After spending yesterday recovering from our flight, mostly sleeping and then getting some dinner. You won’t believe it, but there is a Pizza Hut right around the corner from our hotel. The place was a mob scene, but it was very different from a U.S. Pizza Hut, more like a European cafe, and everyone smokes! We have gotten so used to smoke free environments, it’s really hard to have to be surrounded by smokers.

We spent today just getting oriented to the city and we can definitely feel the roots of Communism here. While there are some beautiful buildings, there are also a lot of run down, dilapidated buildings and I thought traffic in NYC was bad!

When Nicolae Ceauşescu built the Palace of Parliament he had to tear down 1/6 of Bucharest to make room for the second largest building in the world (the first being the Pentagon). When he did this he tore down mostly apartment buildings forcing people to move to smaller apartments where there wasn’t room for their pets, so they let their dogs run free in the city. Bucharest is now home to over 100,000 stray dogs!

The Palace of Parliament was built in 1984. It took more than 700 architects and three shifts of 20,000 people, working 24 hours a day for five years to build. It has 12 floors, 3100 furnished rooms, 64 reception halls, and this year the NATO summit will be held here.

We took a short tour of the palace. I had to pay an extra 30 Ron (about 15 dollars) for a permit to take pictures.

A side street that we came across.