Wednesday, 21 September, Bucharest, Romania

Written 24 September 2022

This day, 21 September, is some sort of important anniversary of something in Bucharest, to do with Dracula and Transylvania, but we never got the straight story on it.

The Grand offered the usual sumptuous breakfast buffet. Many kinds and flavors of yogurt and cereal hot and cold, plus myriad things to stir in or sprinkle on.

At the left here, croissants, bread rolls, and their variations. They make their chocolate croissants not by rolling bars of chocolate inside but by sprinkling the surface with cocoa powder and rolling them up.

At the right, more bread options, danishes, and muffins.

To the right of that, the cold-cut table; note the guy carving a whole raw ham to order. Other offerings were red-rimmed slices of smoked chicken, cooked ham, a couple of salami-like things, plain roast chicken, etc.

Beyond that, around the corner (shown here at the left), were smoked salmon, smoked trout, and marinated salmon. They were accompanied by cream cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, etc. and by salad, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.

Everything I tried was great.

We were off right after breakfast for our full-day visit to Bucharest. We started with a driving tour of the city's sights, including the building portrayed at the left here: the magalomaniacal Palace of Parliament built at great (in fact ruinous) expense by communist president Nicolae Ceauşescu, starting in 1983. It was finished in 1992, after his death. It's the largest civilian building in the world, second in indoor surface area only to the Pentagon. Its volume is about 2% greater than that of the great pyramid, and it's built entirely of Romanian materials, including 1 million cubic feet of Transylvanian marble. The Romanian population is only 20 million, so it was way overkill for the country's needs. Nowadays, you can rent it for weddings, conferences, or whatever. Nadia Comăneci was married there (to American gymnast Bart Conner). The only person ever to speak from its front-and-center balcony was Michael Jackson. He wore his general's uniform and aparently looked perfect for the part. Unfortunately, he crowned his speech with "Hello, Budapest! I love Hungary!" But, our guide said, we forgave him because we loved his music.

The Palace cost about 4 billion dollars, but Ceauşescu wanted everything to match, so he built a whole complex other government buildings at the same time, at a total cost of 15 billion dollars. Needless to say, the Romanian economy completely imploded. The photo at the right is one of several that form a semicircle facing the palace. The ring at the top was a common architectural feature.

The lampposts in this area were particularly ornate; one is shown at the left.

Leading away from the Palace toward Unification Square (I think) is a two-mile boulevard ornamented by a line of 41 fountains, one for each county in Romania. The base of one of the fountains is shown at the right. Each smaller jet is angled in such a way as to produce this "braided hourglass" effect. All of them turn on and off, pulse, and produce other nonmonotonous patterns in unison.

Under communism, many of the city's small Orthodox churches were destroyed, until somebody convinced the powers that they had historic and cultural value. After that, the remaining churches were actually hoisted onto rollers and moved out of sight of the streets, behind other buildings. Even whole monasteries were relocated! We were shown a couple of such "back-yard" churches.

On our driving tour, we also saw university buildings, the Athenaeium, many churches (mostly Eastern Orthodox), the Triumphal Arch (celebrating WWI victory), the National Theater (with a wonderful bronze grouping in front representing "comedy" and featuring a figure in a top hat representing a famous Romanian dramatist satirist, "The Romanian Mark Twain," Ion Luca Caragiale), the "Memorial of Rebirth (locally called the potato on a stick), and myriad government buildings of the same vintage as the Palace. In particular, a new Orthodox cathedral is under construction—its domes already gilded—in the very back yard of the Palace, as a sort of retrospective gesture of defiance.

