People’s palace and the long and winding road to Chisinau
Perhaps you’ve noticed I’m falling behind with my live blogging. By live I of course mean with a few days of delay. Energy/alcohol related reasons usually keep me from writing before going to bed, thus making me fall behind. I apologize to you, my cherished readers. Both of you. 
Saturday, 1. August 2009:
Still in Bucarest, previous night and the hardships of travel took a toll, extending our sleep almost until the early afternoon. We managed all the necesseties, grabbed a coffee at a bar full of locals. They could easily tell we were tourists. You might think that the cameras, Lonely Planet guide, lack of knowledge of the Romanian language or our inquisitive looks were a giveaway. No. We were the only ones not drinking alcoholic beverages at 12.00.
We split up with Jan and Ivor going to the national history museum, where, according to them, practically all the items were replicas and the biggest attraction was the massive neoclassical building the museum was housed in. Sanjin and I went to the Ceaucescu’s Palace of the people, where we first started with the part housing the Contemporary art museum. Since we didn’t get the right entrance right away we had to take a 5-10 minute walk to the other entrance. Yeah, it’s THAT big. The museum itself turned out to be a dismal experience for the most part, much of it comprising of 50-something year old “artists” discovering Photoshop for the very first time believing they have something to offer. While that might be just fine otherwise, the problem is that they are embraced by the “artistic establishment” and hosted in galleries accros Europe. There were some rare gems though in this sea of self-congratulating manure. Rare.
The teracce cafe on the top revealed the true vastness of the palace estate in the heart of Bucarest and the slight chlorine aftertaste of the Romanian filled Kinely Tonic. My outpouring of criticsm might not have gotten that message through but the visit was quite an entertaining experience in whole.
We signed up for a guided tour on the other side if the palace where the parliament is housed, but we were running a bit late, which we could not afford since it was the last one that day. We therefore took a taxi which brought us to the other side of the building. Crazy, I know. Ivor & Jan were already there, the guide led us through the tour. Just a few facts, read the rest on Wikipedia. 4 billion $ to complete, 10% still not finished, all the materials had to be from Romania, 400 architects worked on it, already falling apart in some areas due to shoddy work, maintenance, a looot of houses destroyed to build the boulevard in front of it, second largest building in volume – after Pentagon…
After that we met with Flavia once more, slowly got to the bus station where we booked a trip to Chisinau. It costs 65 Romanian Lei or 20 € (it’s a bit more in Euros) and takes app. from 20.00 to 7.00 in the morning to get there. It was a bit hot on the way, mostly because of the low powered air conditioning, but also because of the beautiful ladies which seemed to all have found a way on our bus (more on the reasons in later posts). The guessing which one of them might be a lady of the night during the stops, combined with tech/political/phillosophical debates during the drive kept us entertained throughout the journey. Black humor helped us during the unnecessarily long but otherwise uneventful border procedure. In the morning we discovered how wrong our preconceptions about Moldova really were, but more on that next time. Don’t you just loooove cliffhangers? 