Run the equator: 4 days in Bucharest

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

4 days in Bucharest

I have no pictures of mine from Bucharest.
This one is from Wikimedia commons

My aunt was nice and allowed us to stay with her in Bucharest for a few days. We had planned to see the city (or at least that I would show the city - which I have seen many times before - to Angela), take some pictures, and perhaps see a museum or two. But things didn't go as we intended. Laziness and constant bad weather slowed our engines; instead of taking to the streets, we locked ourselves up in my aunt's apartment, read old National Geographics and watched TV (which in Romania, with the exception of cartoons, is mostly in original language, so Angela didn't have a problem understanding).

Despite our general lack of interest for street hiking and the huge distance (my aunt lives all the way at the edge of town) we managed to get downtown twice. Once we spent most of our time looking for a toilet - luckily McDonald's is well represented in Romania - the other time, one evening, together with my aunt, we tried to get into a restaurant for dinner and kept running from place to place across downtown, since all our choices were booked for company Christmas parties. Either way, there wasn't much to enjoy in downtown Bucharest during those drab winter days. The streets and sidewalks were covered in a thin layer of liquid mud - the eternal curse of all Romanian towns during the rainy season - there were works on all the main streets and unmarked man-made pot-holes adorned many corners. In summer, the same streets are swept with dust by the hot wind of the southern plains, but at least the trees are green and the skies are blue; you can walk and feel good and stop in a beer-garden and then walk some more. But not in this wailing December weather; no, the warmth and shelter of the apartment were much more appealing than the cold boulevards...

Posted from Cluj-Napoca.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok, fess it up, you never loved Bucharest, so it wasn't just weather keeping you from exploring.

Big Fat Rat said...

Whoever you are... you must know me pretty well, ha?

Actually I love that town. If I were living in Romania now, I would have certainly moved to Bucharest.

And it wasn't just weather that stood in the way, it was my wife's sickness and aversion to cold weather as well.