is it that so many of my photos feature Colin front and centre?  He's the one with the hat.

We also went to the Student Square, where (as I remember things) there was a big uprising against the dictator while he was giving a speech one day.  He jumped in a helicopter and was taken away to safety, but some of the protesters died.  After that, the dictator and his wife were had up in court for the way they'd run the country into the ground, run up a massive national debt, and caused the people to have to live in poverty, and they both ended up in front of the firing squad.  The square now has lots of statues and monuments and so forth.

We're not sure what the birds nest up the pole is about.

Some of the architecture was pretty cool.  There were a couple of buildings where they'd kept the façade but built a new, much bigger, building behind it.

Oh yeah, this was awesome.  Check out how they were advertising the tv series True Blood (it's about vampires, for those who don't know):

It was a little sick, because the pigeons were drinking the water.

We were staying well out of the city centre, so that was about the extent of our veiwing of Bucharest.  The next day we left about 11am to get our next overnight train (woohooooo!!)...