Romania 2025: Part One - București

7^th March 2025

The day doesn’t start well. A woman gets on the bus with two huge bags of shopping and isn’t inclined to pay her fare, saying she’s lost her freedom pass. The female driver reasonably points out that she needs to use a bank card, but she claims not to have one. After a ten-minute stand-off another customer pays for her. This woman sits behind me and in the increasingly torturous and voluminous 20-minute journey to Brixton shouts that black people should help one another, and that’s she’s going to put a voodoo curse on the poor driver, cut her up etc. Not nice.

A tedious trip to Stansted, which is somewhere in Lincolnshire and has the nickname ‘London.’ The check-in area looks like a building site, which would be forgivable if any building had been going on. There’s a surly girl at the suitcase drop whose job is to tell people: ‘use the auto-bag drop.’ I tell her it doesn’t work (probably because we’re five minutes early) and, seeing how old and useless we are, she reluctantly checks us in.

The hellish duty-free spiralling labyrinth goes on forever, like the punishment of Tantalus. There are too many people - couples spending the whole of Friday going somewhere cheap, then the whole of Sunday returning from it, the sort who clap and cheer the pilot before they’ve even landed.

I need to buy some extortionate items from Boots and ask for a bag as the one I have, the only one that Ryanair allows on board for less than 75 Euros, is stuffed within an inch of its life with electronic items with lithium batteries. The paper one I buy for 12p splits immediately on a particularly sharp plastic tube of moisturiser and I beg for a second. I put this around the first and it splits too, but somehow the two terminally ill items manage to fuse together to become usable, like competing diseases in Mr. Burns’s body.

Every single person has far more cabin luggage than they’re allowed, but because Ryanair is so woefully understaffed, nobody challenges them.

On the flight, my damaged left ear is assaulted by shrieking behind me. The guy, who’s talking amiably to an Essex woman, has the weirdest accent I’ve ever heard - a cross between hillbilly, Boer and bogan. Turns out he’s Canadian.

There’s supposed to be somebody holding a sign with my name on it at the airport, but there are two arrival floors. When we eventually find him, the driver is dressed like the Riddler and pretends not to speak English until we arrive at our location. The suitcases don’t fit in the boot of a tiny, grubby car called a ‘Logan.’ I’m composing my letter of complaint to Welcome Pickups in my head until I remember I chose a local firm that was five Euros cheaper.

The Airbnb is set inside an old communist block, is clean and sparse with a little balcony and a view of a huge building down the street and drug dealers below. The wifi doesn’t work.

It’s ten-thirty as we go into the Old Town, where the boom-boom-boom of techno thumps from every bar, like in Hanoi but with even worse pavements.

Amidst the odd scattering of impressive art-deco architecture, I wasn’t expecting the plethora of scantily dressed pole dancers in bar windows, and the inappropriately-unattired and (mainly British) messed-up revellers in the scrum in the street. Probably normal in Bangkok, Manila, Magaluf and Faliraki, except it’s -1c here. I’m briefly propositioned until the young girl realises Mrs Mad is walking behind me.

Oh, did I not say, we’re in București. That’s Bucharest, Romania, to you.

8^th March 2025, București/Buftea

We don’t like our apartment. The plugs are in stupid places, the toilet is cramped into a corner, the hot water is at best tepid, there’s no storage or blankets and, worst of all, no internet. I message the property manager several times to let him know that the network and passwords he’s given me are bogus, but he keeps assuming that I’m a stupid old man who doesn’t know the difference between upper and lower case. Eventually, he stops replying.

We’re here for a wedding. It’s a romantic story involving our neighbour’s son who grew up with our eldest. When Putin invaded in 2022, our neighbours took in a Ukrainian refugee as part of whatever Johnson was pretending to do at the time, and it blossomed from there. When it was announced that Felipe had proposed to Daryna we were amazed because his parents had denied the relationship for years, but it transpires it started a few weeks after she arrived. They had managed to hide it somehow.

The code for the wedding is ‘dressy casual’ according to the invite. “What does that even mean?” I ask Mrs Mad, but she doesn’t know either so I google it and the first article I find asks: ‘What does dressy casual even mean?’ I want to wear what Zelenskyy was wearing at the White House but it turns out that would have been disrespectful, so I dry-clean an old suit I’d sworn I’d never wear again.

Thirty of the older guests are piled into mini vans and the traffic’s so bad I assume the whole of București is also going to the wedding. It’s a lovely spot by the lake at a place called Buftea and the weather is beautiful - a pleasant 18c, no wind or cloud. The bride looks lovely and is a fashionable 15 minutes late and the ceremony lasts 45 minutes, everybody welling up, although I cry at the cricket. Reaching for her tissues, Mrs Mad’s phone inadvertently plays Romanian techno during the vows, even though she’s put it on airplane mode, and she’s mortified. Of course, I’m blamed.

