Bucharest 17 Feb 2020

Bucharest and Palace of Parliament

Just a few metres away from our room are all these beautiful buildings..

CEC palace in distance

Stavropoleos Monastery for nuns

CEC palace (state bank headquarters)

We had coffee at the famous Pasajul Macca -Vilacrosse, an indoor Street with a yellow glass roof.

Inspired by a street in Paris, now famous for smelling good from the bars serving Shisha.

Fancy coffee shop where Dave accidentally paid in Euros, saying keep the change. The waitress immediately returned the money - everyone seems very trustworthy here.

We walked to the Palace of Parliament, the largest building in Bucharest, where Parliament sits. We were right at the entrance but not realising, did an entire loop of the complex, about two kilometres. Sigh. According to David's phone, we walked 10.6 km today!!!

We joined the one o clock tour which took over an hour to see less than 5% of the building. It was very impressive. There are over 1000 rooms including conference rooms, halls and offices.

It's the heaviest building on the world, made with lots of marble.

3 ton chandelier, cleaned from the inside where it can hold up to 3 people who enter from above.

Construction started in 1984 with a young woman architect of just 28 years. She oversaw a total of 700 architects.

Entrance area

I think a world peace summit was held in this room

There is a new year's eve party thrown every year in the main hall. Tickets cost about 200 euros.

Main hall

It's lovely how you meet people when you travel. I had a silly race with an English woman on the elevator at the airport and then bumped into her at the coffee shop.
Dave sat next to an English couple on the plane and we met them at the Palace of parliament. She'd forgotten their passports so they couldn't join the tour.

I'd read about a beautiful old Inn that is now only used as a restaurant, so we headed there, not having eaten breakfast or lunch yet. It was very pretty. I had trout and Dave had lamb.