Sunday, June 10, 2012

Day One-Little Paris and Dracula's Palace

HI, everybody!  First of all, I apologize for how bland this page looks.  Let's just be thankful that I figured out how to make a blog at all.  The title was the best I could think of, and I chose it because I knew Mom wanted me to include plenty of food-related details.  I need to go to bed soon, but I wanted to write about today before I forgot what happened.
The day started bright and early, as we had to be on the bus by 8 in the morning.  I slept well, although I'm still feeling jetlagged today.  Here's the view from our room:
(the Palace of Parliament, somewhat more impressive than these trees, is on the other side of the hotel):

Our tour guide was very nice and seemed to know everything about Romania.  We went through the heart of the city, where most of the buildings are still from the Ceausescu era.  I'm not saying he was a good guy, but I happen to like his architectural taste.  It's an interesting mix of the normal art deco-ish Balkan architecture I saw so much of in Istanbul, which I love despite its simplicity, and a very French-looking Art Nouveau style, which is apparently what Ceausescu was going for.
Apparently he wanted to make Bucharest the new Paris.  He might have failed at that (and at running a government, and at surviving a coup), but downtown Bucharest is still very beautiful.  Two rivers run through the city, one of which you can see in the above picture.  Also, notice how capitalist advertisements have overtaken this socialist-planned area.  Take that, forces of evil!  The city is very cosmopolitan and many of the buildings are very modern,

 but there are trees everywhere, and lots of open spaces.  I don't know how many parks we drove past, but there were a lot of them.  The most beautiful part, however, was the main avenue.  I hesitate to call it the Avenue of Victory, because when our tour guide said "This is the Avenue of Victory" we were in the middle of a square formed by at least three streets, but it is certainly deserving of that title.  Trees hang over it everywhere, a park is on one side, and the other side is home to nothing but mansions.  Some of them are now museums, some are still regular mansions, I guess, but most of them are embassies or the homes of diplomats.  Our guide told us that the home of the American ambassador was the most beautiful.  The avenue also featured its very own Arch Du Triumph.  I give it a C for originality but an A+ for looks.  It is worth mentioning that this arch was built before Ceaucescu's time.  He was a huge fan of the Paris parallels, but he wasn't the first one to think of Bucharest as a little Paris and he was by no means the only one to buy into the whole French thing.  French was the unofficial second language of Romania until English took over about thirty years ago (take that again, forces of evil!).  Interestingly, I've been in two cabs so far.  One was driven by a young man who spoke decent English, and the other was driven by an older man who asked if I knew French.
From there we left Bucharest for the plains.  I don't have any pictures of plains, but if you've seen a field before, just multiply that by like a million and there you have it.  After about an hour of driving through plains, we came to the Carpathian Mountains, which form a protective ring around the central plateau of the country (Bucharest is southwest of this ring).  These mountains are not only home to beautiful rivers and trains,
they're also home to Dracula!  Our guide downplayed that part, but we were technically in Transylvania, and you could easily tell that the area had been influenced by Germans, if not vampires.  The buildings in the mountains looked like they could have been in the Alps, and there was even a ski resort only reachable by cable car.  I'm not sure if you can see it, but I think it's on top of that gigantic mountain.
Anywho, we were visiting place called Sinaia, named after Mount Sinai, which was the summer home of Romania's monarchs during the fifty years or so that they had actual monarchs.  A quote from our guide: "The king would spend roughly six months a summer here."  The palace was amazing.  We couldn't take pictures inside, so you'll have to take my word for it when I tell you that there were some incredibly intricate wood carvings and really cool mirrors.  What was cool was that the palace was built less than 150 years ago, so it had central heating and electricity along with all the trappings of a medieval castle.  There were two rooms that were supposed to look like different places in Italy, one that was supposed to be Arabic, and, of course, a French room.  I also loved something we learned about King Mihai I (not sure if the I is necessary when he was also the only King Mihai, but whatever): in his office he kept a writing desk to lean against when he met with people, the idea being that if they had their meeting standing up it would be quicker.  There was also a very nice couch for longer meetings.  I found that hilarious because, if you knew what the couch was for, it must have been pretty obvious when the king didn't want to talk to you.  Here are some pictures of the palace.
After that, we drove to the other side of the mountains, the heart of Transylvania, and saw two fortified churches.  They were basically forts with churches inside them, and the first one contained over 140 rooms that could house 3-4 people each.  They rooms weren't very nice on the inside, being 800 years old and windowless and all, but it sure looked a lot nicer than 1937 Hall on the outside:
Right?
After that we got lunch at a nice place on the side of the road/river going through the mountains and headed back to Bucharest.  We got there around sunset, in time to see the balcony where Ceausescu gave his last speech (two or three days before drawing his last breath, I think):
To the right of the frame there was a monument to the protesters who died overthrowing the government in 1989.  They love to hate Ceausescu and his wife here, and it was pretty entertaining to hear some of the jokes our guide told about them.  It'd be great if I could remember one.

But I can't.  I have to go now, but thanks for reading!  I'll post again the next time something interesting happens.

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