Monday 19th July

19/07/04 Day 16.

Another bad night's sleep but we said we'd make it into the centre so I crawled out of bed. Forgot to mention, Thiri Thailand, who is sharing our room and doesn't speak a lot of English so I spoke to him a bit in Italian XX. This resulted in the thought that 'its amazing how quickly you can appreciate something and amazing how quickly you can be inspired by something'. It was weird how I was proud to be able to tell him that I was studying Italian in England (& all those lessons have had some effect) but I also wanted to be ableto understand him better and be able to talk more (therefore I'm quite happy to sit for another whole year of 7am lectures just to be able to do that).

Back to the point - we wandered into town and to the Palace of Parliament or House of the People, which is apparently the world's second largest building, after the Pentagon, but I'm sure I've seen bigger. Then we walked to Romania's oldest part - Cismigiu garden, which had a bit of a lake, lots of trees, a very comprehensive playground and cafes. Obviously a popular place with the locals and a well-used park, which is what I like to see. We pondered around some more - there are so many important buildings (palaces, embassies, banks, museums...) in Bucharest that it's hard to keep up with which one's which! In the end I gave up and decided to admire them for their structure instead. There aren't a lot of quaint, cute buildings around here - they're all just BIG. I think they must have liked being pompous in their day. And now the old buildings are competing with the equally big modern banks & hotels.

Hasn't anyone told the Romanians that not everything is about size?! My favourite, I think was, what we guessed to be (Gheorghy something - I did & I filed together name as badly) a match house or concert hall. It had life-size women carved around the top and ornateness (and it wasn't my English). We desperately searched for a traditional Romanian cafe with proper cake and in the end we answered our question from the night before, which was - why do people sit and eat in the underpasses? Because - as we found out - there is nowhere else to and so we ate proverbial humble pie in the cafe in the underpass as we reflected on the long, judgmental day we had undertaken. And it's after warm, by the way, from the point of viewof a tourist, I wouldn't want to spend a week's holiday here - we suddenly realised we hadn't bought any postcards, the reason being we hadn't seen any - it's not very touristy and there isn't much to do (except museums which are helpfully shut today) to find out stuff. I've found Bucharest really just a walk-around-city. Not much of an international feel (are or American and Italian, I suppose). But there are quite french too - but no Asian influence for example. A good place to work and come to this but not really many tourists - hopefully a trip to the gypsy market and a meal out will stamp a bit more Romanian-ness on my visit. So we went in sycle of the market but initially all I found there (expected to see on a Saturday morning in Petersham (on in-joke). I think I expected some-most traditional Romanian cafes. But we did in-the end find the food section, which was pretty amazing. Never before have I seen so many water melons in one place. Not a great diversity but abundance was clear and home-grown cored from everything there - we bought some grapes. I'm sure Brian will comment on my surprised statement that they had pips.

Part of the evening was spent planning the all-in-one castle trip for tomorrow. There is a lot of doubt whether we'll make it.