Corporate Romania

Two days in Bucharest has been an incredible experience.
Our host, Mada has been amazing, driving us around, showing us sights and good restaurants.
Bucharest is indescribable.
It's so poor but so beautiful in a way I had never imagined. It's really different from anywhere I've been before this. The buildings are falling down but there is unexpected color and music and laughter in the most random places. It's so black and white, you can pass buildings that look like they're from a demilitarized zone and the next street beautiful people are sitting out smoking hookah in street chairs.  There is a street where people just sit outside with their hookahs and drink and party.

Mada says that the Romanians often have no money but they still spend tons on big cars and fancy clothes even when they can't afford it. After communism ended the foreign corporations moved in and everywhere you look are billboards and neon signs, BCBG, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, LG. The buildings fall down while new advertisements go up telling you to not look as your world falls apart, just buy buy BUY! Romania has very little local economy, and the corporations have taken over everywhere. It's such a commentary on corporate greed, pushing people to spend what little they have on useless crap when they can barely live. On the top of every derelict apartment there is a shiny new billboard advertising products from some other country.

We took a tour of the Parliament Building, which was built by the insane dictator Ceausescu. It's the second largest building in the world after The Pentagon in the US. It was the most expensive to build and the dictator kicked 20,000 people out of houses to tear them down and build this monstrosity. Our tour lasted an hour and we only saw 4% of the building. There are massive halls that are so big that no one knows what to do with them. There are rugs that weigh 4 tons and take 80 people to unroll them and curtains that are 30 meters high. It's so epic. Ceausescu was obsessed with power (like all dictators) and he wanted the palace to be the biggest in the world. He was such a bastard that he made them redo the marble staircase 7 times because he didn't like them.  Apparently he took walks with teams of architects through the city and pointed to buildings he didn't like and told them to tear them down and kick out all the people living there. He was also paranoid and made tons of secret passages and hidden rooms. That didn't save him though, because he never got to use the palace and then he was shot. Usually when they put people before a firing squad they only load one gun so none of the shooters knows whose bullet killed the convict. With Ceausescu though they hated him so much that they loaded all the guns.



After the palace we took a tour of old Bucharest. It was led by students and was awesome. They showed us some really interesting parts of the city. There were churches that were condemned by Ceausescu so instead of tearing them down like he wanted, the people lifted the whole church and moved it somewhere else. There are pictures, it's quite amazing. They dug out the foundations and just moved the entire thing. 

We also saw the statue of Vlad the Impaler, who impaled his enemies on long wooden stakes while they slowly died. He is the basis of the Dracula myth, even though he didn't drink blood. They called him Dracula because "Dracul" means dragon. It also means Devil which may be more accurate. He only reigned for 4 years but he impaled 20,000 people in that time. He was very industrious.





The tour finished with the opera house, which is so beautiful, and the monument to those who died in the revolution. The Romanians don't like it, they call it "the potato on a stick". The potato symbolized communism. Their revolution was just 20 years ago and the country is still pulling itself back together. But there is such life here and as we walked back from the tour everyone was out in the streets sitting and having drinks and enjoying the break from the rain. I am so grateful to Mada for showing us this city because it reminds me what the train conductor said, that no matter where I go people live and die and laugh and love. I know it's a romantic notion but it's another reminder to have faith in humanity. I know people are capable of suck terrible evil, (like the dictator who tore down hundreds of houses to build a disgusting palace for himself), but generally people are just trying to get by.