Our bed is shaking. It’s 6:50am and its not because of anything we are doing. Our phones display an earthquake alert registering 5.3 on the Richter scale. We had heard in our walking tours that Romania has had several severe earthquakes. The last bad one was in 1977 registering 7.2 and over 1,500 people were killed.

After a filling breakfast at the hotel, we head to our 10am tour  of the Palace of the Parliament.

This parliament building is the second largest administrative building in the world…the first is the Pentagon. It is also the heaviest building in the world; constructed mostly from Romanian marble…and it is sinking.

The building was the vanity project of Nicolae  Ceaucesea, last communist leader of Romania. He was dead before it was completed (executed on Christmas 1989).

Ceaucesea had a large balcony built from which he could make speeches but as he died and later rulers decided against making  balcony speeches, the first person to make an appearance on the palace (parliament) balcony was Michael Jackson in 1991, who made a big faux pas by shouting out “Hello Budapest!” Wrong city…wrong country.

Click here to see an intro video for his 1992 concert. .. surprisingly, I cannot find any videos of his faux pas.

The tour takes an hour. We see large rooms and hallways built to impress. Communist architecture at its finest.

We take the subway to Aviatorilor Station. Nearby is the smaller replica of the Arch de Triumph. Bucharest has many influences from France.

We head into the Village Museum . This outdoor museum is filled with old, small houses, churches, barns etc that have been saved and transferred here from all over Romania. It is set up like a village on one side of a lake.

It is the perfect, warm, fall day to visit this park. Leaves are on the ground, the trees are colorful and the sun is shining. We take our time walking around and stop for lunch at one of the old buildings which previously was an inn.

Leaving the village, we walk back to the Metro through Herastrau Park. I spot a statue of Mark Twain…I am not sure what his connection to Romania is. An old lady feeds the pigeons. Many other people are enjoying the afternoon sunshine in the park.

We head back to the hotel for a rest before heading out for one last supper in the Old Town.

Our tour guide told us about a restaurant that serves traditional Romanian food like his mother makes called La Mahala. We find the sign on the street and go down  a narrow alley to a quaint little outdoor patio. Most of the diners are Romanian.  This place has more atmosphere and better food than the tourist place we went to last night.

We notice on the menu, as at other restaurants in Bucharest, that in addition to listing the food options, there is a section listing what cigarette packs you can purchase.
Romanians are big smokers, it’s sad seeing so many young people puffing away.

I try a traditional bran sour cherry liquor which just about burns my eyebrows off…but then again, I rarely drink hard liquor so I shouldn’t be surprised how I react.

After dinner we walk around Old Town. The bars and streets are packed with English football (soccer) fans who have travelled here  to support their team, West Ham, which is playing Bucharest FCSB. They are singing team songs and drinking lots of booze. I can hear a symphony of empty bottles rolling around on the cobblestone streets. There is a heavy police presence to keep everyone in order. Click here to see a short video.

We talk to a fan who is here with his 78 year old father to watch the game. He tells us that from the Old Town they have buses arranged to take the West Ham fans to the stadium for the 10:00pm start time. The late start is to accommodate the British TV audience back home where it will be 8:00pm.