Hanging out in Bucharest

Fun with Airplanes

Our next stop, for awhile, is Romania. Despite arriving at the airport 2 hours early, we nearly missed our flight from Copenhagen to Bucharest due to an crazy long line of passengers going through security and immigration. It’s been years since I sprinted to a gate. Note: budget airlines use gates that are furthest from security. BlueAir didn’t even offer complementary water to drink. $2+/bottle….

Covid and planning

While in Bucharest we had some down time. I was in Covid isolation, and surprisingly Susie never got it. We spent a lot of time researching and deciding details of where to go and what to do from now (mid-June) to the end of our trip in mid September. And we are also working on the next trip (Nepal + ?) starting mid-October. We are in never-ending trip planning mode, even when on a trip.

Seeing the City

Bucharest has been a town/city since the 15^th century, but wars and earthquakes have destroyed most ancient buildings. The city center has many nice buildings from the 19^th and early 20^th century, intermingled with ugly utilitarian Communist-era buildings and seemingly abandoned old building with bracing to hold them up. There are many of these older buildings damaged by recent earthquakes. Rather than restoring the building (the only allowed option in the historic district) owners are waiting for earthquakes to finish the demolition so the owners can build new buildings.

There are also many modern buildings and shopping malls, offices of multinationals like IBM. US chains like KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Subway are all here. Things are improving, but not everywhere and not evenly. We’ve also found some good bakeries here too. They make a kind of strudel that is like a long, thin hot pocket, with the filling inside and a light flakey pastry crust outside. I’ll have to include a photo of one in a future post….

There is also a large swath of the downtown area that was bulldozed by the Communist era leader, Ceaușescu, in order to make room for a central mall, a giant fountain system and some oversized (to match his ego) government buildings. He literally starved his citizens to put millions of dollars towards these overblown projects. Ceausescu’s 24 year totalitarian police state fell in 1989, after his regime killed more than a million of its own citizens.

So yes, a history of wars and destruction, capped with a brutal communist police state. Romania joined the EU about 15 years ago, bringing more stability, but also a migration of its skilled workers to other parts of the EU, where they can earn more. So Bucharest feels like it is in a bit of a building phase.

They do make good pastries and the cost of living is low here. My informal measure is the cost of a standard snickers bar: $0.57 (Snickers bars and M&M’s have been available pretty much everywhere we have been, not that we buy them with fresh pastries available).

Ukrainian Refugees

We chose an apartment near the main train station because we had thought there would be an opportunity to help with Ukrainian refugees arriving in Bucharest. Our church sent several senior missionary couples to help for several months. However, the flow of refugees coming through Bucharest has slowed to a trickle. Some refugees are even heading back to Ukraine through Bucharest. There is still dedicated refugee space for a cafeteria and some tents set up where refugees can get clothing and some sleep. Susie organized the clothes in the clothing tent, but otherwise, nothing really for us to do. That’s a good thing though.

In more happy news, we visited a “Village Museum”, a huge park-like setting with more than 300 historical structures from around the country and from different eras which were disassembled, moved and reassembled. Craftspeople have booths to sell their creations. We bought some elaborately painted eggs to bring home. Now we just have to keep from breaking them during the next 12 legs of our trip….

BYU Pathway

One of the reasons we are here in Romania is to help promote the BYUPathway.org program This program provides affordable, online accredited education throughout the world. We supported this program when we lived in Cambodia and are happy to be traveling around Romania to present it to interested people here.

For the next six weeks or so, we are going to be in various cities north of Bucharest to explain the program to interested parties, but most of the time we’ll be hanging out and doing touristy things.