Beginning Bucharest

Sep 23-25, 2014: Once upon a time, dear reader, flying across the Atlantic was fun. If you arrived short of sleep it was because you had been partying in the back of a half empty 747, not because it was impossible to get comfortable, never mind horizontal. Instead of mostly inedible, if not positively hazardous, food, you didn’t have to fly business class to eat well. Transfers at Heathrow did not require you stand for half an hour in a queue in order to redo the security check you endured before boarding the first plane. And so on.

So, correctly anticipating that the journey would be an ordeal, I booked a better than usual hotel (helped by a discount for booking from Tripadvisor and another for booking three nights), the K+K Elisabeta, not in the old town, but nearby and close to a metro stop. And even though I could have taken public transport in from Bucharest’s airport, I allowed myself to be tempted by the offer of airport pick up on the hotel’s website. Whether the 20 euro cost was extravagant or not is a matter of opinion, but when I emerged into the arrivals hall, towing my checked bag, the sight of a man with a sign with my name on it was very welcome indeed.

Although I wasn’t thrilled by my room, a bit small and with no view, I approved of the shower and of breakfast, and headed off to explore in a good mood. I zig-zagged through the old town, which was not in the best of shape, towards the epitome of hubris, Ceaușescu’s hulking Palace of Parliament. Said to be second in size only to the the US’s Pentagon, and only partially used, it loomed in undistinguished modernity at the end of a tree-lined boulevard. I rather liked the boulevard, which besides some welcome shade offered a sequence of mosaic-floored fountains, but was wryly amused to discover that it ended, at the foot of the folly, in a large parking lot.