Then the whole wedding is repeated in Ukrainian. I’m joking. However, we did once go to a wedding which lasted several hours because everything needed to be translated from English to Polish.

I’m sure the bride and groom would have been more nervous had they not actually gotten married several months ago.

There are seventy guests from at least twenty different countries, I’m guessing. American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Canadian, Danish, Egyptian, Hungarian, Israeli, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Mexican, Moldovan, Polish, Portuguese, South African, Spanish and, of course British, Romanians and Ukrainians. I’m careful not to offend the whole world in a few hours by doing a Trump. I’m also not allowed to mention Trump.

The canapés and drinks start at 4pm. There’s a menu on our table and an unannounced prawn cocktail which I assume is the fish course, the canapés having been the starter, but at 5pm a huge plate of starters arrives. They pace the wedding well, but by 7pm, when the real fish course turns up, I’m wondering how I’m going to make it to midnight, having only had ten hours sleep the previous two nights. The ‘first course’ comes at 8pm, the mains at 9pm and the six dessert courses, seven if you count the pre-dessert of ice-cream ‘wedding cake’, at 10:30. It’s mainly very good but as I stare in dismay at my confit duck main course, I realise I’m defeated. The constantly refilled glasses of free booze don’t help either.

There are a lot of heart-felt speeches, slow and quick dancing followed, later, by wild Ukrainian dancing with an over-enthusiastic skinny guy in a tight-fitting bright blue suit doing impromptu somersaults. The bride and groom surprise everyone by doing a perfect waltz in a sea of dry-ice.

The bride throws the bouquet over her shoulder and it torpedoes past the waiting girls into the head table, landing on the lap of the groom’s mother.

The best place to be is the smoking terrace, where every random guest you talk to is from another part of the world. Like the UN of non-arseholes. A guy asks how I’m liking the music and, assuming he’s one of the guests, I tell him I hate the too-loud techno. Turns out he’s the DJ. We’re allowed a brief respite of soul music.

I don’t get invited to many weddings these days, but this one was special. I felt privileged to be there.

9^th March 2025, București

After the wedding we get back to București about 1am. The streets are still packed, the night is still young, but we’re not.

The next day I’m not particularly hungover, perhaps because of all the food and I paced myself. Maybe the impromptu dad-dancing. Still trying to work out why each guest was given a whole uncut lemon and a die.

It’s a scorching 19c with no cloud cover. The Romanian Parliament Building, aka Ceaușescu’s Palace, is either very near, or very large and far away.

The latter. It’s the second-biggest building in the world (floor area 365,000 square metres) and the heaviest (4,098,500 tonnes – not sure who weighed it, or why). It costs more than $8 million dollars to heat each year and 70% of it is empty. It’s also very ugly. We have no intention of taking its guided tour, even if they did do them on Sundays.

Here’s some history for you. Romania only unified in 1881, twenty years after Italy and ten after Germany. It chose the side of the Entente Powers in WWI because it wanted Transylvania, which had a Romanian majority but had historically been ruled by Hungary, and joined the Axis Powers in WWII to resist the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia (Moldova). The Romanian Army advanced as far as Stalingrad and then beat a hasty retreat. King Michael I led a successful coup against the Nazi-supporting government, proclaimed loyalty to the Allies and declared war on Germany. The Red Army swept into Romania in August 1944 and Stalin took over the country. Apart from losing Bessarabia, Romania was allowed to keep its pre-WWII borders.

The King abdicated and Romania declared a People’s Republic under its leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej who was the most loyal of Stalin’s advocates. He died in 1965 and, due to rivalry in the government, was surprisingly replaced by the relatively-young Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Ceaușescu was prepared to take decisive steps to become independent and thus distance Romania from the Soviet Union. He was initially considered the most liberal and enlightened of the Warsaw Pact leaders and denounced the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He actively courted trade and diplomatic relationships with the West and Romania was the only communist country to attend the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Ceaușescu promoted rapid industrialisation with investment in drilling and oil refineries in particular, borrowing freely from the IMF and, through the good relationship with Arab countries, becoming Europe’s main refiner of Middle-Eastern oil. He was even knighted by our Queen in 1978.

It seems somewhat surprising now, but Ceaușescu’s vision was to make Romania one of the world’s super-powers. He tried to address the problem of a shrinking population by incentivising women who had five or more children, higher taxes for barren couples, and banning contraception and abortion. This led to a huge increase in the number of orphans.

