Romania trip report, part 2

[lethargic_man]

The Black Sea

From the Danube delta we travelled south to Mamaia for a few days on the beach at the Black Sea. In the evenings we would pass a stall selling Turkish icecream, where they were mixing it with a long and stout metal pole and lots of elbow grease; the stuff appeared to have more the consistency of a thick paste than what one expects of icecream. aviva_m declared she had to try it. Apparently the taste was unexceptional, but it was worth it for the entertainment vale of the way the seller handed it over to us, repeatedly leaving aviva_m unexpectedly empty-handed whilst the icecream instead hung upside down from the metal pole, or had been deftly transferred in a second cone leaving the one aviva_m was holding empty.

Mamaia is just north of the city of Constanţa, which is where the Roman poet Ovid was exiled in the first century. (I remember learning in Latin class in school about how he complained about being sent to a half-barbaric place at the edge of the empire, where the natives were so un-Roman as to wear trousers.) Constanţa is proud of the connection with him; there's a statue of him in the big square in the centre of the old town, which is now named Ovid Square, and the town outside Constanţa where Ovid died has been renamed Ovidiu. I myself met an Ovidiu whilst I was there; presumably it's a popular name in the area.

Actually, Ovid's not the only Roman connection that Romania has; when Romania was created as a country in the nineteenth century it took, on account of the Romance language spoken there, the name by which what we now call the Roman Empire was known in antiquity. In central Bucharest there's a reproduction of the famous statue of the Capitoline wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (which Wikipedia tells me was a gift from Italy to Romania a century ago), and I also saw other representations of the statue in Bucharest.

Bucharest

From the Black Sea, we travelled to aviva_m's father's old stomping grounds in Bucharest. Bucharest is barely on the radar at all today when one thinks of great European capitals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but apparently there was a time when it was known as the Paris of the east, and there's a lot of grandiose architecture dating from that time there.

Of course, since then it spent a time as the capital of a communist period, which left its own mark on the city. For example, as Bucharest grew (it's much bigger nowadays than it was at the end of the war), the sewerage system was unable to deal with the growth in population, and the river became effectively an open sewer running through the city. The communist authorities didn't have the technology to clean up the water properly before discharging it into the river, so they instead split the river into two layers: the lower layer, hidden from sight, is still little more than a sewer, but sitting on top of that is a nice clean waterway of only a fraction of the depth of the original.

Speaking of communist management, we learned of a couple of mind-boggling incidents during our tour of the city, whilst viewing the outside of the Palace of the People (the second largest administrative building in the world, second only to the Pentagon, commissioned by Ceauşescu but not finished until after his fall—and which Rupert Murdoch tried, unsuccessfully, to buy after the revolution to turn into a casino)... but unfortunately I've forgotten the details. :-(

One was that upon an occasion, perhaps marking some anniversary, a famous American said something about Romania which the communist authorities took great liking to; they printed it on the byline of the most prestigious newspaper in Romania for two weeks... and then they worked out he was being sarcastic; so they managed (under pain of criminal punishment) to recall all issues of the newspaper, nation-wide, that had been issued during that fortnight, to destroy the evidence of their culpability.

(The other story was similar, but I can't remember any of it.)

To be further continued...