LAST DAY

everything is on a really grand scale. The “People’s Palace” aka Coucescu’s palace is the second largest building in the world. Only the Pentagon is bigger. But all the buildings around it are huge as well.
Ceaucescu took advantage of an earthquake in 1977, or at least in the 70’s, to demolish a lot of area around his palace on the premise that it was dangerously damaged, and replace it with luxury apartments for high level flunkies. Most of those people managed to grab a lot of money at the end of the regime and now have places in the countryside.
These apartments now rent for $1000 a month, mostly to foreigners who can afford such outrageous rent. The average salary in Romania is about $700 a month. Of this, about $200 is what the employer claims he pays and the other $500 is under the table. This is because employers have to pay a huge percentage of tax for medical insurance, social services, etc., on an employee’s salary, so they claim to pay them next to nothing to avoid the taxes. But even in Romania, nobody would work for that, hence the under the table payments. On the other hand there are no such taxes on the government, so a person who works for the government is more likely to get the actual salary they say they are paying. Talk about a system dootmed to failure. You can never build any infrastructure, because the whole system is based on a lie. If the picture with the wires comes out anywhere near this, you can sort of see what I mean. Westerners are apparently allowed to ride roughshod over any kind of rules and regulations -- in fact, everybody bribes everybody here. The wires are because anybody can put up any wires anywhere they can find a place, so the whole area is ugly with all these wires.



They also took us to a nice beer hall restaurant today. Our food was chicken soup, fried cheese !!! with mashed potatoes and custard. Basically a gold-colored meal. Thee fried cheese was really good, but perhaps just a bit too heavy. Even I didn’t eat all my food. However, the restaurant itself was really fabulous in a kind of a Jungenstile way.

***We had a city tour on the bus which was just awful. Usually a bus tour is not great, but all right, but on this one we went past the same things multiple times and by and large they weren’t that interesting the first time. When they finally dropped us off at our hotel, they told us that the outdoor museum was a ten-minute walk.
If I had gone by myself, it might have been a 20 minute walk, but four of us went together and it was more of a 40 minute walk. This is because everybody else thought it was hot. I thought it was nice. The museum was really interesting with traditional houses that had been brought from all over Romania and gave you an idea of the different types of houses people had built over the years – thatched roofs, cellar construction, various things.
Plus it was quite and peaceful and just a nice place to be. It seems like it might be the kind of museum they take kids to during the school year. Because everybody but me was dying of the heat, and because we had to be back to the hotel by 6 p.m., we took a taxi back. Five of us went in the taxi and the ride was 10 leu, which is about $3. The guy who paid it apparently gave him as much again for a tip, mostly because once you leave there, you can’t use the leu anywhere. I’m not sure why they don’t use the euro there anyway, because it is a member of the EU. Anyway, you can see from the pictures what a nice place the museum was, and even Zoe thought it was worth the walk, after she got cooled off.