Art, parks, big buildings, dogs, cow tits, grandmas - must be Bucharest, yes?

My trip to Bucharest (Bucureşti) wasn't at all planned; it was a holiday day in Germany, so two days before I decided to do a 'Blind Booking' with GermanWings. Basically you pay €40 and after you have paid you find out where you are going; I got Bucharest. If I'm honest it's not a city that I have ever had the urge to visit, but was so glad that I went.

I stepped off the plane into 25°C heat (compared to closer to 5°C) in Bonn, and after wading through the endless taxi scammers, caught a bus into the city - well I hoped it was going into the city anyway; I just followed a woman with a suitcase. Someone about Bucharest immediately drew me in. I'm a real city boy, and this is a real eastern European metropolis. It's busy and full of cars, pollution, dirt, dust, amplified Eastern Orthodox plainchant coming out of dark and incense-filled churches, fast paced people, green lungs of grass and trees in the middle of eight-lane roundabouts, street vendors hawking miscellaneous meat and is humid as hell. Sounds like a nightmare, but the sadist in me likes it. Oh, and there are lots of fountains - and I'm a sucker for a good fountain, me.

My first port of call, was the Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului). It is the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon in the US, and was built (but not completed) under the Ceauşescu's regime. Indeed, it is still not fully completed and many of the 1000 plus rooms are still unused. The tour of the building isn't the most interesting hour I've spent in my life, but it is the only way to get in - unless you are a member of the Romanian Parliament, and the guide did throw around some interesting facts - he was especially keen to point out the natural air conditioning system in each room that was installed because of Ceauşescu's paranoia of being poisoned. He also furthered the myth of Michael Jackson being the first person to actually speak from the Presidential Balcony, making the ultimate faux-pas of shouting, 'HELLO BUDAPEST' during his Bucharest concert - supposedly it did happen, just somewhere else.



Substantial and historical parts of Bucharest was bulldozed for the building and the grand avenues of Communist concrete that surround it, and all the materials used in the construction and decoration came from different parts of Romania - as such, it was going to be named 'The People's Palace', and that name still holds firm for some Romanians. There are many impressive rooms and halls, and more chandeliers than you could shake a stick at, but what struck me most was the exterior and the palace grounds. Whilst everything inside is of the highest quality and clearly well looked after; outside there are piles of rusting pipes, potholes that are fighting to gain quarry status, crumbling cobbles and a formal garden that has been long been gifted back to Nature. Whilst it is clear that Romania is still grappling with poverty, it would appear strange that such an icon of the capital city would be, outwardly, left to languish. Perhaps it is the conflict of the palace being the seat of democratic power in present day Romania, and what it was intended to be; a fortress of potency and fear (it looks down on the city from its highest point) for the Communist leaders. Or something. What is clear however, is that it is indeed a very big building. It takes around 25 minutes to walk from the tour entrance to the entrance of the new Museum of Contemporary Art, which is on the other side.


The Museum of Contemporary Art (or MNAC), is housed in a glass extension to the main palace and appeared to be free to go in - in that no one asked me for any money, or in fact acknowledged that I had entered the at all. This part of the palace is a real contrast to the main building; all varnished pine and white walls. It surprised me by having quite a good selection of exhibitions. Each of the four floors is dedicated to one exhibition or artist, and the video installations from Regina José Galindo of Guatemala really stayed with me. She won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and is known for incorporating her own body, and its limits, into her performance art. One of the videos, probably the least graphic of the collection, held me for a good 20 minutes. Entitled ¿Quién Puede Borrar las Huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces), the video follows Galindo as she walks barefoot from the Congress of Guatemala to the National Palace carrying a white plastic tub full of human blood. Every four or five steps she puts the tub down and places her feet in it, leaving, therefore a trace of footsteps as a protest against the presidency of José Enfraín Ríos Montt, and the atrocities that he oversaw. She walks through a series of busy narrow street, full of shoppers and market stalls, and actually what struck me was how few people even noticed that there was a woman leaving footprints of blood on the street, simply pushing past, in their own worlds. To ease you out of blood, water-boarding and self-flagellation, there is a roof-top café that sells disgusting coffee, but lots of weird and wonderful teas, and whilst the view over Bucharest doesn't exactly compare with Manhattan or Paris, it's a nice place to take in the city and hang out with Bucharest's art glitterati.



