30/5/09 Bucharest

I ended up getting a seat by a wall and used my bag to prop myself up against it. It was alright, I might have slept for three or four hours. I had a terrible dream that kids were robbing me while I slept. Not so good.

Around 7 I went to take the bus in to Bucharest. Not so good at signage. I met a guy from Barcelona who spoke English and we tried to figure out what to do. We ended up realizing that we had to buy tickets first, so we went across the street to the stand (all unlabelled) and bought two tickets (he even paid because they were only like 1.30 and I only had 10s, in return I let him use my phone to find directions to his hostel).

We got on the bus, and ended up going in the wrong direction to the end of the line, which wasn’t that far, but we had to wait for another bus. When it came I couldn’t find him, so I got on by myself. About ten minutes into the ride they came around to collect tickets and it turned out I bought the wrong ticket. I should have bought one for the express bus, which cost 7 Leer return. Instead I got taken off the bus and had to pay a 50 leer fine. Awful, and a complete mistake. I didn’t feel bad about this one because it really wasn’t anything I could do about it, I’m sort of surprised they made me pay it, obviously not from the area and they even looked at my passport. Oh well.

I got on the next bus and my Barcelona friend was there, he didn't have to pay any fines. We said we should get off at the next stop, even though I was suspect, and it turned out I was right, I should have went two more stops. The buses were only running every half hour and it was absolutely freezing out. Not the best intro to Romania.

My hostel was nice, they let me hang out and eat breakfast and I used the internet and read about the family history dad sent me. Turns out we're from Suceava, in northeast Romania. And the kicker it's Cristina Bolohan's hometown. So I looked at trains for getting out there and I could leave at 6 am and get in around noon, leave around midnight and get back around 6, so I decided to do it the next day. The lady at the desk was surprised I wanted to go there and helped me look at tickets for it, I told her I was Romanian and she seemed to like that. I canceled my reservation here the next night because I'd be spending it on the train, which is awesome.

I showered and made my way out to the House of Parliament, supposedly the second biggest building in the world after the Pentagon. I don't really buy it. It's pretty controversial because a whole neighborhood was uprooted and moved into shoddy housing so the Communists could have this fancy place to be. It wasn't all that impressive. I stopped for a pastry, some sort of jelly covered chocolate pastry. It could have done without the jelly stuff.

I walked into the old town area down Lipscani, which was nice. You could see a little of the old city, and it was also nice they were doing work to uncover the foundations of a number of old buildings along there.

I ended up in center of the city by the huge shopping mall and the fountain at the end of Parliament so I went in the mall. It was sort of like a dirtier Oakland Mall, but an interesting experience. I felt like I was in America a little, strange. The prices here are pretty good so I looked around at stuff but didn't get anything.

It started to pour and I stopped for a little pretzel like pastry thing my book raves about. It wasn't that great.

Since the weather wasn't great, I went to the English Bar in the Hilton Hotel, which is from 1919 and supposedly anyone who is anyone has stayed there. The English Bar is featured heavily in "The Balkan Trilogy" which I have never read or anything. But it had a cool Casablanca feel to it. It was all people speaking English, but I heard one guy talking about how he was involved in the revolution. I had a cappuchino and read the USA Today from a few days ago. It was nice.

I ended up down by the Pieata Revolution where the big student revolution in 1989 took place. There is a pretty lame monument that looks like an olive on a toothpick, but then there is the actual bullet holes above the Humanities bookstore. There is also a house that was destroyed in the fighting and they kept the shell and turned it into a new office building, pretty cool.

It was raining hard again and Bucharest doesn't have much of a drainage system so the water sits on top of the street. I ducked into a tiny old church and there was a baptism going on, interesting to watch. The Romanians are very religious, whenever they pass a church they do the signs of the cross, I even saw a guy do it from a car as he passed. They also are big into buying candles to light, all interesting.

I went back to the hostel and got Suceava stuff together. I decided to go out for some dinner and had a place in mind, the Crema Cafe reccomended by my book. Well I couldn't find it, probably because I think it's out of business. There were a number of other interesting cafes around there but I decided to try to go down to the Count Dracula restuarant, but I couldn't find that and ended up on a dark street, which there are a lot of here. It's a safe city, but there's just enough to scare you a little as you walk down some areas, in kind of a good way. You don't feel like you are in America.

I ended up back at Gilitti's Cafe, which was the one with the most activity. It was pretty packed, and they had a guy playing keyboard, mostly songs you'd hear at a hockey game. I wanted something more exotic but they only had Italian stuff so I had a really great pesto pasta, better than most pasta I had in Italy. And it was super cheap too.

I was tired and had to get up super early so I went back and went to sleep.