Paradoxical Bucharest

by Sheila on 31 Jul, 2014 - 1 comment

Backing up to 3 days ago, we decided to take a day to explore what Bucharest had to offer. Unfortunately, the day was extraordinarily hot & humid, so we limited our sightseeing to a hop-on hop-off tour bus that we didn’t hop off of.

Bucharest cemented our opinion of Romania as a “confused” country, in that seeing Soviet-era apartment blocks next door to opulent buildings reminiscent of Art Deco Paris was a head trip. Even so, Bucharest was lovely to see! Contrary to popular belief, there was a significant lack of stray dogs in the city.

The Memorial of Rebirth (also known as the Potato of the Revolution by locals) is generally reviled by the residents of Bucharest, but I kind of liked it.

The Palace of the Parliament is the second largest building in the world, but given that I have never seen the Pentagon it is definitely the biggest building I have ever seen! Pictures cannot capture the sheer scale of this building, it is mindblowingly immense:

Many towns in Romania were graced with the presence of storks! It is said that storks bring good luck to places where they nest:

Unfortunately, this stork is a sad stork as its mate was roadkill a couple kilometres back 🙁

If you missed the updated post about our drive on the Transfagarasan, you can watch the video of our drive down here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQxXcezS6vk]