I did many other things over the next few days; went to a concert at the beautiful Romanian Athenaeum; walked - a lot, ate fresh, warm, chocolate-filled pastries - a lot; left the city to visit Peles Castle in Sinai and Braşov (I'll write about them in another post, sometime. Maybe); ate ice cream in the vast parks (including one where the hedges are shaped into dolphins. Yes, dolphins. Jumping through hedge-shaped hoops); bathed in the sunlight in the cloister courtyard of Mănăstirea Stavropoleos; maintained an interested look as an old lady shouted at me in Romanian about the merits of George Enescu (I was impressed that I managed to grasp even the topic of our conversation); marvelled at how 100 electricity wires can come together on a pole and still manage to work; sat through two of the biggest thunder and lightening storms I've ever experienced; dodged packs of stray dogs, or 'community dogs' as they are now termed; and visited the Arc de Triomphe, just at the end of Bucharest's version of the Champs Elysée on Charles de Gaulle Square (sound familiar?).

The one thing that nearly all of the guidebooks say you must visit in Bucharest is the Romanian Peasant Museum. The name kind of jars in my brain and sounding both utterly dull and slightly un-pc, but it is a gem of a museum. It's on the edge of a large park and some of the exhibits were so stirring so as to nearly bring a tear to the eyes of this cynical Ice King. One exhibit, the belongings of an anonymous Romanian lady; religious idols, lace shawls, tupperware, photographs and a moth eaten chair amongst other things, all arranged to look like her compact flat, is something that I would normally probably glance at on my way to something 'important', but the handmade card at the side kept me there for much longer than any Picasso or Monet has:

'Few people are ignorant of what happiness in grandma's kitchen means. The problem is what you do after grandma is dead. You come into an inheritance that sometimes becomes a burden. You cannot keep all the objects, words, gestures, smells... At least put some of the memories in a safe place.'


Another piece of advice from the Fire exhibition was that 'If the boiling milk boils over, stew some salt on it or else the cow's tits will burst'. Something to remember next time you stick a bowl of porridge in the microwave - just think of those Cravendale cows hundreds of miles away.


Before I made by way back to the airport I popped into the Zambaccian Museum, which, I guess, is Bucharest's answer to the Frick Collection in New York. The art was collected and lovingly arranged by businessman Krikor Zambaccian and is displayed in his house exactly in the way he wished. It's a lovely collection (including Romania's only Cezanne); is, as with all the museums and galleries in Bucharest, extremely cheap; and I was the only visitor there. My only (huge) bugbear was that the gallery's ladies-in-attendance were perhaps a little (annoyingly to the point of milk-boiling-tit-bursting) omnipresent. There seemed to be (at least) one per artwork and I started playing a game of getting myself just out of their eye-line to see how long before I saw a stony face creep back from somewhere. It became so off-putting that I didn't stay very long and went for ice cream instead - any excuse for ice cream to be honest.

And that ended my trip to Bucharest. I would definitely recommend it as a city break destination. It has all the draw of a big city, but still holds some of the allure of the unknown and undiscovered. The city seems to be making big strides to improving both its appearance and tourist infrastructure, so it's a good time to visit; everything is still cheap, and there are as yet no coach tours. And whilst the 'community dogs' may have rabies, they add some character to the streets - just watch your step when walking along non-lit streets at night, I'm sure they're probably not so placid once their tails have been stepped on.

Possibly the best hot chocolate in Europe, and that is just the beginning.

I arrived in Slovenia’s capital pre-dawn, so decided to escape the -5°C temperatures, in the warmish train station with the rest of Ljubljana’s homeless until the sun got his groove on.

When the sun came out to play – and he did – he revealed a pleasingly attractive city. Along the river, Baroque and Art Nouveau buildings shimmered in the frosty sunlight and Ljubljana castle watched, from its hilltop position over the empty streets of an early Sunday morning. The only sound came from church bells pealing for people to cross over the quaint ‘triple bridge’ and go to the day’s first Mass; all surrounded by the glory of the snow topped Julian Alps. Sounds like the opening to a Disney movie; I half expected a chorus of blue tits to come and bid me good morning through the medium of interpretive ribbon dancing.

