We caught our bus at 8 in the morning and since we would need to get up at 2 am, cut out the tour we were going to take and did the shorter one arriving at our hotel at around 6. No supper as we had a late lunch at a restaurant while on the tour.
Here are the last of the pictures from our trip.
Sorry for the reflection on the photo, but this is a picture of the Romanian parliament built by Ceausescu. There are 8 stories in the underground of which I think I remember the tour guide saying 3 are flooded. Ceausescu was pulled from the balcony and killed by the people. His wife had her own palace about a block away.
We were entertained by dancers while we were eating our lunch.
This is the canal that travels through Bucharest. Under this canal runs the power and a subway system.
Bucharest is a contradiction in architecture, there are brand new buildings, and then all of a sudden there are the apartment blocks built during the Soviet occupation. Then there are the beautiful older buildings from before the occupation and the Second World War that survived.
The roads were wide as well, in some sections and very narrow and winding in others.
Slept until it was time to get up and then headed for the airport, where once again we were met by a Viking rep and helped through the check in lines, she also told us how to get to the security section. Got through that fairly quickly except once again I had a bit of a problem with one area. Nothing that kept us from getting on our plane.
Vienna was strange as the plane stopped on the tarmac and we needed to catch a bus to the terminal. We crossed our fingers and got off when everyone else did, which was the right decision. Found our next gate and soon were on our way home. Well to Canada at least.
I will try and answer questions in my next post.
Everyone have a wonderful evening.
Wow, 8 floors underground and 3 flooded. What a building. The buildings built before modern technology fascinate me.
ReplyDeleteGreat pics.
I wonder with 3 floor underneath that is flooded, if it causes decay or even humidity with the building. Interesting.
ReplyDeleteGuess whoever built that didn't figure on the flooding. Must have been interesting to see the contrasts between the different types of architecture.
ReplyDeleteHi, Romanian reader here. Very impressed you went to see Bucharest, very few people on tours of Europe do! Ceausescu and his wife were arrested after they fled Bucharest in a helicopter, then tried, sentenced to death for treason and executed (in a different city) according to laws that they pretty much wrote themselves. He wasn't 'pulled from the balcony and killed by the people' - and the famous balcony in all the stories wasn't in the Palace of the Parliament (this building), which was only about 60% completed in 1989 so not used by Ceausescu. They demolished a whole neighbourhood (houses confiscated and people displaced in tiny communist flats in random locations, no compensation and often only a few hours notice to gather possessions etc) to build that building, which is apparently the heaviest building in the world and second largest admin building in the world after the Pentagon.
ReplyDeleteAh, thank you for posting. I guess our tour guide embellished the story of his death just a tad. Probably to make it more exciting for us. I had forgotten about the Palace of the Parliament being the second largest building in the world.
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