Other information the guide mentioned during the tour

• Population of Bucharest is about 3 million, that of Romania is about 20 million
• In 1989 Ceauceşcu was swept away, and Romania became a democracy. It happened in six days, over Christmas. On 21 December, Ceauceşcu had a crowed of thousands of laborers assembled to cheer when he gave a speech. Instead of cheering, they got angry and started fighting. Some of the guards on hand went over to their side, and the revolution was off and running. Over a thousand people were killed. On Christmas Day, Ceauceşcu and his wife were shot, and fighting ended.
• Behind Unification Square, we could see the dome and towers of Patriarch Hill, where the Patriarch of the Romanian orthodox church resides. He's the "local pope." Under communism, they had to look to the Greek Patriarch, but now they have their own again.
• The 1980s were a terrible time for Bucharest (Venezuela is the current equivalent)—total economic collapse
• The guide called the local residents "Bucharesterians" and McDonalds "the American embassy"
• In the 1970s, only 1 family in 10 had a car, so all those big govenment buildings were built without enough parking lots. Currently Bucharest has 5 million cars but only 500,000 parking spaces.
• Bucharest has a five-line subway; a sixth line is under construction; the city has good public transport with buses, electric buses, and trolleys. The subway is subsidized and cheap, to encourage its use rather than cars.
• Romania is about the size of Great Britain in surface area, but of course the population density is much lower
• In 1977, Bucharest has a disastrous earthquake (Richter 7.3!) that collapsed buildings and killed 1500.
• The north side of town is "the right side of the tracks." It suffered less damage from the war and from earthquakes, is less crowded, and has many parks.
• Before WWII, Bucharest was 10% jewish. During the war, the jews were sent to labor camps. Many died of malnutrition and lack of medical treatment, but the survival rate was much higher than in concentration camps, where prisoners were deliberately killed. After the war, the communists confiscated all Jewish property, so survivors of the camps left en masse for Israel. After 1989, property was returned to the original owners, and many buildings have been restored.
• The Triumphal Arch we passed many times commemorates victory in WWI.
• My own observation: the lindens, oaks, and horse chestnuts along two-mile boulevard are looking pretty scorched, as they are almost everywhere we've been. I asked our guide on Saturday, and he confirmed my guess that it's acid-rain damage compounded by the heat and drought.
• Another observation: "Gradina" seems to mean "garden"

Written 25 September 2022

On our way to our next stop, we passed the Heroes of the Air monument, shown at the left. It's a memorial to Romanian military airmen who lost their lives before 1930, when the monument was built.

Our destination was the wonderful "Village Museum," a vast area, right inside the city limits, to which whole houses and farmsteads had been moved as a museum of the lifestyles of Romania from the 17th to the 20th centuries and in its various regions. Same idea as the Museum of History and Natural Science in Tallahassee but on a much grander and more ambitious scale.

At the right is its handsome gate.

Just inside its gate was this magnificant American red oak, planted when the museum was founded in the 1930s (officially opened in 1936). Apparently every foreign dignitary who has visited Bucharest since then has been photographed under it, usually shaking hands with a local dignitary. Europeans like to plant American oaks of the black oak group in public places, both because they are handsome trees and because they grow much faster than European oaks, which are all in the white oak side of the family.

One of the transplanted structures we were shown was this four-sided roadside shrine, white-washed and decorated, which shelters a cross. In Catholic regions, such a shrine would shelter a statue of a saint, but the Orthodox church has decided that painted pictures are not "graven images" but that statues are, so they're forbidden.

Here, at the left, is a 19th century house from the village of Dumitra in Alba County (ethnograhic region of Târnavelor plateau, in Transylvania), where thatch was favored for roofing (other regions used different thatch materials or even shingles or tiles). Note that even the woven wooden fence is thatched, to protect it from rain and snow and make it last longer. The beautiful blue window frames mark it as a poor dwelling, as blue was by far the cheapest paint at the time. Richer people used red or yellow.

On the other hand, the Bancu household (from a village in Harghita County), was quite affluent, as indicated by the elaborateness of its gateway entrance (which our guide called a "porch"), complete with literal pigeonholes below its eaves (provided to encourage pigeons to nest). The guide pointed out that the openings to the pigeonholes always faced outward, because householders were taxed on the number of livestock they owned—so much for each cow, or horse, or chicken. But he could tell the tax man that those weren't his pigeons; they were outside the gate. But many of the pigeons nevertheless found their way into his soup pot in the course of the year. Our guide pointed out, a propos of these two Transylvanian houses, that Transylvania is a very large area, larger than Hungary, and occupying at least half of Romania. (And, by the way, that Vlad the Impaler, on whom Dracula was based, wasn't really from there and never lived there. Bram Stoker just liked the sound of it.)

Unfortunately, I didn't get a very good match-up between all the houses we saw and the information panels that said where they came from or who built them, and I have a hard time matching my notes from the guide's narration with the photos I took, but the one shown here at the left has a huge counterweighted boom that aided in drawing heavy buckets of water up from the well.

The one shown at the right is buried to half its height in the ground, together with its outbuildings. It was therefore better insulated from both hot and cold weather and presented a much lower profile to the scouts of marauding bandits.

At the left here is a fortified shepherd's compound (with wood-shingled roof). At night, the whole herd of sheep could be driven inside, protected by stout log walls from both two- and four-legged predators. Our guide said that, to this day, Romania has the highest density of carnivorous predators in Europe, including bears, lynxes, and wolves. For wild grazers, they have deer, roe deer, and elk, but only the occasional stray moose.

