Farewell Bucharest

It has been a busy couple of days of travel on day trips using Bucharest as our base. On Sunday, we went with the Leightons to the Black Sea (the Leightons are the Australian couple, Garry and Joy, with whom we planned our itinerary). If you REALLY like looking at corn, wheat, and sunflowers growing (millions and millions of sunflowers), the drive from Bucharest to Constanta is right up your alley as that is practically all you see for the majority of the three hour ride. If, on the other hand, you think once you have seen one sunflower you have seen them all, you might find the ride a bit tedious. I leave it you to decide into which category I fall. The seashore is quite nice and there are many hotels that face right onto the beach. The weather was quite pleasant and there were many people enjoying the sun and the surf. It was a three day weekend in Romania so it may have been more crowded than normal. We saw a bit of the older part of Constanta but could not really walk around because there was a lot of construction and renovation taking place. When we returned to Bucharest, for some inexplicable reason, I was so tired that I beat the sun to bed and probably slept for about 10.5 hours.
Yesterday, eight of us stranded Tauck travellers went to Bulgaria and were charmed by the two cities we visited, Ruse and Veliko Turnovo, both of which have retained their old charm. We found the town square in Ruse and the narrow winding cobblestone streets of Veliko Turnovo much more appealing than what we have seen in Bucharest. Seeing these two cities finally crystallized for me what makes Bucharest less than charming to me. Much of old Bucharest was razed, some thanks to WWII, and lots courtesy of Couceascu who bulldozed blocks of the city for the construction of very large monuments to him and to Communism. The homes he destroyed were replaced by apartment buildings, very ugly apartment buildings that all look alike (for those of a certain age, "little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes little boxes little boxes all the same [except the boxes are big]"). We did enjoy our visit to the Village Museum which is an outdoor museum in a park and is filled with 150 houses from all over Romania and from different eras of Romanian history; but overall, Bucharest is not on our list of cities we must see again. It is more of a been there, done that place. We both prefer the older and quainter locales such as Ruse and Veliko Turnovo, so we look forward to seeing and staying in three medieval cities for the next three nights prior to returning to Bucharest and then moving on to Budapest.
This has nothing to do with any of the above, but I thought you'd like to know that Dianne and are in the unfamiliar position of being the kids on this trip so we are making every effort to show proper respect to our elders. By the way, of the eight of us who will be travelling together for the next three days, six of us are Californians, one couple comes from Menlo Park, the other from Palm Desert. I don't know how wireless will be in our next three stops, so we may be off the grid for a bit.