Monday, July 1, 2013

Exploring the City of Joy

According to our tour guide, that is.

Tour guide? Yep! Searching for things to do in Bucharest yielded this result. Free city walking tours. It was about 2 hours long and we learned a whole lot about the city. In English. This is much more preferable than tagging along awkwardly and listening in on tours of other cities in a variety of languages...not that we have done that, of course.

I am grateful the weather actually held up today; I actually had to wear my sunglasses.

Here are some sights of Bucharest:

Vlad Tepis. Aka Vlad the Impaler. Aka Dracula....or whom he was based on, at least. You can't really tell in the pic, but even this statue was terrifying. Along with the story our guide was explaining to us, how exactly people were impaled by him? I can't ever forget it. Ew. Ewewew.

Ah it's a little clearer here.



Our guide kept saying, all these monuments (maybe he meant statues) keep appearing in Bucharest. Pretty much every week a new one is discovered. The people don't even know where they're coming from, or what they stand for anymore. Here is one that appeared today:

It's all wrapped up nicely.


And this statue is pretty famous. The Internets have meme-d it a lot. We call it the awkward statue. It is the Roman Emperor Trajan; and the dog represents the one from Rome, Capitoline Wolf, who nurses Remus and Romulus. The funky thing sticking out of the dog's head is a snake with the head of a dog. The statue symbolizes the merging of Roman and Dacian people. Dacia was the region Romania was once called, if I'm remembering this all correctly. It's a very fascinating history, and Trajan was especially known to be one of the best Emperors ever. Maybe look him up. 


And here is me. With the awkward statue.

Tomorrow morning we head off to Curtea de Arges, to see Dracula's Castle! :) 

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