Bucharest, Romania

I made my way via a $2 cab ride back to the Brasov Train station. My cabbie spoke English and had driven a cab in Chicago. He tried to convince me to let him drive me all the way to Bucharest for $25. While it seemed a reasonable fare for such a long drive, I opted for a 4 hour train trip instead, at the extremely cheap price of $6.
The ride to Bucharest brought me out of the green hills and mountains of Transylvania, down into the hot, flat, dusty plains of southern Romania. For the first time in the trip this year, I felt some truly hot weather. Bucharest is a big, loud, bustling city of 2 million. The scene outside the train station was shocking chaos. Cars were furiously honking. The pedestrians packed on the sidewalks were moving purposefully, all doing their best to pretend to not see the legless woman scuttling along in the gutter begging for change. Some stopped to examine the lineup of people selling bizarre selections of goods; one woman selling cartons of individually wrapped men's underwear all size small, another selling a mountain of black socks, another selling some unrecognizable food.
Once a got a few blocks away from the train station the city quieted and became managable. Bucharest has some wonderful green parks and lakes. The city is relativley clean and attractive considering the drastically lower economic level of Romania compared to my previous stops.

This monument remembers those who died in the revolution in December, 1989. Dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had led a brutalized Romania for 24 years. He turned Romania into a police state. He enacted disastrous economic policies, like forcing all of Romania's farmers to put down their ploughs and work in factories, causing a famine. He built the second largest building in the world for his palace, while his people starved and froze. Finally by 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall propelled the Romanian people to have the courage to bring down his regime. Over 1000 people died in the month long revolution, with Ceausescu's capture and execution on Christmas Day 1989 ending the killing.

Above is a Dacia car. I'd never heard of the brand Dacia before, but in Bucharest, literally 50% of all the cars on the street are Dacias.

The People's Palace was built by Ceausescu in the 1984. It has 1100 rooms, and is the second largest administrative building in the world next to the Pentagon. To build it, Ceausescu destroyed one fifth of Bucharest's historic district. 28 Churches were demolished. The street leading up to it was widened by the mad dictator to make it one meter wider than the great Champs Elysee. The destruction of the peoples homes that had lined the street were of no consequence, nor was the fact that his palace's construction took up to 25% of Romania's GDP. So much marble was used that Romanians had to find other types of stone to use for gravestones.

Today it houses the Romanian Parliament, as well as the Museum of Totalitarianism and Socialist Realism.