Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 15:49:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 3 days, 3 cities... 2 of them superb! (another long email, but no ranting, I promise...)
Yesterday - Tuesday May 29 - was spent in Bucharest. I was debating whether or
not to go out of town, then finally decided "I'm here, might as well see this
city now so I never have to come back here again"..
I went for a walk -- a history lesson actually -- going around all the places
where the revolution of 1989 took place. The first picture taken today was of
the Intercontinental Hotel at Piata Universitati. To those of you who remember
watching the revolution carry out on live TV, this is where Ceausescu's tanks
drove over so many protesting students crushing them underneath, until the tank
operators finally deserted and joined the protesters.. It was all filmed by the
foreign reporters from their upper-floor rooms at the Intercontinental hotel.
Next stop was Piata Revolutiei, after a slight detour through Piata Unirii (the
last "i" is silent) and some shady areas of the city where I lost my way
walking through. This was the spot where Ceausescu was lifted off the balcony
of the nearby Communist Party building by helicopter, and then captured and
executed a few days later.. There is a tall white monument there now, along
with the names of all the people who died that day, similar to the Vietnam
Memorial in Washington DC. There was also a small (peaceful) protest going on
outside the plaza, with tourists like me all around taking their photographs
until being told by the riot police to be on our way!
The last stop on this walk was the second-largest building in the world in
surface area and the third largest in volume -- the Palace of Parliament -- aka
"House of the People" before 1989 -- aka "that huge block of concrete". It was
not much to look at, and I wasn't too keen on taking a tour inside it. Instead
I just relaxed in the park that surrounds it, enjoying for the first time a
cool breeze that was blowing by..
In the evening it was time to go back to the train station. I caught the
overnight train to Budapest at 6:40 PM. This train was much better, and I had
my own sleeper compartment with door locks! But unlike the overnight train I
had taken from Paris to Frankfurt in February, this time the conductor did not
take my passport in the evening. At the Romania-Hungary border crossing (around
4am), the train came to a stop and the border control guards boarded it,
knocking on everybody's door and waking us all up to check passports.
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| May 28 | Contents | May 30 |