Greetings from Bucharest Romania!
After a quick hop-skip flight from Athens, we landed in Bucharest with our crew of eight renegade scavengers last night. Eager to prove we still had our adventure traveler chops, we opted for the city bus ride to our hotel. Bad idea. I think we got on the rugby team route and ended up several kilometers from our hotel in a semi-deserted area at night without a cab in sight. Finally, after quite a hike lugging our heavy bags, we were able to get a ride to our hotel. Important Lesson #1: Don't make things difficult when you don't have to!
Today was relaxing and fun. We enjoyed the beautiful architecture and history of Bucharest. What an interesting city. A highlight was our tour of the Parliament Palace (aka: the People's Palace). This enormous structure, the second largest administrative building in the world (only the Pentagon is larger) was designed by over 700 architects and built between 1984 and 1989. The Palace was commissioned by Romanian dictator Ceausescu and includes over 600 rooms (we kept speculating on how rich we'd be if we had the Stanley Steamer carpet cleaning contract for the building.)
Opulent doesn’t do justice to the Palace. Each room has towering ceilings, marble columns, silk tapestry curtains with matching wallpapers, crystal chandeliers (some of which weigh over two tons) and custom carpets, woven to match the inlaid wooden floors or fabrics used in each room. In one room, the carpet was so large, it was actually woven as one piece in the room and weighs two tons.
Ceausescu was a strange bird (as dictators have been known to be.) He feared being poisoned and, as such, would not allow air conditioning in the Palace. He was vertically challenged and made the builders re-do the grand staircases five times until the stair heights were to his liking. As an aside, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by firing squad in 1989 and their bodies displayed on TV. Hmmm, do you think there was a link?
A number of famous people have tread this path before the Blakelys… Nadia Comaneci was married in the Palace (that must have been quite impressive to Bart Connor’s folks from the US! No pigs-in-a-blanket at that shindig!) We were so tired after our tour, we awarded our entire team 500 scavenge points for completing the tour and debriefed at the oldest pub in Romania. Tomorrow we are off to Transylvania. So far, no luck on finding bloody mary mix. No one said this would be easy.
Ceausescu was a strange bird (as dictators have been known to be.) He feared being poisoned and, as such, would not allow air conditioning in the Palace. He was vertically challenged and made the builders re-do the grand staircases five times until the stair heights were to his liking. As an aside, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by firing squad in 1989 and their bodies displayed on TV. Hmmm, do you think there was a link?
A number of famous people have tread this path before the Blakelys… Nadia Comaneci was married in the Palace (that must have been quite impressive to Bart Connor’s folks from the US! No pigs-in-a-blanket at that shindig!) We were so tired after our tour, we awarded our entire team 500 scavenge points for completing the tour and debriefed at the oldest pub in Romania. Tomorrow we are off to Transylvania. So far, no luck on finding bloody mary mix. No one said this would be easy.
3 comments:
Hey Jeff and Joann,
Sounds like you guys are having a blast while we at home are stuck in our every day lives!!
Love reading your blog. Good luck.
Edie
Jeff and Joann,
We are enjoying all your adventures so far your trip sounds fabulous. Good luck.
Mangone's
what planet r u from
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