Blog

I don’t want to get too political on this blog, but it’s fair to say that I’m not a fan of the governance of Nicolae Ceaușescu. And this building is one of the reasons for that dislike, as whilst he presided over a political system that had tens of thousands of children in orphanages and a country that didn’t have enough electricity, he decided to build one of the largest, and heaviest, buildings in the world, the Palace of the Parliament. He destroyed a huge chunk of the city to build it, he ploughed through history and constructed a building that remains 70% unused. Hundreds of people died during the construction, 40,000 people lost their homes and Romania couldn’t afford the extreme costs of this building. Look at the size of the building as it is, but there are also eight underground levels. This is a building meant to be part of the Ceaușescu personality cult, but it’s fair to say that it didn’t turn out as he intended.

Anyway, politics aside, I was pleased to be going on a tour of the building as I didn’t get chance to do that last time I came to the city. Visitors have to phone up to make a reservation, and as Susanna is the most social of the group, she did that.

There’s a free art installation on the ground floor for visitors to look at and, let’s be honest, it’s not like they’re short of space as there’s a total of 4 million square feet in the building.

There was tight security, but this is the working Parliament of the country, so that’s to be expected. Here’s my visitor’s pass and they carefully checked IDs before allowing entry. Our tour didn’t visit some of the rooms as Parliament was sitting, although the tour remained at an hour or so in length.

There were a lot of long corridors such as this.

A theatre, which is still used, with what I think is the biggest chandelier in the building.

A carpet designed to fit into the flooring. Just imagine the cost of all this.

Media rooms.

Interviewing of what I assume to be Romanian politicians.

This would have been the grand entrance for international dignitaries and Nicolae Ceaușescu would have walked down those stairs whilst his wife, Elena Ceaușescu, would have walked down stairs that were located opposite.

The curtains are so large that they’re dry cleaned in situ.

The first of three rooms all next to each other.

The second room.

And the third room. These are huge rooms, do they really need three of the things? There are 1,100 rooms in total and just under 3,000 chandeliers.

The building is so heavy that it’s sinking, which is causing cracks throughout the structure.

Another function room.

It was a fascinating tour, although I struggled to hear the guide for quite a bit of the walk around. The group size was large, perhaps just a little too large, but we saw a fair amount of the building. At the end the guide said we had only seen 2% or 3% of the interior, a reminder of how large the structure is. I’d recommend the tour to others, it’s a way of seeing inside this enormous building which they clearly still don’t know what to do with. There’s a temptation to use it commercially, but it is the Parliament building and they don’t want to Disneyfy it. There’s an interesting Guardian article on the whole arrangement.

I didn’t really need to buy a Metro pass for the time that I was in Bucharest, but I love underground systems and I make the most of them whenever I can. OK, it’s geeky, but there we go, it’s all about the travel adventure and I’m very much into that. The purchase process was simple enough as there’s a vending machine which sells Metro tickets and there’s an English option available.

As some background, there are currently five Metro lines in the city and the first one opened on 19 November 1979, so much later than in some other European capital cities. The network is publicly owned but is separately managed from the rest of the city’s public transport system, so there’s no integration of tickets. There’s a new sixth line being planned to the city’s airport and that seems a most sensible idea. The prices are cheap, so a weekly ticket is something like £6, with the services running from 05:00 until 23:00. On the times that I used the network, there were regular services and it’s easy to understand how to change lines at the interchanges.  The network, along with all public transport in Bucharest, is currently subsidised by the Government in an attempt to reduce the volume of traffic on the city’s heavily congested roads.

I got a bit muddled up with how to put the ticket in the machine, so being rather sociable I went and asked one of the staff at the gate line. The helpful staff member showed me which way to put the ticket in, which was inevitably not the way that I had been doing it. Handily, the system is like New York and Warsaw (amongst many others) which is that there’s no need to put a ticket in when leaving the network because all journeys are the same price.

I’m not sure that either of my two loyal readers will be that excited about my photos of some signs that I took during the time I was there, but here they are anyway. Sometimes this blog is just about me and not anyone else  🙂

I have a lot of good ideas. This visit to a medieval restaurant in Bucharest was another one of those great decisions. There was some initial scepticism from the others, but the whole thing looked like an adventure to me and I like those.

Nothing wrong with a themed restaurant!

The restaurant doesn’t use forks, it’s knives and fingers only, with a finger bowl provided to clean hands. It’s obviously what they did in the medieval times and although I was aware of this rule in advance, I didn’t tell the others that they wouldn’t be allowed the usual cutlery. I didn’t want the chance to go here sabotaged by that sort of news.

The beer was the Bucur which was drinkable, although I wouldn’t actively go looking for another bottle of it. Bev, not unfairly, wondered why there wasn’t mead, although I was happy with the beer.

Steve takes great care posting photos which he’s thought about the composition and lighting, but then finds out he gets over 50 likes on Facebook for this rather fetching photograph of me that he took.

Steve had asked earlier on if I’d get a whole chicken as the menu didn’t detail that, but I said that was hardly likely given the meal was only about £11. To my surprise and delight, they come out with a whole chicken. There was a note on the menu that I could keep the wooden sword, but I willingly handed that over to Thim as I didn’t fancy taking that through airport security.

