BUCHAREST

 The next few updates from my European trip are all well and truly overdue but I couldn't upload photos to Blogger from my i-Pad so everything's been on hold.

One of the downsides of cruising is being in enclosed air-conditioned spaces with lots of other people so not surprisingly, Susan and I both have colds. She suffers more than me with a  hacking cough but that didn’t stop us exploring Bucharest for a few days.  I’ve touched on some of the quirks of Romania in the River Cruise newsletter but there are some more stories to be told.

To start with, we’re in a very fancy hotel, the Intercontinental Athenee Palace, as part of the cruise. Normally, we’d head to an interesting AirBnb but we were too lazy to move our luggage for just a couple of nights. The hotel is brilliantly positioned, next to the Athenee Palace (funny that) where we had tickets to see a concert as part of the George Enescu Music Festival (that’s the good part) and opposite Revolution Square where hundreds of people were killed in the dying days of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu (the not so cheerful part). More about Ceausescu in a minute. I don’t know why it is that hotels can’t cope with simple requests like twin bed/walk in shower. I love Susan but don’t want to sleep with her. And between us with our various foot, ankle and knee ailments, we’d rather not risk stepping into baths for a shower. What made our experience here amusing was that even the staff didn’t know which rooms had such facilities so we travelled to the second, the third and finally the fourth floor to find an appropriate room. It turns out that Romanians have a similar phrase to our “third time lucky”.

We had some excursions built into the river cruise and we’d found some ourselves and all of them were slightly quirky.

George, our guide on the bus from Oltenita, provided some great insights into the various districts of Bucharest as we drove into the centre but he kept referring to the beauty of Romanian women as one of the country’s greatest assets. I suspect there’s still an underlying Orthodox patriarchal culture at play here. As we drove initially through working class suburbs the generally feeling was of rundown housing stock, wooden shacks with rusted tin roofs, concrete cancer apartment blocks, but there was also the occasional two and three story massive ornate mansions with gold touches owned by Roma people (more about them in a minute). 

Housing, as you move closer to the centre, is a mixture of dull concrete blocks, colourful painted blocks, 19th and early 20th century apartment buildings (Parisian style through to Art Deco) and some with a red circular label which tells you that they are likely to fall down in the next serious earthquake! They were checked after the last major earthquake in 1977 when 1,500 people were killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed and although everyone now knows these blocks are unstable, there’s not enough good will or money to fix them. Another curious fact about Romania is that even under a communist regime, 85% of people owned their own house. 

Our next adventure was a walking and food tasting tour. Unfortunately, it included the remnants of the river cruise folk, including some rude and deaf and less than bright Americans. We tasted cheese pastries, grapes and figs from a little market, skinless sausages (rather like their smaller Balkan cousins cevapi), all the dips you’d find in a Greek or Turkish restaurant, sarmale (cabbage leaves stuffed with pork mince) served with mamaliga (polenta) and a rather odd polenta/cheese combo served on top of sour cream and topped with a fried egg. Needless to say, that one I just looked at. What was more curious than the meal was the conversation between Laura, our guide, and the Americans. She was saying that based on her family’s experience, she couldn’t understand why anyone in the 21st century would want to be a Communist - and the Americans were all insisting that the Democrat candidate for the New York Mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, was exactly that, secretly planning to take away people’s homes and nationalise industry. I found the conversation ironic as it seems to me that Trump who is nationalising some parts of industry, removing enemies from positions of power, trying to enact a Christian-nationalist cultural revolution is much closer to the Romanian dictator Ceausescu than Mamdani is!

