Edd's Travels: Bucharest, Romania

Welcome to the 15th anniversary edition of Edd's Travels. It feels like such a very long time since those first tentative baby steps to New York in 2008. Nowadays I'm closer in age to the retired SKI-ers (Spending the Kids' Inheritance) than I am to the hostel crowd of posh young gap-year types. My ginger stubble has been bleached white, and my eyes are wrinkled from squinting at departure boards and trying to work out if I'm in the right airport. Indeed, by the end of 2023, I will have spent an aggregate lifetime total of literally 3 whole years on the road. I feel like it would be a bit ridiculous to keep doing this forever. But I'm not ready to stop just yet.

And so I'm in Bucharest. In my ignorance I had unthinkingly assumed that Romanian would be one of those incomprehensible Slavic / Cyrillic languages, but in fact it's mostly descended from Latin, and so my familiarity with French (dimly remembered GCSE) and Spanish (more or less fluent) has been a great help. For example, 'thank you' is mersi, and 'house' is casă. My own casă here is a short tram ride out of the city centre, in a large communist-era block of residential flats. I quite enjoy the throwback feel, though of course in the communist era they didn't have aircon and wi-fi and Nespresso machines.

Nor, I imagine, did they have framed signs on the bookshelves saying 'Live! Laugh! Love!'. If I had a pound for every time I've seen that inane slogan, then I'd have enough coins to execute its creator by dropping them all on his moronic head.

Bucharest is generally avoided by tourists, and to be quite honest, the tourists have a point. It's a sweaty polluted place with scary traffic. Also it's a bit bewildering at first, because there are no signs in English, and the same goes for the tannoy announcements on the subway. But it's worth persevering. I've been here a full week and the place has grown on me steadily in that time. All you have to do is obey two simple rules: never get in a taxi, and don't drink the tap water.

And of course, though it's vulgar to say so, everything is agreeably cheap. I got served three gourmet tacos and three beers for a grand total of about £11. My train ticket from airport to city, plus 72 hours of unlimited transport on bus and subway and tram, was less than £7. Speaking of trams, a random bit of local colour: when approaching a corner, the tram stops and the driver hops down to switch the rail points himself, using a big metal implement kept in the cabin for that purpose.

Another notable bit of local colour is the grave of former dictator Nikolae Ceauşescu. Those of my generation or older will remember that in 1989, along with a few other minor reshuffles in Europe, his 24-year reign as Romania's leader came to a very abrupt end. Live by the sword, die by the sword, right? Or in this case, by the bullet. 120 bullets in total, between him and his equally unpleasant wife Elena, after a half-hearted show trial. I suppose there are worse ways to go. Lethal injection takes 10 minutes or so. Cancer can spend years torturing you to death.

Anyway the Ceaşescus now lie in a fairly nondescript corner of a quiet civilian cemetery, not far from my apartment. The grave has 13 reviews on Google Maps, with a total rating of 3.6 out of 5. When I visited, nobody else was around. There was no security around the grave, nor was there any graffiti; just a few week-old flowers and cheap burned-out candles. Sic transit gloria mundi. Good riddance to the old bugger.

More to follow in a week or so. In the meantime, live laugh love, and all that.