Around Bucharest – my first Saturday Part 1

Part 1 – same old story, every part of the world has it’s “bad” people

Walked down Calea Dorobantilor (the main road near “home”) and around past the Dinamo Stadium to the Stefan cel Mare Metro.
VERY quiet first thing in the morning arriving at the Metro just before 9 am. It took a while to figure out that you don’t buy a ticket to your destination, a ticket being valid for one journey to anywhere on the network. You purchase a ticket for a number of journeys, the minimum being 2 (effectively a return) – took a while for me to understand why I was being asked if I wanted two tickets (being on my own!). The Metro trains have quite large carriages (District Line size), but rather hard seats. They are also extensively decorated with “free-form art” which is a shame. The network seems to run quite well although some of the smaller stations seemed to lack signage so counting stops was an important precaution. I traveled around the M1 line to Piata Unirii which is the centre of the City and the nearest Metro to the Casa Poporului and the heart of Ceausescu’s building program for Bucharest and his grand palace.

The Square is huge with a very grand central fountain and park. Boulevard Dul Unirii is a wide and rather grand tree-lined avenue running up to Piata Constitutiei and the Casa Poporului.

With it being still only 9:30 and me gradually realising that nothing is open before 10 I walked up the hill to the South West of Piata Unirii towards the Palatul Patriarchal. I can already sense that being a morning person is going to give me a few issues while I’m here!

The church and bell tower are late 17th century and the palace is the home of the Patriarch. The church is normally only open for services twice a day at 11am and 5pm, but as the Patriarch has just died there was a memorial service in progress. It was very busy inside (understandably) and while very ornate in terms of the decoration and iconography it was really rather gloomy. Given the nature of what was going on it clearly wasn’t appropriate to be getting the camera out as the flash would have been required – so sorry no photo’s of the inside.

With time ticking on past 10 I headed back down the hill and around the main Boulevard running up to the Casa Poporului. Getting there I realised there was no indication of the “way in”, and that I was on the wrong side. Making my way around I was approached by an apparently helpful young man who told me the Palace was closed due to the Patriarch having just died. He suggested I go to the “Tourist Park” and that he would help me with a taxi – unfortunately he wasn’t able to show me where it was on the map which was a little suspicious and he then started asking if I needed to go to the ATM first as it would be 250 RON to get in!
I made my excuses and said I would head back to the Metro as I already had a ticket, unfortunately my new found “friend” was in hot pursuit telling me not to go back towards Piata Unirii “..because of the gypsies who had killed two Englishmen there the previous evening.” I headed quickly for the nearest taxi and made my escape to Piata Victoriei – the first thing that came into my head as it’s near the office!