Welcome to Romania!

Welcome to Romania--land of crazy traffic! It is unbelievable the way people drive here. People part on the sidewalk, literally! Whole cars entirely on the sidewalk! Traffic lanes exist only in theory, though stop lights are fairly observed. There is no way I would attempt to drive here.

We arrived from Vienna late last night amid confusion about who was meeting us and how we were to got to the hotel reserved for us. We ended up taking a taxi (which we overpaid for-$15 should have been about $6) only to find out after several unsuccessful calls to Florin Suciu ("suit you"), drive/guide/interpreter, that he had been waiting at the airport for us for an hour! Oh well. What can you do? The hotel was only moderately helpful but nicely furnished. About the same as our Comfort Inns or such.

We've spent the morning touring Bucharest while waiting for Dave Bottorff to arrive from home. The city is interesting. The architecture is very Baroque, a throwback to the Austrian influence and rule. In combination with that is the Communist influence evidenced in wide boulevards, monumental buildings, and endless apartment blocks. I wouldn't say that it is pretty overall--a lot of disrepair, dirt, and grime--but it is enjoyable.

Part of our morning included a brief tour of the Palace of Parliament. Indescribable! The building is the second largest in the world behind the Pentagon and was built by Ceausescu in the late '80s as the "Palace of the People." It was billed as a testimony to the greatness of the Romanian people and land but was essentially a monument to meglomania and insanity. More than 1,000,000 square feet with halls that are easily 10,000 square feet. The galleries run 500 yards on each floor, and the rooms have an average of 15 chandeliers each, that I could count. Carpets that weigh four tons! It is almost unfathomable. If totally functional and used, the building would consume enough electricity in one day to power a city of 400,000 people! However, full construction remains incomplete, and the building is virtually unused. It is just too big and too impractical to maintain. Ceasescu had executed any architect or engineer connected to construction (to preserve security and secrecy), so many of the building's design secrets and features remain unknown. In fact, with the floods Romania had this summer, secret, and hence unknown, tunnels were discovered leading from the palace to the subway stations nearby. 16 years later! Amazing.

More to come...