Bucharest

We  stayed at the Athenee Palace Hilton. We heard from many people that this was the place to be.  Everyone spies one everyone else there.  Every room is bugged, and James Bond himself carved his initials in our room. Many beautiful women are sent here as moles to gain information from dupes who just happen to be hanging around loaded with sensitive information, yet don't have a clue.  You know, like Peter Sellers,  Mike Myers and me.  I personally had several beautiful women, and a couple of other shady characters, come up to me to try to glean some useful trail maintenance secrets, travel management strategies, and other sensitive government information from me.  Luckily I was able to foil them.  But I got their secrets. Heh, heh. If only I didn't have that piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe.

One of the reasons Bucharest is known as the Paris of the East is that they have historical and social connections to France, let alone the similarity in the language. Arcul de Triumf, an obvious copy of the one in Paris has been here since 1878. Wooden versions have burned down until the current one was built in 1936.

Everywhere they were decked out for Easter, something you wouldn't have seen in the communist times, since they frowned on religion in general and Christianity in particular.

This is the police headquarters: notice the big rusty hole near the top of the building. The big red star of communism is gone, as are all other vestiges of that repressive time in Romanian history.

Here is Maggie taking a rest under a gift from Rome to celebrate the Italian connection to Romania as well. 

Sunday morning we had a bus tour of Bucharest and then went to the Opera house near our hotel. My parents seem to think that we went to a concert here in 1985, but I don't remember. This time we saw a guy demonstrating the acoustics with a trumpet. It was fine for a free show with a detailed description of the concert hall. Also a couple of blocks away was the government building where the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu tried to calm down the Romanians in late 1989. After he got booed off the balcony, he had to escape by helicopter, only to be captured nearby, and executed several days later.

After some free time, we drove to the Danube to board our ship, the Avalon Imagery.  We keep chuckling because the tour people pronounce it "Imagerrry", as if that's a real word.