But oil prices collapsed and Ceaușescu dealt with this by imposing crippling austerity in order to service the enormous foreign debt which, to his credit, he managed to pay off. Although initially popular in Romania, his mind was turned after a visit to North Korea and he encouraged a cult of personality.  He had absolute control of the media and forbade them to show that he was a mere mortal only five-foot-six in stature. His humungous ego precipitated the demolition of the Old Town in București and the construction of his monstrous palace where work began in 1982. Romania was on the brink of starvation, București had only recently recovered from a catastrophic earthquake, but the project went ahead. This is his legacy.

It’s a six km walk around its circumference to the not-at-all signed MNAC (Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana al Romananiel). There’s a humongous cathedral under construction in an ugly scrub, and we find the unmarked door to the museum on just the fifth attempt.

It’s almost empty. The first floor is a collecting of ancient, medieval and modern artefacts in glass boxes, none of which have any order or explanation, in something called ‘the Twist,’ the twist being that it’s not modern art.

Up 200 steps in a graffitied fire escape to floor 2a/2b, where there’s an exhibition by Yugoslav artists from the 1960’s who were probably tortured and shot because, in my experience, that tends to be the theme of Eastern-European museums. Some of the statues are impressively grim, and there are lots of paintings depicting wet mud, including the snappily-titled ‘one hundred tubes of black paste.’ Mrs Mad whispers in all seriousness: ‘this is amazing. I never knew I liked conceptional art so much,’ or something like that.

My favourite floor is 3a/3b, up another 200 or so stairs, which is titled: ‘the things we’re not exhibiting.’ True to the promise, there are many interesting sculptures and paintings locked in steel cages, but there’s also an exhibition of communist-era propaganda posters and, if you know me, there’s nothing I love more than communist propaganda posters. Some of them date to 1989, the year of Ceaușescu’s downfall, although they look as though they might have been created in the 1920’s. They mainly celebrate the anniversaries of Romania’s year zero, 1944.

We would have visited another museum, but the cloudless views from the coffee-shop terrace on the top of Ceaușescu’s Palace, across the brutalist wasteland of București are so pleasant.

We decide to walk to Old Town, which looks small and is far away. We decline the offer of a taxi.

You get some idea why București used to be called the Paris of the East (along with Baku and Beirut) as there are huge grandiose art-deco buildings which may have once been hotels, but are now black from pollution, graffitied and their ground floors occupied by discount shops. Ceaușescu built huge sad housing blocks that look like prisons and expanded the boulevards, probably so they could fit tanks. Of course, the Old Town used to be much bigger.

We go for our evening meal at 6:30pm, the only time I could get a reservation. The place is called Caru’ cu Bere (the beer wagon) and it’s in a wonderfully over-the-top 19th century building. If you’ve been to București you’ve probably been here. It’s chaos, even at this time, with people trying to get in and out, not helped by the revolving doors. We’re seated up a spiral staircase in an annexe of the gallery. The lovely young waiter starts off by saying that our main courses will take at least an hour to arrive, would we like to leave? We say we’re fine with that, we’ve nothing else to do, but aren’t we supposed to be gone by 8:30? “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he says in desperation. “Please stay till midnight, I don’t want to have to serve anyone else tonight.”

The wine arrives quickly and the starters take about 45-minutes and they’re good - an assortment of meze dips involving aubergine, beans and crap roe (the Romanian name for carp). Every 15 minutes there’s some wild dancing below and everyone rushes to the gallery to film it on their phones. There’s also a man with tippex on his face, at least ten hats and a parrot, for some reason.

There’s plenty of time to go out and have a cigarette as the mains take two hours to arrive and there’s a scrum of angry tourists showing the soul-destroyed staff their phones as evidence that their reservation time was at least thirty minutes previously.

When my huge knuckle of pork eventually arrives, I’m in heaven as there’s so much crackling, and I dig in. However, it transpires that there’s only so much salt and fat one can eat. I’m also rather put off when Mrs Mad asks the waiter whether Romanians usually eat this much and what they do with the leftovers. “Oh, they feed it to the pigs,” he replies. Below the massive chunk of brined-flesh is some solid polenta, some grated horseradish and cabbage which is much too salty. To quote Greg Wallace on Masterchef, I desperately need to stick my pork into something wet. My solution is to order a bottle of red wine. Mrs Mad, as she often does, declares her trout the worst thing she’s ever eaten.

I think I’ll be able to eat my dish over the next two hours or so, but I can’t. Eschewing the offer of a monstrous doughnut, we retire defeated. It was a fun night but, whatever your reasons are to be in Romania, don’t come for the food.