The church at the right is entirely wooden because the Christian rules of its time forbade the construction of brick or stone Orthodox churches. On its outside walls, you can still (or at least we could, up close) see traces of the polychrome decoration—they used to be entirely painted with images of saints. Its roof has very wide eaves by design to help protect the paintings. The inside was also completely covered in painted images.

The house at the left here was that of a wine maker, recognizable by its very high stone foundations and the large arched door for rolling barrels into and out of the resulting cellar space.

At the right is a raised corncrib. Its posts rest on stones, presumably to protect the wood from rotting in contact with the ground, but we saw no evidence in this case, or in several others we saw at the museum, of attempts at incorporating rat baffles. The guide told us that maize was readily accepted when it was introduced to the region and that lowland Romanians ate a lot of polenta.

In addition to these structures we saw places where the family's living quarters were on the second floor, above the barn, so that the heat from the livestock could help heat the dwelling. In others, the houses had extremely tall and had steeply sloping roofs (the better to shed snow) and no ceiling between the floor and the rafters. Meat, fish, and herbs were hung in the rafters to cure in the smoke from the fire, which, in the absence of a chimney, accumulated under the roof, escaping only through small round "eyelets" (under miniature, rounded gables) in the roof.

I haven't included half of what we saw and learned, and we covered less than a quarter of the museum's area. We never even looked at the indoor section! If you want to see more, have a look at the museum's excellent and comprehensive website, which shows all the houses and extensive information about each one—and all in English, of course; just click the little English icon on the front page.

Then it was back to the buses to head for lunch, sight-seeing all the way! At the left here is one of a pair of buildings that we passed several times in the course of the day and that looked as though somebody had been playing Jenga with them.

The guide showed us some points of interest in the old town (now a pedestrian district), the first of which is a beer garden called The Beer Wagon, which has been there a very long time. He assured us that the management was happy to let tour groups use the rest rooms and look around for free. Its symbols are the cat and the rooster, because beer drinkers go out at night like cats and don't come home until after the rooster crows.

We also learned that, through the vagaries of inheritance and conquest, Romania got a German king in 1879 and that his majesty set about converting the people from wine drinkers to beer drinkers. He didn't succeed entirely, but he definitely popularized beer.

They then turned us loose to explore on our own for a while. At the right is my favorite building façade in the city: the CEC Bank building. Apparently, when it was built, it was very controversial—ugly, out of keeping with the rest of the city's architecture, etc., etc. But then the glass-and-steel building behind it went up . . .

The Art Deco "Telephone Palace" still has an Orange store in it.

One place the guide recommended was a bookstore that claimed to be the most beautiful in the world. At the left here is the whimsical bike rack outside its door.

At the right is the interior. Yes, it's lovely, but I think that place in Porto, Portugal, would take exception to its claim to be the most beautiful.

Here are two small churches we admired. The red one is Stavropoleos Church (1874), and the white one is Saint Demetrius of Oath Taking (1843). Both are Orthodox and are typically small.

Behind St. Demetrius was this striking bust labeled "Gheorghe Dinică, 1934–2009." We don't know who he is, but all along the side of the church was this long line of identical stone blocks, each commemorating an actor in the nearby national theater, so maybe he was an actor.

Back at the rendezvous point, we got back in the bus for the short ride to our lunch venue, the Hanu' lui Manuc (Manuc's Inn), the oldest still-functional hotel/restaurant in Bucharest. It started out as a secure overnight stop for trading caravans and included a large courtyard and stables for the animals, accommodations for people (up to 500), food, repair shops for wheels, tack, and ironwork—everything the travelers might need. Today, it's a hotel, restaurant, bar, and coffee shop.

At the left is its archway entrance. At the right is the flooring under the arch, made of end-cut blocks of wood. Much of the city's paving was once wooden— wood was easier on horses' feet and less slippery for them in the rain than stone. This is one of the few remaining patches of it.

The courtyard is now outdoor restaurant seating, but we were directed up a stairway to an indoor area, where we were served lunch. As we ate, a troupe of traditional musicians paraded in, followed by dancers in local traditional costume.

While they danced, we were served lunch. Already on the table when we sat down were three vegetable spreads: eggplant, hummus, and something tomato-based. The next course was simply described as "vegetable soup" and was a delicious puréed concoction of many vegetables, including probably some potatoes or beans, which made it thick and smooth.