There was one downside – Slovenians don’t seem to have jumped on to the idea of eating out for breakfast – unless it is a cocktail pitcher you fancy instead of scrambled eggs. Tempted by a Mojito, but more famished than anything else, I scoured the city centre, crossing back and forth over the Plečnik designed Triple Bridge (Tromostovje) for an open café. Fine, there were plenty open but they were just selling alcohol. Even McDonald’s was just selling their ubiquitous chicken burgers, and as much as I love Ronald’s bistros in an emergency, fried chicken at 9am did not appeal. Any people I asked seemed puzzled by the idea that I would be looking to buy breakfast. Maybe they just don’t eat it at all. I eventually found Cacao, a place that was willing to sell me one of yesterday’s pastries along with a strange concoction of fruits, cereals and peanut butter that was whizzed into the most awful tasting smoothie that I have had the misfortune of forcing down a somewhat resistive throat.

Full of questionable flavours, I set off to find the hostel I had set my sights on. Celica enjoys a bit of a cult status and received unanimously glowing online reports. Converted from an old prison and army barracks, it is situated in an artists’ commune that has some of the most wonderfully strange sculpture I have ever seen. I managed to get a room, sadly however, not in one of the individually decorated former cells.

It’s amazing what a blue sky can do for the soul, and it helped me fall in love with this compact yet bustling city. It doesn’t have gargantuan monuments, famous ruins or a grand avenue filled with Italian designers, but the whole place just exudes beauty and almost dares you not to walk around without a smile on your face. Even the brutish blocks of concrete from the 1950s and 60s come into their own here.

Climbing up to the castle, the view is nothing short of breathtaking. The church domes and spires of the city centre are followed by houses and fields, which continue endlessly until halted by the imposing Alps. I stayed for a long time before coming back down to see if I could find a forgotten Picasso at the riverside flea market. Instead I found the best ever Croque Madame I have ever eaten at the inexpensive Le Petit Café, a popular place here in Ljubljana, followed by my best ever hot chocolate (and that is a hard category to win), in Zvezda, not the cheapest café in the city, but a must for the cakes. I returned to both places the next day, just to confirm things of course.

In the evening I went to see Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel, a film that I had never heard of, but was a great discovery, at Kinodvor. It was here that I met a temporary end to my love for this city.

The cinema itself is wonderful – modelled on an opera house complete with balcony and Royal Box and the film was great – I managed to follow despite it being in French and Russian with Slovenian subtitles. However, the cinema has the policy of assigned seats. Whilst this is not necessarily bad in itself, everyone always ends up huddled together in the middle section and you are guaranteed to end up next to a relentless talker. Yes, the bane of the cinemagoer – the film commentator. Somehow, they are even worse than the heckling teenagers, crying babies and popcorn hurlers combined, because they know exactly what they are doing, shamelessly exerting assumed superiority over everyone else in the room. I contemplated jumping overboard and sitting somewhere else, but I have – from previous experience – found that this is often not met very kindly by the rest of the room and I didn’t want to start a diplomatic row. 

What followed instead was the best sequence of Britishness I have ever employed. I did a bit of quiet tutting, followed by some subtle seat shifting, cleared my throat and finally caught the culprit’s eye, fumbling some international sign language indicating that I had a recently sharpened axe in my bag that would be suitable if I felt the need to recreate all three instalments of Scream. It worked. Kind of. She did shut up. Mostly. Except when she didn’t; but I still felt a small victory. Even when, as we were leaving, she whacked me in the face with her baby rabbit fur shoulder wrap as I made my way to catch my train to Italy.

 

 

Julie Andrews is dragging around half a dozen kids and Mozart-branded 2-in-1 shampoos and conditioner is in the supermarket. Where else?

As with other historic cities that have its main train station away from the centre, Salzburg let me down slightly as I stepped off the train. No Baroque splendour. No palatially beautiful gardens. No Mozart-tinted-hills-are-alive-coated chocolate. Julie Andrews would not approve. And it was raining. But I’m very forgiving… even if it took me over an hour and a half to find anywhere other McDonalds to eat.

One particular reason Salzburg will stay in my mind is that I attracted more than the usual quota of crazies that the lone traveller should expect to come across in such a short space of time. It was a designated ‘I’ve-gone-over-budget-time-to-sleep-in-the-train-station’ night for me, and I had found a little waiting room, making myself at home by drying my wet wardrobe on the 10cm2 heater, and taking advantage of the free electricity. 

