The 7 ft Easter Egg
Rural Farm House interior
Email No 18 – Bucharest. Romania
The Varna – Bucharest Odyssey
There are a couple ways to get from Varna (Bulgaria) to Bucharest (Romania) none of them very efficient. One of the option is to board a 9:30 am train to Ruse (Bulgarian border town) and then wait about three hours in Ruse for the Moscow-bound train that gets into Bucarest at about 6:30 pm.
Another option is to take the 17:35 train to Ruse, then wait about 5 hours for a Moscow-bound train that gets into Bucarest at about 6:30 the next morning. I opted for the first choice and set out to the train station when my watch showed 8:45 am. I felt real good, being ready, and having already made reservation in Bucharest.
The train station is 15 minutes away from my hotel and as I approached it I could see the station’s tower and the station’s clock. The clock showed the time to be 9:50. The time on my watch is 8:50?
My first thought was that the Station’s clock was wrong (we are in Bulgaria after all). Then a very unpleasant thought crossed my mind in the form of a possible time change?
I checked the time with somebody in the station and found out that in fact the clock’s time was correct.
Back at the hotel I found that the time was changed three days before. A very costly oversight as I also misted a date the previous day with a Syrian woman I met at a restaurant (an English teacher).
Well, the dating is not retroactive and now I have to take the 17:35 train to Ruse and wait the 5 hours for the train to Bucarest. As a matter of fact, I am presently in Ruse, in a restaurant writing this sad story (I am joking, this is an acceptable part of the unpredictable events that occurs when one travel in this manner). I only have to wait another 3 ½ hours.
Once in Bucarest I took the metro to a station near the “Happy Hostel” and was assigned a bed in a 6-bed dorm.
The hostel is located in a cul-de-sac and surrounded by several houses, each one of them defended by its own dog. The dogs have an well coordinated defensive system. Each time (day or night) that someone walks or drives in the cul-de-sac, first, the biggest of the dogs barks, followed by barking, or howling, by all the other dogs.
In spite of my loss of one night of sleep I feel good enough to take an orientation walk.
The hostel is close to one of the very large main boulevards, some of them part of Nicolae Ceausescu expensive development follies. Another French-like sights is a reduced copy of the French Arc de Triomphe. It was constructed in 1935 in celebration of the reunification of Romania (after WW1).
Bucarest is better appreciated by walking around to more interesting side streets and by visiting some of its numerous museums.
The most interesting museum is a very large open-air collection of several dozen homesteads, farms, churches, and windmills relocated from different parts of rural Romania.
One can appreciate the clever ways people dealt with tough conditions in all sorts of weather conditions. Very steep roof line to shed the snow in the mountainous part of the country. One-room house centered around the kitchen to use the wood stove for cooking and to provide heat in winter.
The National Art Museum is divided in three parts, the third featuring European Art, with painting by Rubens, Van Eyck, Tintorito, Rembrandt and others.
Happy Easter to all!
Next Curtea de Arges.
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