The dancers were immediately behind me and too close for easy photography—I usually had to cut off either their heads or their feet, and they moved so fast they were usually blurred, but I managed to get a couple of shots that give you an idea.

The dances seemed to consist mostly of "figures" rather than "steps"—that is, they walked, clapped, and changed position with respect to each other, and the women did lots and lots of twirling.

The main course was an excellent veal and vegetable stew with potato wedges.

I don't seem to have gotten a photo of the dessert, and I don't remember what it was, but once we were back in the buses, heading to board our ship (moored in Turnu Măgurele), I did get this shot, which is the closest I've been able to come to my traditional photo of an unusual piece of farm machinery driving slowly and blocking the road. It seems quite tall, but we're not in grape country. Speculation on the bus was that it's a sprayer, tall enough to run its narrow wheels between rows of wheat and spray the fields without crushing them.

At some point, the guide pointed out a church (perhaps the little red one pictured above, built in 1874) and explained that back in the day a church would have a guesthouse for merchants traveling this "side alley" of the Silk Road. The monks took a fairly liberal view, and if a merchant brought a prostitute back to the hostel after a night on the town, he could conveniently go to confession right there on the spot.

The guide also explained that wood was an important building material in the middle ages, and Carpathia had a lot of sheep. The 18th century house at the right, with the wood and glass facade, is one of the oldest in the city, showing heavy Ottoman influence. It survived the great fire of 1847. That style of window, called "jamluk" (spelling? meaning "little windows") is a sign of the Ottoman influence. It was designed as the sort of window from which a squestered Muslim woman could look out at the world. Later, in Romania, prostitutes were not allowed to solicit in the street, but they could be displayed behind windows. So 100 years ago, women would be behind those windows, waving. Prostitution is now illegial, so the city has nudie bars and massage parlors instead.

Saint Michael the shepherd built the red and white church which is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It's built in Byzantine style, with blind arches under the roof.

The original plan was for us to go by bus after lunch to the port of Giurgiu, on the Danube about an hour south of Bucharest, where we would board our ship, the Viking Lif. Unfortunately, because of the very hot summer and the European drought, cruise ships had been having trouble reaching all their planned ports, and many were out of their normal places. Conditions had improved by the time we got there, but Viking ships still couldn't quite reach their easternmost destination—Giurgiu—and the Lif was somewhere west of Budapest filling in for a ship that couldn't get there to board its passengers. The solution was for us to be bused to Turnu Măgurele, the easternmost workable port, where the Viking Vidar was waiting for us—about an hour extra on the bus. All the Viking "longships" are identical, so we weren't concerned.

All the equipment worked out and packed for Lif had been transfered to Vidar, though, so throughout the cruise, we boarded buses marked Lif and followed guides carrying lollipop signs bearing the Lif's number, 31. We were warned that, because Viking has many ships on the rivers we would be travelling and we would encounter many other Viking tour groups, we should only follow lollipops reading "31," or we could get guided back to a different ship!

More random info provided by the guide during the bus trip to the ship.

• Young Israeli men come to Bucharest to gamble in the casinos; it's only about a two-hour flight from Tel Aviv (same as from Amsterdam)
• The revolution of 21-27 December 1989 was triggered by arrest of a liberal priest who was criticizing the government. He was defended by his parishioners, and and many more people joined in. The incident took place in the western part of the country, but shortly thereafter, when Ceauceşcu assembled that group to cheer him, things got nasty. Ceauceşcu and his wife fled by helicopter to the summer palace, then the airport. On Christmas day, while loyal and rebel troops were still fighting each other, they were captured, tried, and executed; fighting stopped on 26 December; 1200 people died during the insurrection.
• Conditions in the 1990's were very harsh because the economy was a wreck, and they were still converting to democracy. The GDP is now 5 times the size it was in 1989. Many parties slug it out for votes in the elections. Officially, there are no more communists. At least now, "every four years we can elect the thieves who will steal from us; it's better than having the same one for decades."
• Romanian is a romance language because so many retired Roman soldiers settled there in the area called Dacia. They married local girls but kept Latin as their language, which has evolved into Romanian.
• The world's most valuable collections of gold and silver are in the basement of the art museum.
• Bucharest was founded in 12–13th century as a trading post for shepherds
• In the old financial district, many buildings used to be banks; some still are. The shop facades are very narrow but deep, so that many could fit in a block. From this very commercial area, all the merchants were evicted in communist times, and uneducated country people were brought in, in the hope they would grow up to be fervid communists, but they didn't. One area of it is called "Little Havana" because of the crumbling facades.
• St. Anthony is (among other things) patron saint of unmarried women in the market for a husband. When services dedicated to him were held, single women would attend en masse, so soon, young men looking for wives did, too.
• On our drive to the ship, we'll see the only flat part of the country—very rich and alluvial from the Danube and now under heavy cultivation for corn, canola (oil-seed rape), hay, sunflowers, and wheat.
• Agriculture under communism didn't work well. The people from whom the land was confiscated were not interested in working it—if you pretend to pay me, I'll pretend to work. After restitution of the land to its original owners when communism ended, the kids raised in cities didn't want to go back to the land, so they sold out to large corporations, who farm it industrially, with few hands. So we saw no fences or hedgerows, no farmhouses. Because of the flight from the villages to the towns, the villages seem deserted.
• A little hole in the wall shop in the old town of Bucharest was pushing pasteis de nata (its sign said, "the cinnamon is not optional").
• The drive to the ship from Bucharest was 2.5 hours. I saw wood pigeons (maybe some Eurasian collared doves?), storks' nests, and a crow (maybe a hooded crow). When we passed through villaages, I saw many fruit trees in private gardens. Our guide said the fields of low, bluish leaves are canola; they will overwinter like that, then shoot up and bloom in April.

