Bucharest

We arrived in Bucharest in the evening after a very long (8hrs), hot train trip and crashed pretty much straight away in a place near the station. The next morning we set out to a hostel closer to the centre and after settling in there had a bit of a nasty morning discovering our inner demons. After some food and a sit down we were ready to try the city out in a better frame of mind and organised tickets on to Sofia for Saturday night-it's really hard to believe it is almost time to leave Romania.
Bucharest was a very busy place and it took a bit of getting used to after all the quiet places we have been visiting. After wandering around for a day getting our bearings we set out on a bit of a walking tour starting on the large boulevard Ceasescu wiped out 1/6 of Bucharest to build. We had read a lot about this area and the general consensus was that the whole area was hideous but it was actually amazing. Sure it was no picturesque old town but the scale and grandeur of it all as well as the uniformity of the architecture sure had an impact.
At the end of the boulevard is the Palace of Parliament which Ceasescu never actually saw completed. The place is freaking huge!!!! It is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon, crazy. The tour we went on took us through some of the most spectacular halls but only covered around five percent of the building. Our guide had only ever seen about fifteen percent. To give some idea of how over the top this building is the 4 curtains in one room weighed a combined total of 1 tonne, velvet of course with real gold trim.
We continued walking through the city and passed through the squares where the 1989 revolution really exploded. The old securitate building is just a shell left standing as a reminder of the old regime and there are crosses all over the place commemorating the 1000 or so people who died over a couple of days in the capital. Once we started looking we found bullet holes everywhere, some still with bullets hanging in there. We really were speechless thinking about just how recent all this was.
To get over our speechlessness we found -yet another- beer festival. Besides it had started raining and we needed to shelter somewhere. Several beers and a plate of German sausage later we didn't mind the rain so much and decided to make a night of it and hit a really nice bar, sampling a few cocktails and acquiring the coolest Bacardi swizzle stick in the process.
We spent our last day in Romania hitting the shops for supplies for our overnight train trip and trying to find a new Tshirt each, Saturday is definitely shopping day over here, everywhere was packed.
We then headed to the train station, on the way having a nasty experience and left the country in a rather paranoid mindset, more about that later.