Booking a rest in Bucharest
We have a habit of taking holidays in November; it interrupts what's usually a quiet reclusive time between the end of summer and the hectic Christmas season. And holiday destinations are nearly always free from crowds. So, via the magic of the Crowne Plaza reward points scheme, we got offered three free nights in a hotel from a short list. I picked Bucharest due to curiosity about eastern Europe and it being about the right latitude to be warmer than Cambridge.
Along the way we came up with a convoluted travel plan which involved staying in the Yotel hotel in Gatwick for the night before our flight out. This is pretty much a Japanese capsule hotel; our double room was entirely occupied by the bed, which could be electronically retracted into a sofa, and a thin shower area walled off by glass. It's like staying in a cyberpunk techno-future. Not ideal for claustrophobes or people who don't like hard beds, but if you get cabin fever then the entire terminal is available for your entertainment - the hotel is in the terminal building, very convenient.
Flight out involved changing planes in Budapest. From the air it looks like an interesting place, all white buildings with tiled rooves; we shot through the terminal with no time to spare to look at anything at all.
Bucharest is very much the opposite. Grey buildings under grey sky.
The hotel we stayed in in Bucharest was extremely plush, with a reccomended restarant, and complimentary pool/sauna etc in the basement. Right next door was the Ramada, whose restaurant we also tried. Food played quite a big part in the holiday; Romania has some great wines, on which there is low duty, and anything locally produced is comparatively cheap. So we had our two hotel dinners, and one in the place rated highest on tripadvisor.com, called Baba Dochia. Menu only in Romanian, but the owner happy to advise; I ended up having pork in a tasty sauce with potatoes in cheese and cumin. Dinner for two with wine for £30.
We went to two museums, the "peasant" and "village" museums, one indoor, one outdoor. Both had taken entire traditional wooden buildings as exhibits. The peasant museum contained an entire windmill, water mill, house and a church. The village museum had about 50 buildings in a park, all with appropriate internal decor. Several of them were various types of watermill, adapted for tasks like fulling cloth and crushing rock for gold mining.
One house had a tiled roof like a Roman villa, but most had traditional wooden tiled rooves. Built to a very steep pitch, they loom blackly above you, especially the steeple of the wooden church that forms the centre of the exhibition.
Given more time I'd be happy to explore the country. It seems to have the sullen pride of a place to which the 20th century has not been kind. The revolution of December '89 is marked in street names and the occasional memorial. In the basement of the peasant museum there was a small exhibition on the disaster of forced collective farming its casualties, which gave me the impression of being quietly very, very angry about it.
Possibly the best example of the strange collision of ancient and modern is this building: http://www.iocoffee.ro/ - modern glass built directly in the shell of an older building.
I get the impression that it's a country that values its intellectuals as well. It's proud of Ionescu.
Along the way we came up with a convoluted travel plan which involved staying in the Yotel hotel in Gatwick for the night before our flight out. This is pretty much a Japanese capsule hotel; our double room was entirely occupied by the bed, which could be electronically retracted into a sofa, and a thin shower area walled off by glass. It's like staying in a cyberpunk techno-future. Not ideal for claustrophobes or people who don't like hard beds, but if you get cabin fever then the entire terminal is available for your entertainment - the hotel is in the terminal building, very convenient.
Flight out involved changing planes in Budapest. From the air it looks like an interesting place, all white buildings with tiled rooves; we shot through the terminal with no time to spare to look at anything at all.
Bucharest is very much the opposite. Grey buildings under grey sky.
The hotel we stayed in in Bucharest was extremely plush, with a reccomended restarant, and complimentary pool/sauna etc in the basement. Right next door was the Ramada, whose restaurant we also tried. Food played quite a big part in the holiday; Romania has some great wines, on which there is low duty, and anything locally produced is comparatively cheap. So we had our two hotel dinners, and one in the place rated highest on tripadvisor.com, called Baba Dochia. Menu only in Romanian, but the owner happy to advise; I ended up having pork in a tasty sauce with potatoes in cheese and cumin. Dinner for two with wine for £30.
We went to two museums, the "peasant" and "village" museums, one indoor, one outdoor. Both had taken entire traditional wooden buildings as exhibits. The peasant museum contained an entire windmill, water mill, house and a church. The village museum had about 50 buildings in a park, all with appropriate internal decor. Several of them were various types of watermill, adapted for tasks like fulling cloth and crushing rock for gold mining.
One house had a tiled roof like a Roman villa, but most had traditional wooden tiled rooves. Built to a very steep pitch, they loom blackly above you, especially the steeple of the wooden church that forms the centre of the exhibition.
Given more time I'd be happy to explore the country. It seems to have the sullen pride of a place to which the 20th century has not been kind. The revolution of December '89 is marked in street names and the occasional memorial. In the basement of the peasant museum there was a small exhibition on the disaster of forced collective farming its casualties, which gave me the impression of being quietly very, very angry about it.
Possibly the best example of the strange collision of ancient and modern is this building: http://www.iocoffee.ro/ - modern glass built directly in the shell of an older building.
I get the impression that it's a country that values its intellectuals as well. It's proud of Ionescu.