Aug 11, 2005 – Disembarkation and Bucharest
By 10:00 our bags were packed and in the hall; just after lunch, docked in Olteniţa, we disembarked and got on buses bound for Bucharest. On the way out tour guide, Irén pointed out that the “suburbs” are the industrial areas, and the factory workers live in these outlying areas. They were noticeably poor areas. She also explained that after the fall of communism the peasants got back their land. Just like in Bulgaria, they had no money to buy machinery to work their land. Unlike in Bulgaria, they went two ways: one group, the larger, lease their land to the government, work the land using government machinery, and receive their pay in crops; the other group opted to work their land using farm animals. I found it interesting that they did not choose to make their own co-ops.
In Bucharest, we were taken to our hotel – a Hilton, I believe – and were given time until dinner to be on our own. Zsuzsa and I decided to take a walk, and studied the map in the guidebook we found in the room. We had the route completely memorized and took off. The only thing we did wrong was turn the wrong way as we left the hotel, so we walked a long way looking for the street and park we had set as our goal. Finally we decided to turn off and head gradually back. We saw a lot of the everyday city – again noticeably poor and in need of reconstruction; the everyday people – not noticeable friendly; the wide avenues and the maniac drivers. We arrived back at the hotel uneventfully and checked the map to see where we actually went.
For dinner, we were taken to a restaurant which was partially open-air. Loud squawking birds were in cages along the walls and people were joking about tomorrow’s dinner. The food was totally uninteresting, but the folklore show, songs and dances in regional costumes, was entertaining.
Aug 12, 2005 – Bucharest
It seems that Romania tries very hard to
establish its connection to ancient Rome – a connection which did exist in the
past. Their language is based on Latin, and Irén suggested that the common
ending of “u” in Romanian is the “us” in Latin. We were taken to a museum where
a tall Roman tower was replicated and essentially taken apart so that each
relief could be studied close up. Interesting, but not particularly Romanian.
Then we went into the National Treasury, where there were jewels and crown and
other intrinsically valuable artifacts from various periods of history.
Impressive, and well presented, but the room was quite airless, and we
wanted
out, so we did only a superficial examination of the contents.
We drove to the Parliament – supposedly the
second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon. We were told that
there are seven stories underground as well as an underground road directly to
the airport. Ceausescu must have been a bit nervous. As an aside – our tour
guide often spoke of the toppling of the Ceausescu government and was clearly
relieved; a guide on one of our other buses spoke sadly of the death of their
great leader. We did not enter
the Parliament. We drove to a large Church,
frescoed with the last judgment on the outside. A couple of priests drove up in
a Mercedes to the fancy rectory next to the church, and found out that in
Romania, the state still pays the church, so their wealth is not exclusively
dependent on the collection basket. Here we were also able to take pictures
inside.
There is restoration going on here and there, but on the whole, the city is poor, dingy, and in need of a lot of money and work. An earthquake hit the city nearly thirty years ago, and there are numerous remnants of that, mostly in cracked and flaked off facades. Romania has only about 20% standard of living compared to the average European Union standard. It will be some time before the standard comes up. There needs to be a concerted national effort, and the consensus is not there and the government is filled with corruption. Time will tell.
We went to a restaurant lunch, right across the street from a small church whose frescoes were being restored. Then, given a choice between an art gallery and the outdoor village museum, we opted for the latter. This museum consists of 84 houses and their outlying buildings from various regions all over Romania. The houses were moved, intact, and placed in this museum area. Note: this is very similar to the outdoor museum in Szt. Endre, in Hungary. We did not have enough time to see the whole thing, so we looked mostly at the houses from the Transylvania (Erdély) region.
We had a huge, gala dinner at the hotel, which went on for hours – but it was the end of the journey, and it was farewell for most of us.