Pete Codes
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

Good times in Bucharest

I had a terrible time in Cluj as you can read about here. Arriving in a big, dirty city like Bucharest felt like bliss. I arrived on the bus from the airport at 10:30pm and the city felt so alive with people and activity. It was so exciting arriving in a new city for the first time but all the more so at night.

I had thoroughly checked out the hostel I was staying at given the hostel from hell in Cluj I stayed at. I was already pretty keen for this place as it was an X hostel and I had stayed in the group’s hostel in Alicante earlier this year and had a great time. When I arrived I got a great welcome from Edin at reception. It helped that he didn’t immediately leave his post as soon as he had checked me in unlike in Cluj. All the staff at the hostel were locals and really helpful with everything. I got a free upgrade to a better room which helped and I headed straight for bed.

While I stayed in Bucharest I worked on adding internships to Living Wage Interns, a site I made to help solve the problem of people having to work for free when starting their careers. I had recently made an infographic with Canva for think tanks in the UK that pay the Living Wage. The first time I did this I got a lot of reaction and attention on Twitter which was good. I made a second one in Bucharest but this time there wasn’t so much reaction to it for some reason, possibly because I covered smaller groups this time.

Anyway, it was good to be doing some work from the hostel when it was too hot to be outside. Every day it was hitting the low 30s. The WiFi in the hostel was good enough to work with and every room had air conditioning which was a welcome change from Cluj! I had done some budgeting at the last co working space and realised there was no way I could go to a 10 euro place each day so I would have to work from public WiFi until I was settled somewhere. I had decided to spend 5 days in Bucharest just so I wouldn’t be on the move each day and I could relax for a bit.

After doing some work I went out and did a walking tour of the city. Bucharest it has to be said has a bad reputation but it is an interesting place and there are still parts of the old town that the Communist dictatorship didn’t completely destroy. There is also a copy of the Arc de Triomphe which was built in the late 1800s after victorious Romanian soldiers returned from fighting the Ottoman Empire.

There are actually quite a few French- style buildings in Romania since after becoming independent the country wanted to appear more Western and shake off the legacy of being part of the Ottoman Empire. Hence at the time the city was known as the Paris of the East. Of course a lot of these buildings were destroyed in the Communist era.

The main attraction in town is of course the gigantic parliament which the dictator Ceaucescu built in the 1980s. It’s said to be the biggest parliament building in the world. It has 8 underground levels, metre thick walls and is generally what happens when you give an ego maniac complete power. An entire suburb had to cleared to make way for the building works with 40,000 people losing their homes. Many soldiers were forced to work on the building and all this went on while people lived very tough lives economically.

Everyone said you have to book the tour online. The website kept failing so I just showed up early and they let me in. The interior of the parliament is full of marble floors, huge ballrooms and ridiculously wide corridors. Our tour guide was good and he explained after an hour of walking up and down lots of stairs and covering many rooms that we had only seen 3% of the building. The absolute best part of the tour was the view from a balcony looking down the boulevard which Ceaucescu made marginally longer and wider than the Champs Élysées for egotistical reasons. The boulevard is flanked on both sides by monstrous communist era tower blocks so there is something very dystopian about the view.

Aside from that I mostly hung out with people at the hostel. There was a cool American programmer who brought me to a cheap diner he had found that had bargain lunches with huge portion of rice and chicken. I also hung out with a couple of Scottish digital nomads who were from my part of the country so that was a nice coincidence. It definitely made a huge difference being in a sociable hostel where there were always people chatting and up for going out places. I suppose Bucharest won’t be for everyone but for it was great to be in a big city for a change and really interesting to see communist buildings like the parliament.

Pete Codes

Written by

Indie maker. Learning Python.

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