We are headed to Bucharest before a river cruise (Bucharest to Budapest, with stops in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Serbia). We aren’t going until July 2025 so we have lots of time but we are trying to figure out how many days we will want in Romania and what we want to see. Also researching is part of the fun of travel!


Has anyone been? JonNYC?

Sounds like a great trip!

Never been. But owner of the little bakery I go to is from Serbia. I'll ask her if she has any favorite places back home.

Sorry I can’t be of much help.

I’ve been to a small town in Serbia. My son-in-law is from there. The capital city is much more of a destination.

I want to order a piece of sheet music from a Romanian publisher but I’m wary of doing direct online commerce with a country I don’t know anything about.

My step grandmother was born in Bucharest in 1899. That's about all I can say about Romania!

my paternal grandmother was born in Bucharest in 1896 and came to America with her sister and three brothers and her widowed mother (her father died from a broken leg) when she was 12. They traveled in steerage, IIRR. Also I have a friend from Bucharest (he is the piano rebuilder named Rudy in my book) who suffered there greatly before he came to America with nothing but the clothes on his back in the 1960s or early 1970s (IIRR). Therefore my impressions from friends and family are not positive, but it is now decades later, so it may be an entirely different place, in fact, it likely is.

I'll be most interested to hear your impressions and please post pics! I've been interested in going there some day if only for the family connection.

I’m just impressed that you can plan a trip so far in advance!

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
I’m just impressed that you can plan a trip so far in advance!

We normally don’t but we had some vouchers from last summer’s river cruise to spend and had to use them within a year, there was a good sale, and the specific sailing we want was down to only a handful of cabins.

Ahh, that makes sense!

quote:

Originally posted by dolmansaxlil:
We are headed to Bucharest before a river cruise (Bucharest to Budapest, with stops in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Serbia). We aren’t going until July 2025 so we have lots of time but we are trying to figure out how many days we will want in Romania and what we want to see. Also researching is part of the fun of travel!


Has anyone been? JonNYC?

I was there last August with my then-girlfriend who is Romanian. We didn't do too much touristy stuff as we spent a lot of time visiting with her friends.

I do recommend a formal tour of the Palace of Parliament building. It's billed as the second largest building in the world by square footage and one of the heaviest by weight - at 4,000,000 tons, it weighs almost as much as the great pyramid of Giza.

It was Ceausescu's grand project and he cut no corners. He raised an entire neighborhood in central Bucharest to build it. There is something like 3500 *tons* of crystal, upward of 500 chandeliers, over a million *tons* of marble, etc etc, all sourced in Romania. It's fascinating to see what a communist dictator could do while his people starved.

Bucharest also has a number of museums that are not really internationally known, though the George Enescu museum is interesting if you are interested in him.

But besides the Palace, I would recommend walking around Old Town, especially for dinners. You can get a decent airbnb in Old Town for not much money.

You know what I would definitely recommend? A quick trip to Mamaia on the Black Sea coast. It's like a 2.5hr train ride and the beach is lovely.

My ex-girlfriend Alina's story is pretty interesting. Her mother was a famous folk singer in Romania and Ceausescu loved her. He would bring her to state functions, even overseas, to share traditional Romanian songs with diplomatic delegations.

This meant that they got to live like party insiders. As a little girl, she wasn't allowed to bring friends over because her parents didn't want them to see how they lived. They had fruit! A television!

So the revolution was tragic for her mom. They immigrated to the US when she was 16. Her mom tried to make a living singing in Romanian bars in NY and Chicago. Imagine what a change that was from how she lived under Ceausescu. Her mom gave up and went home within a year, but Alina stayed on her own at 17, in a foreign country where she still didn't speak the language. She worked as a seamstress and then in a factory, eventually learning English and getting a GED then a college degree and a masters. Today she teaches math in NYC city schools.

Thanks, Jon! The Palace of Parliament building is definitely on the list! We visited the Hungarian Parliament when we were in Budapest and we found the tour fascinating - I expect the Bucharest one will be even more so. I will look into the museums as well! We had looked at the Museum of Communism but I will dig into the options.

Alina’s story is definitely fascinating! I cannot imagine what that would have been like - for her or for her mother!