Romanian Folk Dancing--We Have Lift Off

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  Bucharest, Romania
Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Bucharest was our introduction to Eastern Europe. It feels like a city stretching for westernization. Ceaucescu's civic centre with its massive Palace of Parliament and Champs-Elysees copy lies like a monolithic scar amidst the Baroque and Renaissance churches of Bucharest's pretty past. But even giant scars heal and Bucharest has the flavour of a capital of a country soon to join the European Union. Ceaucescu's rule only ended 16 years ago when he and his wife were executed on Christmas Day. In a country famous for a fictitious vampire, the Romanians refer to Ceaucescu as the country's real Dracula.

We took in Ceaucescu's Palace of Parliament which, along with the rest of his civic centre, required the destruction of 1/6th of the city and the displacement of 70,000 people. The Palace of Parliament is the world's second largest building after that other monument to national virility--the Pentagon

Massive Palace of Parliament

. Strangely enough, construction of Ceaucescu's edifice is still ongoing and it's a mystery to locals as to where the funds for its completion are coming from. The interior of the Palace of Parliament makes you feel like a midget. That was probably Ceaucescu's intention. The vast corridors turn into ballrooms so large they feel like natural spaces, all of which now suffer slightly from disuse. The Palace of Parliament impresses on a bizarre level with its 150 million tonnes of marble.

Our dinner in Bucharest was quite notable. We went to a restaurant in a barn-like building with live chickens in the rafters and Romanian folk dancing for entertainment. The dancing was very impressive, especially when the dancers formed a tight circle and began to spin with increasing speed until the women in the group were lifted from the floor. We waited for someone to collapse from the G-force but obviously the dancers had high thresholds. For food, Mel had a chicken from the rafters and Paul had bear from the Carpathian mountains. It tasted like Smurf--that's if Smurf tastes like beef with the consistency of braised pork.

In Bucharest, a group of our fellow tour mates were swarmed by a pack of gypsy children in broad daylight on a main artery. They were overtly aggressive and our friends escaped by ducking into a pharmacy, but only after one of them had her necklace violently torn away. Fortunately, we haven't experienced anything like this on our trip, maybe because we safely store our valuables by ingesting them before we go out in the morning. Try to pickpocket that. No, but we are inhumanly vigilant and we have locks for everything.

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