During the trip, I saw a few small volunteer sunflowers were blooming in the middle of the rape fields, and roadside stands were selling big sacks of potatoes; nearby freshly ploughed fields might have been where they were grown. Lots of Rumex grew in the vacant lots, and locust trees lined the roads. We crossed the Vedea river, which was pretty close to dry, and I saw an oak that could almost be a Shumard.

We passed half a dozen horsedrawn carts along the way. And I'm beginning to see walnut trees—we are, after all, in or near Carpathia! Also catalpas, which are a popular ornamental here. Our guide pointed out an old can factory from communist times, now abandoned.

At last we came to our ship, where we were welcomed aboard, issued electronic room-key cards, and escorted to our staterooms, where our luggage was waiting for us (it had been transferred by truck from the Bucharest hotel while we were sight-seeing). We scarcely had time to unpack before we were to assemble in the lounge for our introductory briefing.

Among the cocktail munchies this year (which always appear during meetings in the lounge), the wonderful wasabi almonds of yesteryear have been replaced by wasabi peanuts (good, but not as good); still the same plain peanuts and mini pretzels.

A vast improvement is that the "boarding card"/"guest passport" of old has been discontinued. Now, the electronic card that opens your stateroom door has your name and Viking emergency contact info printed right on it. You also stick it under a scanner to check out when you leave the ship and again to check back in when you reboard. It will also unlock the ship's outer door to let you reboard if you happen to come back when no one's on the front desk. Much better.

We left our passports with the desk so that Viking could handle all the border checks in the non-EU countries. They were reissued to us in Serbia, because by law you have to carry it with you in that country, but we then turned them in again. When we enter Hungary (first country in the Schengen group), we'll have to do an actual face check. Friday night, once we've finished Bulgaria, we'll set our clocks back an hour to western European time, which will be in effect for the rest of the cruise.

The chef is Dutch, but he goes on vacation when we reach Budapest; the Filipino sous-chef will take over.

At dinner on board, we were pleased to find the little warm cheesy breads we remembered from previous Viking cruises. Unfortunately, the butter is no longer served in open pats topped with herb sprigs but in little sealed plastic tubs. And it's all unsalted. A nuisance, since all the salt grinders are only marginally functional. A running joke/topic of conversation/subject of frustration during the entire cruise was the salt and pepper mills. They had "S" and "P" very subtly engraved on them—so hard to see that the waitstaff often put two peppers or two salts on each table rather than one of each, and the salt grinders were maddeningly difficult to operate.

For my starter, I chose smoked trout, which came as a round timbale with beets, horseradish, and sour cream. Very little sour cream and vanishingly little horseradish. Good though.

I ordered two main courses, because I couldn't choose between them (and this is considered perfectly okay on a Viking cruise). The first was zander (pike perch) a freshwater fish we don't have in the US and like a lot. In the photo, it looks like a dessert, because it came with parsnip purée and beet (not raspberry!) vinaigrette. I think David had the same thing. The other choice was "Mediterrean chicken breast."

I also chose the local-specialty dessert, which was terrible. It was described as a crispy donut with cream and raspberry sauce. The problem was that the entire donut was crisp, all the way through, to the point of hardness. Not good at all. I thought maybe it was supposed to be like that, but later I saw the donuts being sold on the street. Those were crispy on the surface but soft inside.