Then, in walks Crazy No. 1. I recognise him as the annoying man from an earlier flight who held up the airport bus with an incessant and inane queries about Austro-German train timetables. Tonight, he was looking resplendent in his lederhosen – to fit in with the locals of course. It turns out that he is from Australia but living in Glasgow – like pigeons and talcum powder, Glaswegians get everywhere. He also ‘knows’ a friend of mine – on returning to Glasgow I asked my friend about him, and his face contorted at the mention of this man’s name, so you get the picture. One of the better conversations was him relaying, in great detail, the development of the very large abscess that he was lucky enough to possess on his backside. My soul died a little bit every time he stood up to adjust the bandages. There was a pervading threat of “would you mind…’ and I was prepared to go down with my ship.

Enter Crazy No. 2. Less crazy I guess, and more passively sexually abusive. He sat beside me, proceeding to get out his portable DVD player and flicked  - very openly - through his, seemingly, endless array of hardcore pornographic videos. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, so I went back to Crazy No. 1 and his abscess. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very much.

By morning Salzburg was being covered in a fresh coat of white snow, and I said my goodbyes to my new friends and made my way back into the Altstadt proper to see what it was like in daylight. And the result? Simply. Beautiful. Protected as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and with a history that goes back to the Neolithic Age, Salzburg is medicine for the eyes - especially covered in snow.

The city is, of course, steeped; marinade more like, in Mozart and his entourage of costumed imitators. Being a music student, it was obligatory to visit the Mecca of Mozart’s Geburtshaus. With the knowledge that these places are more often than not lots of near empty rooms with a naff few paintings and a jar full of ‘what may be’ the artist’s breath, I paid my entrance fee and went in. Rather than sacred oxygen, there was a lock of Mozart’s hair, which was probably the most interesting thing in the exhibition. The best part for me, however, was the ‘audio room’ where you are invited to sit in a smallish, pine and gold-leafed room, and let Mozart’s music waft over you while you contemplate his prodigious genius. Or that’s the idea I guess. I, wet and tired, with memories of hardcore skin lesions running through my mind, fell asleep. For quite a while. I awoke to stares from a completely new set of faces, had a couple of Mozart chocolates then dozed off again to the Flute and Harp Concerto. Bliss.

The rest of the day was taken up by climbing up the to Hohensalzburg Castle and its surrounding hills, getting lost in the forest, eating cake, flirting with old ladies in said cake shops (it’s an art than I am proud to say that I have mastered), wandering round the cavernous and often empty churches and cathedrals, walking along the river to the gardens of Schloss Mirabell, eating fresh snow (it wasn’t yellow) buying some new – thicker and snow appropriate – socks, trying to find the von Trapps and discovering that the €0.50 hot chocolate from the vending machine outside the train station is actually delicious, before catching my overnight train to Slovenia.

Whilst waiting for the train, I met some mid-teen skater ‘dudes’ who insisted on showing me, repeatedly, videos of them eating as many doughnuts in 30 seconds as they could. And of course, on the train itself Fate decided that would be sitting, in the enclosed space of a compartment (for which I usually laud European trains), across from a heavy breathing, extremely fragrant old man who kept putting his fingers through the hole in his trouser crotch and mumbling something at me whilst he did it.

But let’s be honest, it’s all part of the fun.

Time to go to the polls - unless Iceland prevents you.

Unfortunately, because of a certain volcanic eruption in a certain country called Iceland, I will be unable to vote in the British Election this week. I did send my proxy in plenty of time, but like thousands of others my vote was caught up in the ash plume (just when did 'plume' become part of normal vocabulary?), and I received a rather passively aggressive email from a lady who I imagine to be retired, with a twin set and pearls, almost accusing me of causing the earth's crust to rupture, making sure the wind would carry the resulting ash towards Europe.

