I haven’t posted for a while because we had been taking a little break from traveling. We spent a couple of weeks back in America seeing friends and family. Our house is currently rented out so we mostly stayed at our family beach cabin on Stretch Island. It was a little cold for our bodies now acclimated to tropical weather so we stayed inside and watched the birds, otters, seals and sea lions from the cabin. We saw friends and family and had a good relaxing time but ran out of time to see everyone we wanted to. We did get in a few hikes and did some shopping to refresh our traveling wardrobe. When you live with a rotation of 5 shirts and 2 pairs of shorts, the clothes seem to get worn out a lot faster. We finished up our stay home with the annual Easter games at my parent’s house. We had a record crowd in attendance for a fun day of family games and good food.
Our Spring trip begins with a trip to a new country for us…. Romania. We spent 7 nights in an Airbnb in the heart of the old town of Bucharest. It was in a communist era ugly apartment building that has a 6 floor balcony that looked out over some more interesting French style architecture. It was a good enough place but we worried a bit what would happen in an earthquake (infrequent here, but they do happen). We have recently missed a couple of earthquakes by a couple of days in Bangkok and then again in Istanbul.
Architecture in Bucharest is really interesting. Romania was a late participant in the Renaissance and the industrial revolution. It was primarily an agricultural country and didn’t get on board with the European city building until the late 1800’s. They started a monarchy in 1881 after gaining freedom from the Ottoman empire. They quickly got really interested in building Bucharest using the French architectural style. There are many beautiful buildings from this era and many Romanians look back at this time as their golden era. After World War II, they entered the Communist Era until 1989 and most of these buildings were rather blah. The authoritarian leader, Nicolae Ceausescu did build a few interesting buildings but many had some serious construction flaws and were a mix of Classical, French, Art Deco, and Bauhaus. Sometimes all in the same building. Ceausescu also built a huge parliament building which is now the heaviest building in the world, and the third largest administrative in the world. It is impressive, but also reminds everyone of the excesses that occurred when the rest of the country was on food rationing.
So what did we do during a week in Bucharest? Get over jetlag! It seems to be getting worse every time we change continents. We did schedule a week in this town which is more than long enough to see the big sights even if we were always half sleepy. We did a free walking tour on the first day to get our bearings around old town as well as an understanding of Romanian history. We saw several museums including the Communism museum, an open air museum with historical houses, the National History Museum, and the National Art Museum. Bucharest is also known for having some fantastic parks. We did a lot of park walking and my life list bird count increased by 7 birds so I am now at 658! We also tried a lot of Romanian food but I don’t seem to have taken any food pictures. Stay tuned for food pics in our next Romanian destinations.
It is always great for us to return to Europe. We love Asia and Latin America and Mexico but Europe just feels a lot more comfortable. We can drink the water. There are trains again! We can get good wine and beer. We also get CHEESE. We ate more cheese platters this week than was probably good for us.
We have visited other former communist countries before and it always gets us super interested in the history. The Romanian language is the most similar to Latin and sounds like Italian to us. This is weird because it is surrounded by countries with Slavic languages. Romania was part of the Roman Empire but so were all the other countries in Europe. It is weird that this country is so Roman when it doesn’t really have as much intact Roman ruins that are all over the rest of the continent. The impact of that authoritarian rule is also interesting to see. Romania is still struggling to hit its stride and eventually be well off enough that they will be fully integrated into the European economy. Wages are still really low but we were surprised to see restaurant prices that were similar to the rest of Europe. Just like we found in Croatia and Hungary… the former communist block countries are not super cheap. We will be going through 3 more of those countries this year and it will be interesting to see if that is true there as well. But first we need to see more of Romania. Next stop- the medieval town of Sibiu.