I ploughed through nearly all of the chicken, most of the potatoes and all of the cabbage and salad. The chicken was tender and moist, the potatoes were a bit nondescript and the heap of cabbage added texture. The quality here was high, but I would have rather that the potatoes were a bit more flavoursome and seasoned. The others also had too much food and everyone was very brave. Bev muttered something about she had too many sausages, but I didn’t see that was something to be negative about.

The service was generally very good, although it took a little time to pay the bill and they struggled to split the bill. They weren’t the only restaurant struggling with that, it shouldn’t really be as hard as some venues make it. However, I always felt comfortable in the venue and the team member who served us seemed competent and keen to help. Given that we went on a Monday evening and thought it might be nearly empty, we found the large venue to actually be nearly full. I can imagine that reservations are essential at weekends, as this appears to be a venue that’s popular with groups.

Personally, I would have come back here for every meal, but that idea was swiftly rejected. But, highly recommended, and somewhere that I think my friends Liam and Ross would have enjoyed. I mean, the surprise of a whole chicken isn’t something that you get every day of the week….. Definitely one of my highlights of the week.

By way of a slight spoiler, it’s fair for me to note now that I came to love the Hop Hooligans brewery during my visit to Bucharest and I made everyone come back here again later on in the week.

Here’s the beer board and I’m pleased to note that the bar is listed on Untappd which makes drinks planning much easier. As I haven’t mentioned this in at least three days, anyone can add me at https://untappd.com/user/julwhite, I accept anyone as a friend on there  🙂  Steve and I arrived at the pub first, giving us more time to sample the beers on offer. It’s not necessarily the cheapest bar in the city, but there are some quality beers there and I think that the drinks are worth every penny.

The bar is located in a former grand residential property. The beer here is the Infochemicals from Blackout Brewing who are a respected brewery from Cluj in Romania. A Double New England IPA which was rich and juicy, just as it should be.

My second drink was the Proper Cake from Metanoia Brewing, another beer that I was pleased with given the taste of cherries and vanilla along with the depth of flavour.

During the warmer summer months, there’s a pleasant outdoors area and there’s also plenty of space inside the bar. The bar has received excellent reviews on-line and I also liked the service, the atmosphere and the range of drinks that were available. Although I did notice the review:

“They don’t have a single proper beer. If you order a lager, you get something that has a taste of IPA. If you order IPA, you get something that looks like fruit yogurt. If you are hipster pretending to be beer “connoisseur”, this is your place. If you really like beer, don’t go there, because you will be angry.”

The venue responded politely to this review, but I can say with absolute certainty that I like beer and I wasn’t angry. I also noticed tens of “proper” beers in the fridges and on tap, I’d suggest that the brewery should be very proud of what they’ve done here. This is a venue for the many and not the few.

Our lunch stop of choice was Hygge, a nod towards Thim being Danish and he certainly seemed surprised and delighted when we went in.

The interior was open plan and laid-back, with an inviting atmosphere. Everything was clean and the menu options looked tempting.

After rather over-eating at the unlimited breakfast at the hotel, I decided against needing lunch and just went for a beer. I can be like that sometimes…. This is the Edelweiss Hofbrau, an entirely acceptable wheat beer from Austria, which had notes of banana and was suitably light.

Here’s the group enjoying themselves. Bev at this point was complaining to the staff member that her coffee was too cold. Steve and I didn’t say anything, we didn’t want to get involved with the impending disaster that was unfolding in Anglo-Romanian relations.

I liked the restaurant and the service, it felt friendly and we were never rushed during the meal. I was content with the beer and the others enjoyed their food. There are some recent negative reviews on-line about the friendliness of the service, but I thought our server was helpful and personable. All told, it was a pleasant visit and Thim was especially pleased with the little bit of Danishness in the city and it even made me fancy a return to the country.

In the heart of the city’s Old Town is this church which was built in 1724 under the supervision of Ioannikios Stratonikeas. There was an attached inn, which has since been demolished and the church itself has been damaged many times by earthquakes. The church was forcibly closed between 1890 and 1940, but was then reconsecrated in 1940 on the Feast of St. Nicholas.

The entrance to the monastery are from the early part of the twentieth century and it feels quite mystical walking in through these doors.

I wasn’t going to take any internal photographs as the monasteries don’t seem to usually want this, but they’ve perhaps given up here as numerous other visitors were and they didn’t stop anyone. Given that, I thought I’d take a few photos to remind myself of the grand interior. I like these colourful wall paintings and I’ve never quite understood why there was a move away from these in the Protestant and Catholic churches during and after the period of the reformation. This monastery felt the most touristy of the ones that we visited and it felt like it might be quite challenging to try and pray peacefully here given the pedestrian traffic that was coming through, including a number of tour groups.

There’s also an external area where numerous gravestones and old wall paintings are on display. These wall paintings are mostly from monasteries destroyed elsewhere in the city during the appalling maladministration of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

This precinct and lapidarium involved a major restoration and it’s constructed on the former inn which was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century. It’s certainly worth coming to see for any visitor in Bucharest and there are some printed histories inside which give further information about the monastery.