Day 3: Downtown Bucharest

Day 3:

Today we went to downtown Bucharest, where we found a vital clue in our hunt for the Dark Count. The day started out pretty normal: a merdenele pastry ("Just think of the French word for 'shit,'" Ioana told me when I told her I couldn't remember the name. Appetizing!), a stroll past the old church in her neighborhood, and then onto the 311 bus that goes downtown.

Romanian buses are quite an experience. Romanians have this inexplicable belief that air conditioning, and moving air in general, are the causes of most sicknesses. So even if it's 250 degrees Celsius and 298% humidity out, they like to keep everything closed up pretty tight. Although on the bus we were on, at least a couple of the small top windows were open. The bus ride was actually a cool -- in the sense of "interesting," not in the sense of "not stiflingly hot" -- way to see a lot of Bucharest. We got off the bus in the middle of downtown and started walking around looking at various sights.

Bucharest, once known as "The Paris of the East," is a great city. Like (I imagine) a lot of very old cities, it's got new construction mixed right up with ancient and medieval buildings. Apparently there was a big earthquake in the 70's that leveled a lot of stuff, but what old buildings are left are pretty interesting and just sort of stuck in the middle of a block.

Our first major attraction was the city's main university, where Ioana went to school and taught classes and so on before eventually going to America. It's a pretty, old building and the inside looks like it's all original construction, lots of winding stairs and tiny elevators that travel in open shafts and are held up by thin, fraying cables. They didn't like us taking photographs inside. I don't know if they were afraid that photographs would capture part of their souls, or what, but I only got like one picture before the guards forbade me from using my camera anymore.

From there we headed over to the University Square. It was, for me and Ioana at least, a pretty solemn place. In December of 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceacescu called a massive gathering of roughly 100,000 Bucharest citizens in a nearby square. From a balcony in the Communist Party building, he gave a speech denouncing antigovernment protests in the city of Timisoara. In what was to Ceasescu (and probably a lot of other people) a shocking turn of events, the crowd's initial applause and cheers turned quickly to catcalls and people yelling antigovernment slogans. As the crowd grew more and more angry, Ceaucescu was forced to flee the balcony and take refuge in the building. The crowd exploded into a near-riot of protest and refused to disperse, eventually gathering here in University Square.

That night, the government sealed off the square as best they could with tanks and troops. After full dark, they cut the electricity to the area and began shooting people down. Police also beat protesters and firefighters shot them with water cannons. Over 150 people died and the crowd fled. The next morning, though, an even larger crowd returned, and Ceausescu was forced to flee the area by helicopter.

"Thank you heroes of the revolution of December 1989. Tears and flowers on their graves."

"Hero of the revolution 21-22 Dec. 1989"

There were elections in 1990, and a member of the Communist party was elected president. That led to further protests, including another demonstration in University Square and violent clashes between demonstrators and the police and military. My wife, who was 13 at the time, was there. The new president, unable to get the crowds to disperse, bussed in large numbers of coal miners from outside the city, and turned them loose as shock troops with orders to destroy the protesters. There are disputes about the number killed in the "Mineriad" incident, but most NGOs put the number at over 150. Hundreds more were beaten, paralyzed, had their teeth knocked out, etc.

As of today, a democratic president is in office, after a razor-thin election in 2010 that hinged on last-minute absentee votes of overseas Romanians (including Ioana), desperately cast to tip the scales when the Communist candidate was leading. The democratic candidtate won 50.3% to 49.7%.

But what, you are thinking, does any of this have to do with Dracula? Good question. So after taking in that history, the hunt resumed. We scoured several old buildings, including this church that was built in 1722. We went inside, where some wizened old woman in a babushka yelled at me in Romanian until Ioana explained that I wasn't allowed to wear my baseball cap inside, even though it was for the world-champion Chicago Cubs. I grudgingly took it off, because it was worth it to see the inside of the church. No photos allowed -- I guess it's that whole capturing-the-soul thing again -- but trust me when I say that the murals inside the church were really amazing. I love this old artworky sort of thing. Most of the paintings were just generic pictures of what I presume to be saints and other holy people that I don't know anything about, but the amount of work that went into this stuff is just amazing. The entire interior is covered with pictures. We bought some candles to burn for the living and the dead (although I kept in mind that Dracula isn't either one) and headed off. As we left I snapped a quick photo of some of the murals on the outside of the church. Suck it, Jesus.

Will I go to hell for this?

We headed out and saw many other cool medieval buildings, which I took pictures of but if I put them in this blog it's just going to be like, "Old building, another old building, here's an old building, this building was pretty old" and nobody wants to hear about that, am I right? This blog isn't called One Man's Search for Old Buildings. It's One Man's Search for Dracula.

But first, lunch. We stopped at a cool cafe place where Ioana got traditional Romanian "mamaliga" (polenta with cheese, egg, and who knows what else) and I had chicken in a delicious gorgonzola sauce that Io mostly ate, and potatoes au gratin. They also put a single leaf of lettuce on my plate. This is a cuisine that a man like me could really get into. Ioana wouldn't let me order the lemonade I wanted because she said it would be too sour for me. It sucks when only your wife speaks the waiter's language. I was like "NOOOO I WANT THE LEMONADE!" but to him it was like when your dog is desperately telling you not to throw out the table scraps and all you hear is "woof woof woof."

We walked around the old downtown area, which is still what Simon & Garfunkel memorably described as "narrow streets of cobblestone," although I don't think the rest of that song was about Bucharest. In an interesting tie-in, though, we saw some busker playing S&G's "El Condor Pasa" on the pan-pipes. I am not joking. This really happened. I didn't take his picture because I didn't want him to be self-conscious. Like, I would imagine you would think to yourself, "Wow, that tourist in the super-hip World of Warcraft T-shirt is taking my photograph. He must really like my rendition of 'El Condor Pasa' on the pan-flute. Wait, what the fuck am I doing?"

We continued on and I got a delicious Romanian pastry, this time with chocolate inside, which I am told (I'm not sure whether I'm being punked here) is called a "furious donut." Whatever the name, it was hot from the oven and filled with gooey chocolatey goodness. Yum.

"I shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and FURRRRRIOUS donuts!"

We went some other places and bought a couple of things, and then started walking down another older district in Bucharest.

And that's when I saw it:

True vampire-hunters would recognize that face anywhere. That is the Great Dragon, Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Count Dracula! It turns out that Dracula had a palace right here in Bucharest,

which was preserved as a historical site. As with every other person, building, monument, or thing of any interest at all in Romania, you were not allowed to take pictures of it (probably to hide the fact that none of it will appear on film). Actually, technically you were allowed to take pictures of it for $15, but I am a notorious skinflint and decided that my powers of description are better than any photograph anyway. So we walked around the curiously coffin-free basement of Dracula's summer home, and up onto the ramparts and so on. It was pretty cool. I snuck this picture of Dracula's stove, though:

I didn't know you had to cook blood

So there you go. Our second vital clue. After that, we just headed through the rest of the city, eventually ending up at the "People's Palace," an enormous building that Ceacescu had built at the expense of people having any food or medicine or other things you need to live. It was promptly taken over by the government after his execution, and Ioana tells me it now serves as the home of the Romanian Senate and that the other part of it is "a parking garage," although I think she was kidding. After that we caught the subway back home and I took a giant nap. Tonight it's traditional dinner with the in-laws and then early to bed, because tomorrow we explore...the Romanian countryside. You won't want to miss it.