The next day, we did another walking tour, this time to find out more about the Roma people. There isn’t a link between “Roma” and “Romanians” which Romanians are eager to make clear. Roma are the travellers or gypsies who have their origin in India and still live in tight knit communities in different parts of Europe although of course many of them were murdered in German concentration camps. The trouble with the tour was that it was developed by and delivered by people who weren’t Roma. Imagine going on a tour about Indigenous culture in Australia without any indigenous control or content or guide? So it was interesting, but the information gaps were insurmountable without that Roma content. To summarise, up until the mid-19th century Roma were mainly slaves, owned by landowners and even the Orthodox Church. These days, they suffer discrimination in education, in housing, even in the everyday language of Romanians. They are viewed with suspicion because it’s believed that they make most of their money illegally, don’t pay tax, marry young, have too many children and there’s even that old majority fear that one day, there’ll be more Roma than Romanians and the country will collapse.

Our final perspective in trying to understand the country was a driving tour exploring the history and the last days of Romania’s final dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. I don’t want to bore you to death with information that you can find on Wikipedia but put simply, he was an uneducated man who ended up living in luxury; a communist apparatchik who might have become a Tito or a Dubcek but instead turned into a Kim Il Sung or Mao Zedong with his photograph in every home, school, office and factory in the country. The result was that unlike the President of Bulgaria in 1989 who slipped away into quiet retirement, Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed. We drove around in a 1984 Dacia (rather like the Yugo but based on a Renault design) hearing the history and visiting key sites including the demented Palace of the Parliament, the second biggest building in the world, which used up so much Romanian marble in the 1980s that there was nothing left to put on graves. We also visited his grave and the Spring Palace where he, Elena and his three children lived. It’s hard to imagine life for teenagers in these suites with silk wall paper, gold and marble bathrooms and art donated by world leaders. It’s a Palace utterly lacking in taste but not in clothes. There were long passages full of dresses and suits, furs and shoes. Apparently for over 20 years whenever Nicolae and Elena weren’t travelling around the world, they sat at home after work playing cards in the company of the top 21 members of the politburo to ensure that the latter didn’t have time to plot against them. 

What made this tour particularly useful was that our guide had been in Revolution Square in 1989 but as he freely confessed, headed home when the gun shots started. His home was destroyed by the 1977 earthquake and he had to live with his family amongst (his words) drunken workers. He described himself as being part of the unwanted generation when Ceausescu banned abortion and contraception in order to create a larger population. That happened but unwanted babies were abandoned and for the others, there weren’t enough schools or university places. 

And there’s a final story of Romania that’s worth telling. From 1982 to 1989, Ceausescu initiated a severe austerity program to eliminate national debt. Which meant that heating and electricity, food and petrol were all rationed. Somewhat surprisingly, when he announced the debt had been paid, no one really celebrated because this period led to the highest infant mortality rate in Europe. Even though our guide’s mother was a government bureaucrat who had made presentations to Ceausescu, she still had to queue for rations. Try to imagine your life in the 1980s with  0.75k of meat per week or 3k of vegetables and fruit, and oil and sugar only once a month.

Enough history and politics I hear you say. What other images can I present about Bucharest? The most stunning one was in our final view hours in the city – a concert in the brilliant Athenee Palace concert hall, originally builtIn 1888 as a cultural and educational palace for the betterment of the population. A unique brilliantly decorate circular hall. But then there are more pragmatic images thatAren’t quite so glamorous. Like most of the towns and cities we’ve visited, there are smokers everywhere but there’s a particular difference here. Brilliantly coloured cigarette filters litter the streets - aqua and royal blue and green. Like Serbia, the drivers are flat to the floor types and although stepping onto a cross walk isn’t quite as dangerous as in Hanoi, the risk is there. Next to every renovated apartment building, there is one that isn’t, usually with graffiti detracting further from the look. 

In other words, it’s a city I’m glad I’ve visited but not one I’d come back to. 

Photos:

1. Driving into Bucharest

2. Renovated house of a bicycle riding courtesan

3. Roma and Jewish Holocaust Memorial

4. Palace of Parliament

5. Dacia tour

6. Spring Palace bedroom for Ceausescu’s teenage daughter, Maria Antoinette-style

7. Cinema magazine from the 1980s featuring Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu 

8. Susan at the Atheene Palace

PS If you want to get some insight into the Ceausescus, check out the TV series Spy/Master on SBS