Yesterday we had to leave the ship from our dock in Giurgiu which was really sad. The holiday is not over as we now have a two night stay in Bucharest in a motel. It certainly put the dampener on the holiday spirit though to know that it is so close to finishing.
We boarded the coaches and had a city tour of Bucharest.
In a document dating from 1459 signed by Prince Vlad the Impaler known as Dracula, Bucharest was mentioned as a trading centre, a market town set at the crossroads of the main commercial routes connecting Europe to Asia. It was also Prince Dracula who extended the old princely Courts, so in later centuries Bucharest became the capital city of the Romanian principality of Wallahia.
Communist times bought huge concrete buildings that obliterated much of the old charm of the city. When Nicolae Ceausescu became leader of the Communist Party and President of Romania in 1965, he began to create a megalomaniac Civic Centre downtown Bucharest. For this project he destroyed many historical buildings, an entire residential district, state institutions, hospitals, and 26 churches, monuments of art. His plans were not completed during his lifetime, but the strange combination of neo-Stalinist architecture is now the mark of a large part of the city centre.
The Peoples Palace is the 2nd largest building in the world, the largest being the pentagon. The first two pictures are only pictures of the side of the palace to smaller portion.
The was the palace for the wife, obviously there was not sufficient room to share the first palace.
Today Bucharest is a city with monumental building, large interesting museums, various cultural buildings, among which the largest library in the country stands. The city is also the main university centre of the country with the Old University in the very centre and a huge Polytechnic Institute with its own campus in the new districts.
It is also Romania’s major business centre which concentrates numerous banks, international companies as well as joint ventures, proof of its growing integration into global economy, the country has been a member of the European Union since 2007.
We then went to the Village Museum – Muzeul National Al Satului which is an outdoor museum of all the different types of homes around the different regions of Romania.
We then drove to a restaurant for lunch prior to checking into the Radisson for the next two nights and during the afternoon we walked through more of the city.
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