16-VII-1968.: Bucureşti

Trip through the Carpati was rather interesting - different architecture, different clothes, different weather, even. It was cloudy and sort of rainy most of the way. Eventually we reached the Danube valley and then the big river itself. At the crossing it was rather windy, and the ferry didn't look too safe, but then hey, everybody else is riding it and there isn't any bridge over it anywhere in Romania. We made it easily to the right bank, but still... it was a bit scary.

We found a camp next to the ethnic vilage/museum in Bucureşti. Have some pictures with some kitten there. The whole place looked somehow out of place, compared to the rest of Romania, too much like a big and well ordered city. But then so it looked in Hungary etc, only not so much. The provinces in Romania looked poor, the city was in too much of a contrast. And that copy of the triumphal gate, ahem. The eternal 2nd world copycats, always trying to suck up to the west, or pretending to be as western as possible, never assuming that their own stuff may be in any way better.

The picture is of mom, posing with some government building in the back. The lone tower on the lawn was probably some ethnic thing, we saw them in a few tourist places.

Now the tristać behind mom is interesting - whether it had yugoslav plates, or local but was made in Kragujevac, or was it the original Fiat's thing, too late to know now. Just like any other eastern bloc country's capital, Bucureşti had its own assortment of western cars of unknown origins, and some surprising features of a big city - like the raised cabin for a traffic cop on any larger intersection downtown. Whether the guy was just lookout for the sidewalk traffic cops and would radio them, or he was to override the lights at times, when one of the incoming streets would become too crowded, I never knew.

The wheel on the right belonged to a sidewalk sweeper guy's cart.

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Mentions: tristać, in serbian