BUCHAREST

I drove through the country this week to travel to Bucharest and back to Timisoara. I saw a lot of beautiful and interesting things ...dozens of small villages nestled in the folds of mountain valleys, snow and ice covered mountains, the Danube River as it flowed into Serbia, the winding mountain roads where cars and trucks and horse-drawn carts all share the space.

Bucharest is a very populated city with over 2.5 million people living in a crowded and small space. It was to have been the "showplace" of the Socialist Republic of Romania (what the Communists called the country) ....a picture of what urban planning (some would call it urban destruction) could accomplish. Today, it is a city that is filled to almost bursting with communist block apartment buildings, surrounded by traditional architecture that is influenced by Germany, Turkey and the Hapsburgs. Parts are gorgeous and others are dirty and gray. It also houses many skeletons of unfinished buildings ....the workers simply walked away the day the dictator and his wife were executed in December of 1989 and they never returned. Every city in Romania (including Timisoara) has buildings like this. Before the Communists took over the country, Bucharest was known as "the Paris of the East" because of it's beauty. Today, it is well-known as a place of horrendous traffic ....AMEN to that!

This country is made up of paradoxes ....an ancient agrarian society struggling to be part of the 21st century. Horse carts beside BMW's. Glass and steel bank towers next to 300 year old crumbling churches. People on their cell phones as they soak in 1000 year old sulfur baths. Coming from America, where anything over 50 years old is ancient, it is quite an adjustment.