We crossed the border and after five km we knew that we would be delayed… The roads in Romania are in a very bad condition, holes everywhere, no markings, no verges
The ring road around Bucharest is a simple two-way road with signs that say you may drive here with 25 km/h, but that’s far too optimistic.  Every two km, a garage advertises with quick restoration of tires. No wonder with this type of roads…
We drove slowly to the centre of Bucharest, and since the lights weren’t working we calmly crossed every crossing by joining a long queue. Patience is the magic word. People selling sandwiches and newspapers are doing good business here, the vagrants are less lucky. We decided to go to the former palace of Ceausescu since it’s worlds’ third biggest building. Unfortunately it’s forbidden to drive through the city with a truck so the police stopped us and told us kindly how to leave…
 
  

The ringway of Bucharest
 
Staying in Bucharest
Because of some problems with forms that we will need to cross the border with Moldavia, we had to stay in Bucharest a little longer. No problem, because it really is one of the most surprising cities of our tour. Every new city to explore is a small adventure since we prefer not to travel by taxi. So: where’s the bus station, which line do we have to take, where can we buy a ticket… Using sign language we get everywhere we want. In the bus in Bucharest we needed to pierce our tickets with some kind of maxi-perforator. We chose to take line 330 that, according to our info, should lead us to the city centre, but after a while we found out that we drove out of the city! We got out of the bus, took a tram, another tram, walked for thirty minutes and got to see a little of the Romanian (and all of this for just 0,65 euro per person).  
 
Bucharest is very cosmopolitan and is also known as ‘little Paris’, but in our view it’s more a ‘bigger East Paris’. An arch de triomphe, boulevards just like the Champs-Elysee and lots of squares and parks. But with the difference that it’s full of contrast: majestic buildings are standing next to ruined houses, and next to a three-star restaurant there’s a pile of garbage of at least three weeks. Ceausescu’s former palace, now the parliament, is to be viewed from every street of the city. It looks likes it follows you when you’re walking through the city. Unfortunately, to build this palace they had to sacrifice a lot: a big part of the historic city was brought down, people were forced to move to apartments that didn’t allow animals. The result are a lot of stray dogs living in the city. In general, the dogs are friendly and so are the people that feed them every once in a while.  Even more friendly are the inhabitants of this city, they try to help us with everything we’re searching for and the service in restaurants and our hotel is great.
 
Earth Hour
On March 28 it was World’s Earth Hour, and people all over the world turned off their lights for one hour to ‘save’ the environment. Our hotel joined this action of the WWF but decided to take all energy during the whole night…
 
  
Strada Popa Soare
 

Biserica Baratiei with contrasting building…is it an apartment?
 

Centre Shoppingmall
 

The art of recycling, or recycle-art, or recycled art.
 

Piata Unirii
 
 

Made from the Truck: Bulevardul Unirii
 
 
 Parliament, former palace of Ceausescu