BusinessEnglish1: Sightseeing Bucharest

Hi everyone!

This week we visited Bucharest, the capital of Romania.

Bucharest has seen a violent history but that is exactly why it is so interesting for tourists. Bucharest has seen a lot of trouble in the past years, so if it’s bullet holes you’re after you have come to the right place!

But don’t be mistaken, all the misery put aside, Bucharest has some beautiful things to offer.

The first monument we saw was the ‘Arcul de Triumf’, Bucharest’s Arc de Triumph. It was raised in 1922 to glorify the bravery of the Romanian soldiers who fought in the First World War. The original Arc was made of wood, but it was replaced by a concrete structure in 1935.

Our next stop was the Village Museum, one of the world's most interesting ethnographical parks in open air. Here you can see 50 complete homesteads, churches, windmills and even sunken houses from rural Romania. Another museum we visited that day was The Peasant Museum. There is a room filled with a collection of communist-era busts, paintings and nostalgic memorabilia. There are a number of paintings of Stalin and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Be sure to take a Romanian speaker along to translate the often chilling newspaper articles that are stuck on the walls.

A must see was of course The Revolution Square, on of the city’s most important squares. It is surrounded by symbolic buildings such as: Hilton Hotel, the former Athenee Palace Hotel built in 1883 end the highest building at the time; the Romanian Athaeneum, the headquarters of Romanian Athenaeum Society, which had as purpose spreading cultural and scientific information; The National museum of Art; the Kretzulescu Church, a monument with mesmerizing architecture, the art of the Brancoveanu epoch; the Memorial of Rebirth; the Central University Library and so much more. You can spend an entire day just wandering from building to building. There is just so much history.

On our last day we visited the Palace of Parliament., also called the House of People or the House of Ceausescu. It was built somewhere from 1984 – 1989. It is the largest administrative construction in Europe; it has hundreds of offices, halls for receptions or other events, dozens of conference rooms. It is the second biggest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon building in Washington. After our visit to the parliament we decided tom make a stop at Ghencea Civil Cemetery. It’s about 3 km west of the Palace of Parliament. It’s rather unimpressive, but it is home to the graves of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989 after the communist government was toppled.