Erk - Bucharest, Romania
1 Stars This place was Awful visited Sep 10, 2005
Bucharest was a horrible city. WE had been warned that we might not like it, and that we shouldn't plan to spend more than a day or two there, but that hadn't prepared us for the reality of Bucharest. After loving the rest of Romania, and appreciating the countryside and rural scenes and fresh air, Bucharest was a horrible shock. Dirty, dusty, even their big impressive buildings look run down and unimpressive. The so called historical quarter wasn't, and the ginormous "Palace of the People" that Ceausescu (the second and last of their communist era megalomaniacs) bulldozed a 6th of the city to build was hard to get to, hard to find the right entrance to, and they wanted a ridiculously overpriced entry fee to see inside. To improve our impression of the place, our hostel was grotty and felt dodgy, and with reason. We left some things in the fridge while we went sightseeing all day, and they got nicked. Including about half our dinner ingredients, and things that were in a plastic box tied up in a plastic bag (about as secure and "owned" as you can get in a hostel fridge). Luckily some friendly germans helped us out with a couple of ingredients and we were able to make dinner. A few hours after we left the hostel, I discovered my camera was missing. I like my camera, and it's the only one I've got, but the 100 photos on it are all the photos we had of Romania, as we weren't really using kate's camera at all. I was going to download them in that hostel but felt the place wasn't secure enough to display that I was carrying a laptop, and so I didn't want to get it out). So annoyed. Don't bother with Bucharest, just spend all your time in the rest of Romania.