Bucharest

 

On our way to the People's House

Our bus today was a relic built in 1977 under the communist regime. The regime wanted to be self-sufficient, so Romania built their own cars, buses, and trucks.

The People's House

The People’s House was built between 1984 and 1989 by over 100,000 laborers. It is 4 million square feet, the second largest administrative building in the world (the Pentagon is bigger).  They removed over 10,000 houses in the center of the city to make room for this building. It is meant to impress starting with the staircase modeled after the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. There are 22 football fields worth of carpet on the floors. Half the building is on eight underground levels. We saw a conference room the size of Nicolae Ceausescu’s office. But he was executed just before it was completed. His office is now used by the President of the Senate. The People's House now houses the Parliament, three museums, and an International Conference Center.  Our one-hour tour covered about five percent of the building. Today about seventy percent of the building remains empty.

The Grand Staircase

In the afternoon we took a walk in the Old Town section. Bucharest is called the Paris of the East because many of the buildings were designed by French Architects. We saw the Romanian Athenium concert hall, the Cismigiu gardens, and the Stavropoleos Convent.

Romanian Athenium

This is the ideal trip if you want to see and understand the history of Eastern Europe, especially the years under communism and since the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was wonderful to see Eastern Europe via a riverboat again, the crew of the Adagio was attentive and wonderful. The lecturers and entertainers brought on board really added to the places we visited. Budapest remains the highlight of the tour with its majestic buildings and their history, especially understanding how their leader is taking them back to a dictatorship. The scenic highlight was the Iron Gates portion of the Danube. It was fun sharing the trip with my brothers and their spouses.  

A video of this trip is available on youtube