Nevertheless, I have been following the campaign in all of its technicolour glory, perhaps more so since my forced disenfranchisement, and will be very interested to see how things pan out on the 6th. This, more than any other election I can remember (and that isn't too many to be honest), is - almost - anyone's game, with all three main party leaders putting on their best faces for the 'historic' TV debates. Some complain that this style of electioneering turns the campaign into more of a presidential one, rather than for a whole party. That may be the case, but it certainly brings the parties and their policies to a more immediate and pressured environment. I managed to catch the first two debates - the second one almost killed me. The combination of the not-so-subtle-so-far-down-your-throat-it's-coming-out-the-other-end branding from Sky-no-we're-nothing-like-Fox-News, and the awful moderating skills of Adam Boulton - the man with the constant scowl - almost made me snap my laptop in two.

Of course, in a situation like this, it is style over substance and the Big Three have managed this with varying degrees of success. Poor Gordon still hasn't really mastered the art of smiling yet, never mind joke making, and whilst he probably has more content to his speeches than the other two, it is rarely engaging. Mr Cameron, to put it mildly, needs a short, sharp smack if he uses the phrase "in our country" again - ever. He also has Tony Blair Hand Syndrome, and never actually says anything of much import, predictably just disagreeing with anything Gordon and Nick say, trying to fit every cliché and buzz-phrase around his party's policies. Clegg is, by far, the strongest of the three in engaging the audience in what he is saying. By disengaging himself from the other two, and promising completely new directions, he has managed to achieve huge gains for the Liberal Democrats and almost a 'celebrity' status. Whilst, I would (if I could), vote for the Liberal Democrats, I have to admit - perhaps Gordon Brown is the best person to deal with the specific economic problems we have at the moment. I don't know, I'm no expert.

Sadly, it looks like that Cameron and his moral guardians shall be taking office, despite the huge gains by the Lib Dems. Our First Past the Post (FPTP) system has ensured for decades that actual percentages of the vote don't really account for anything. Only the Lib Dems have promised to reform the system to a fairer, proportional one, but sadly that shall probably be a goal that will remain out of reach for a long time to come.

The TV debates, combined with YouTube, internet news, twitter and their ilk have really made this an election of immediacy, and one that more people are interested in than many others in the past - no matter how slight or peripheral that interest is. But it is also important, to realise what news and coverage is of importance and what is electioneering via Rupert Murdoch and his contemporaries.

Bigotgate 2010 is an example of how such a minor error in the context of a national General Election can dominate the agenda for two or three days, and it overshadowed anything else that Gordon Brown or Labour said. And let's be honest, she was a bit of a bigot - she may not be aware of it, but ignorance, or allegiance to the Daily Mail isn't really an excuse is it?

The main controversies coming out of the Conservative closet, so to speak, have been concerned with gay rights and the party stance thereof. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Tory party includes many members who hold homophobic views, so it may seem strange that David Cameron seems so intent in courting the gay vote. It seems even more incredible now that we know that 'rising star' Philippa Stroud, Head of the Tory's Centre for Social Justice *cough*, has been praying for the curing of and giving 'counselling' to homosexuals through her New Frontiers Church. There have been other examples this week of Tory candidates who seem to be living by outdated and offensive doctrine, and even Cameron himself seems confused about his stance, unable to give a clear party position without falling over his own words. Surely he would have known that he would have been asked questions about gay rights by The Gay Times... you would have thought.

In any case, what will be will be, and the only way Britain can be sure of getting the results that she wants is by going out and voting. If you are registered to vote, you have (almost) no excuse for not using it. Even if it is to simply spoil your paper as a form of protest, the old excuses of it not making a difference, or that none of the parties represent the 'normal person', or that they are all the same, don't really wash anymore. Not that they ever did to be honest. It's just another way of expressing laziness.

It's a cliché, but it's a good one - that if you don't use your vote, you make void your opportunity to complain about pretty much anything for the next four or five years. And seeing as moaning about something is pretty much a British pastime, unless you are ready for some awkwardly silent conversations, then I'd get down to your polling station and tick a box.

Fire, I want you to burn... (Is that how the song goes?)

So, last night as I left to go to the Rhein-in-Flammen (Rhine in Flames), I discovered that my building was on fire. Quite a big fire at that. Big enough to warrant 15 fire engines and a few ambulance vans to boot. You would have thought that there would have been something to let the people inside the building know that they should probably leave, but there are in fact no fire alarms at all in the building. I'm no expert on German Fire Safety Law, but I would have thought that in a large communal, student residence like this that there would have to besome sort of requirement, no? In any case, I wasn't affected as it was at the other end of the building and I went on to look at the prettier fire display in the park.