In Bucharest you can stand on a street corner and appreciate the utter jumbled jostling mess and glory of 500 years of European architecture.
Go to the Piata Revolutiei, for example, and turn on the spot to see an old Orthodox Church, neoclassical, art nouveau and art deco villas, brutalist socialist era boxes for workers, grand Soviet megalomania, and the sharp triangular glass edges of a modern office block.
Speaking of churches, the one pictured still does exorcisms.
Interesting time to be in Romania with the rerun of Presidential elections after the November ballot was cancelled amid evidence of Russian meddling.
Speaking French (or, I imagine, Italian) makes it easier to get around.
If you love sweets they are great bakers here. I highly recommend Casa Capsa, temptingly located opposite my hotel.
The old town is brimming with English and Irish pubs attracting bucks and hens parties on public holiday weekends. I like to think of this as an initial phase of post-Soviet socioeconomic terraforming.
A more sophisticated vibe can be found in Fabrica south of the centre, where factories have been repurposed as galleries, bars, and studios, and around the Romanian Atheneum to the north.
Bucharest was known as Little Paris between the wars. With the overthrow of Ceausescu it picked up that mantle again.
Some old fogeys reminisce about the police state. Like other former eastern bloc countries, I can’t see them subsuming their freedom and creativity under Putin’s culturally stunted, albeit economically resurgent, Russia.
