Moldova and Romania
- Thread starter frogwoman
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Why compare a eastern country to a western country?
Bucharest was known as the Paris of the East until Nicky C. decided to remodel it...
*Everywhere* was known as the bleedıng 'Parıs of the East.'
lobster
Well-Known Member
Surely by western media though? to attract tourists.
Bucharesti had fantastic wide Boulevards and a long tradition of French being a formal language for business and diplomacy under Carol and his Kind.I was in ROmania at he time of the 89 revolution / uprising and our skoolboy French was an esperanto of sorts for communication , mostly with the older Romanians Admittedly
But I see your point, Shanghai and Budapest have both been labelled ar PotE at random points in their history. and Probabaly Tirana/ baghdad/ Kabul/ Doncaster et al .
But I see your point, Shanghai and Budapest have both been labelled ar PotE at random points in their history. and Probabaly Tirana/ baghdad/ Kabul/ Doncaster et al .
I went in 2000 but as part of an exchange so I probably saw a different side of things as we were ferried around all the time. The school we exchanged with was in Arad. It's not the most picturesque place although if you come in via Hungary you may end up here. Arad's just a town, although my Romanian friend didn't seem too keen when I suggested we could walk home one day. There were tons of people just hanging around by the side of the road. But taxis are dirt cheap so getting around is easy. The town was pretty grey with a large hotel in the middle, obviously a relic of the communist era, the view of the city from a high room was the only redeeming feature.
Sadly I didn't get to Bucharest but went to Alba Julia, Sighisoara, Sibiu, Brasov and Sinaia. Sighisoara is well preserved as is Brasov and Bram Castle is worth a look; it's the Dracula castle set high on a hill. Probably even more touristy now. Travelling from Brasov towards Bucharest you head into the mountains. Sinaia is near the old royal palace which is worth a look.
As a whole the country is grey, although I went in October which might have exaggerated the greyness. Look out for bad roads and heating systems which run about a metre above ground leading to grim apartment blocks. The people we stayed with were all really nice but again this was an exchange.
Would go again but out of curiosity rather than for the aesthetics. Magnalia is apparently the big coastal resort (down from Contstanta which is a port I think).
Oh that's another thing. As well as the pollution, Bucharest has the most stultifying micro-climate I've ever experienced. I went in April, and for six days the air was just so still and thick you could cut it with a knife. No breeze whatsoever. And all the grotty appartment blocks had hideous and knackered looking air-con units sticking out of the exterior walls.
When I asked why, it's apparently 'cos it gets up to 40C in the summer!!
If you look at a map, Bucharest is built on swampland, hundreds of miles inland. Yeugh.
When I asked why, it's apparently 'cos it gets up to 40C in the summer!!
If you look at a map, Bucharest is built on swampland, hundreds of miles inland. Yeugh.
Aye. We were on our way from Sibiu back to Oradea to stop for a night before getting the train to Budapest. IIRC the main line up through Sighisoara and Cluj-Napoca was closed for engineering work, so the easiest route was a 'Persoanale' train to Arad and then a few hours' wait before the Oradea train. We got to Arad after dark, which can't have done much for our perception of the place.
The 'persoanale' train was interesting, though. They're the slow services, of a kind that are long extinct here. Everything was very old. The toilet was a hole in the floor and for a while there was a bloke with a live chicken in our carriage. IIRC it took six hours or something from Sibiu to Arad, and it stopped at pretty much every lineside hut. It was a really nice journey, actually. We crawled along at not far above running speed most of the way. It was a stifling hot day, and I just sat in the open carriage doorway with my feet on the steps, smoking and exchanging waves with the blokes maintaining the track, and helping the odd person lift their luggage on and off the train.
Bits of it are fairly dismal, the mining and heavy industrial areas especially. The railway line from Cluj Napoca to Sighisoara goes through Copsa Mica, which is famously and horribly polluted. We were there at the height of a very hot, dry summer, though. I don't think of Romania as grey; more the colour of scorched crops! But certainly some of the towns, even bits of the best preserved ones, are grim.
IME with the exception of Arad and the odd dubious character elsewhere, mainly just people out to screw a bit of cash out of gullible interrailers, Romania is a pretty friendly place. Most people we came across were very welcoming. Tbh it was sometimes as if they were a bit surprised we'd made the effort to come. Perhaps that was understandable at the time, what with its being less accessible than it is now, and the fact that everyone we'd talked about it with during the week we'd spent staying with a friend in Budapest before we got there had told us it was a shithole! A lot of them still seemed to have a chip on their shoulders over the Treaty of Versailles, though. A few months after we got back I got talking with a Hungarian friend of a friend in a bar in London, who turned out to be a raving nationalist and insisted I'd not actually been out of Hungary at all!
<e2a> This thread's given me a hankering to go back to Romania, actually. To the point where I'm turning over ideas like a cheap flight to Cluj and a week's knocking about in Transylvania for later this summer. I've never just gone aboroad on impulse like that before, but I'm sorely tempted. Aside from anything else, to be horribly cynical about it, Romania was, and probably still is, extremely cheap to live in. Thanks to arriving late on a Sunday and nothing else being open we ended up staying in the Hotel Parc in Oradea, at the time the best hotel in town. A twin room with an en suite cost the equivalent of a fiver a night, our much more basic room in Sighisoara was three pounds, and I did get rather fond of very drinkable lagers at 35p a bottle and packets of cigarettes at 20p! The leu was in freefall at the time, though, so I've always felt a bit guilty about living like a king on the back of someone else's economy turning to shit. I'd be fascinated to see how it's changed.
