It was obvious that there has been a great deal of change in Bucharest since we were last here. For one thing, we saw a huge water park just a couple of minutes north of the airport as we were landing, and a many shiny new big box stores on the road in from the airport. We saw the beautiful, leafy, laky Herestrau Park, and the Arch of Triumph at Victory Square before passing in on the still elegant, 19th century Paris Soseaua Kisileff. We are staying near University Square, site of the 1989 revolution. We had dinner at La Mama, which mean's "Mother's Place," which promises what your mother would make (if she were an expert at Romanian traditional cuisine), and where the food was very delicious and very inexpensive. We saw the Athenaeum, where a concert featuring the Barber Adagio was in progress, and the Athenee hotel, a nest of spies in the early months of World War II. Night at the "Relax Comfort Suites" hotel on the Avenue Nicolae Balcescu.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Meanwhile in Bucharest
John, Jo Anne, and Denisa flew on to Bucharest after that no-sleep flight to Frankfurt. We could see the snowy peaks of the Alps off in the distance to our right, and we followed the Danube past Budapest to Bucharest. Unfortunately, Hungary and Transylvania were under clouds, but when we came out of the clouds over Wallachia it was interesting to see how different the agriculture looks from the air. Romanian fields are divided up into small portions only two or three yards wide, but three to four hundred yards long. Our friends here tell us that this is because the farmers wish to make room for all of the crops they wish to grow, and their actual plots are quite small.
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Sounds like quite a lot of changes, John. How do you think the Internet connectivity is doing in Bucharest ... and what do you expect in the hinterlands of the country?
ReplyDeleteInquiring (and wired-in) minds want to know.
It must be exciting for you and your family to be seeing Romania again!
(This is John, logged in as Mike). Well, the internet access was spotty, and indeed in our hotel went down after I posted this, before I could attach any pictures. Everybody seems to have cell phones, however, and Denisa's birth sister had it attached to her ear (she broke up with one boyfriend over the space of our visit, and chose a new one --- the challenges of being 14!).
ReplyDeleteBucharest is still a gritty city in which most people are having a rough go of it. But it's also very vital and interesting, and is noticeably cleaner and in better repair than it was seven years ago. Even so, the contrast between much better off Koloszvar and Bucharest is striking.