Bucaresti - observations and our weekend

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So we've been in Bucaresti (how the locals say Bucharest) for about a week now and I've made a couple of observations of the area:

1 - Taxi drivers are apparently crazy EVERYWHERE!! Every single city I've been to so far has taxi drivers that drive crazy! You're almost scared for your life every time you get into one. Unfortunately - taxi is our mode of transportation here so we take at least 4 taxis a day (to and from work and then for dinner). At least once a day we're ALMOST in some type of accident where the taxi driver ends up cursing out the other driver in Romanian....

2 - Romanian people are some of the nicest and most accomodating people I've met outside of the States. In Amsterdam I realized that "the customer is NOT always right" and usually they don't care if you want to tailor your meal or if you request something special. Here, our hotel staff has been extremely polite and the service is great...that's pretty much been my experience everywhere here. Dinners don't take 3 hours like in Amsterdam - only the expected 1 hour here. And our office staff in the Romanian office is ALWAYS polite, helpful and cheerful. It's very refreshing.

3 - However...Romanians also have the most disgusting smoking habit I've seen (not sure if there's a correlation there). Probably about 85% of the people I've seen around have a cigarette in their mouth. Even the taxi drivers smoke while they drive customers around. If you see a smoker - there's ALWAYS a cigarette in his/her mouth...while eating, while driving, while working, etc. It's definitely impossible to go anywhere without coming back wreaking of smoke! Sooo nasty :-(.

OK - so those are a few observations I've made this week...on to this weekends events:

Friday night (6.15.07)

So those of you I've talked to this week know that I've had a little bit of a stressful week. My job's still better than my previous one, but I've gotten a lot more responsibility this time and still don't know much about the company... which adds to the pressure of getting everything done in a few weeks while we're here.

Basically, by Friday - I was in desparate need to shed "work Ambika" and let "fun Ambika" come out and play...

We left work a little early and I hit the gym as usual to work it out and relieve some stress/feel better. Afterwards, I met up with my co-workers Rafael and Sonia (Sonia is our IT Auditor joining us for 2 weeks) for dinner. We were all pretty hungry so we decided on an early dinner tonight. The Marriott has a bunch of great restaurants inside of it so we headed that way to get some grub. Side note - we were supposed to stay at the Marriott but due to some issue with the rates, we would have had to move hotels in the middle of the week. As a result, we decided to stay at the Hilton the whole time. Now after seeing the Marriott - we shoulda stayed there!! it's a really beautiful hotel that's so massive it has over 6 restaurants plus countless shopping stores and even a pharmacy! oh well...live and learn.

We decided on Cupola - one of the nicer, more expensive restaurants in the hotel that was recommended by both our fellow co-workers that were here the weekend before as well as our PwC translater, Diana, that's been extremely helpful in recommending places to eat and things to do while we're here. Well, they were right about recommending it. Since we had gotten there around 7:30, we were the only ones in the restaurant for a while...kinda nice. Every part of the meal was fantastic! from the bread to my caesar salad and grilled chicken with sauteed veggies. yummm! Well, we were done around 9:30 or so and wanted to head to a bar for a couple drinks and to check out the local scene since Bucaresti isn't much of a "tourist" city. Apparently bars/clubs are spread out throughout the city, so there isn't just one area to go to and hang out for the night. I asked the Marriott concierge where he recommended for us to go. For some reason Rafael wanted to hit up an Irish Pub (in Romania? not sure why)...so there were 2 options. The concierge put us in a cab and sent us on our way to the Dubliner. kinda dive-y but nice cause it was definitely a local pub. of course - everyone there was smoking, so i'm sure my lungs are nice and black by now - yuck! we chilled and talked/joked around for a while and did some people watching, but by midnight we all were ready to call it a night. Sonia isn't much of a party-girl and I think we all just wanted our beds and to sleep in on Saturday.

(at the Dubliner)

Saturday - 6.16.07:

We met up around 11am (slept in until 9am today - woohoo!) to head over to the Parliament and the Village Museum for our day's excursions. This weekend is more chill because 1 - there isn't a whole lot of stuff to see and 2 - Greece is gonna be crazy and I'm gonna get very little sleep next weekend. So the Parliament is the 4th largest building (usable space) in the world. It's a huge square and is the #1 largest building in terms of mass (The heaviest building in the world is made of 1 million m³ (35.3 million cu ft) of marble from Transylvania and 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze. The building also features 3,500 metric tons of crystal glass and 900,000 m³ (31.7 million cu ft) of wood. It measures 270 m by 240 m (885 ft by 787 ft), 86 m (282 ft) high, and extends 92 m (300 ft) below ground.) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament

It was truly an amazing building!! Really extravagent and beautiful on the inside even though you can't really tell from the outside. It's definitely more of a palace than a government building.

- this was on the floor of the Parliament and is a "map" of the bldg

oh - another side note.....i don't know what the deal is with us and taxis - but here's a funny story. so in the morning we went to catch a cab outside of the hotel. Rafael sees a taxi driver that we'd used before so he goes straight for the guy cause he liked him. Sonia and I weren't really sure what he was doing cause there were 3 other taxi's right in front of the building. but whatever. so the guy takes us to the Parliament, but on the way over there he's speaking to Rafael in broken English/Romanian (which apparently is fairly close to Spanish since they both have Latin backgrounds). So him and Rafael and talking and the guy is suggesting that we go to the Village Museum later that day after the Parliament. Rafael informed him that we were planning to do that afterwards so the taxi driver says he'll wait for us at the Parliament since it's only 1 hour and then take us to the Museum after. Now - at this point Rafael looks and me and I said "you know I'm gonna say NO"...I definitely didn't like the sound of that, but the guy just kept talking to Rafael. So he drops us off and Rafael thought that it would be too difficult for us to catch a taxi from the Parliament and tells the guy to wait for us. I'm really unhappy about this, but Rafael's gonna pay the guy so it's up to him. After our tour, the driver takes us to the Village Museum and offers to wait again. This time, Rafael said "no" and the guy wanted 100 RON for his time/driving. Rafael wasn't expecting to pay more than 60 (which is about 30 USD), so they had to bargain and argue about the price. Obviously - I knew that was going to happen, but not my problem!

OK - so we get to the Village Museum and Sonia wanted some lunch since she doesn't eat breakfast. Rafael and I weren't hungry but I offered to stop somewhere first and get something for her to eat. I know i wouldn't have been able to enjoy anything if I was hungry. But we followed Rafael inside since he had already gotten his ticket (are you noticing a pattern here?) and just got a soda each to hold us over and deal w/the heat...it was HOT today!

- some cute kids at the Village Museum

We walked around for a bit...basically this "museum" is an outdoor park-like atmosphere that has models of old villages depending on which region you're in: Transylvania, Moldova, etc. It just shows the differences between regions back in the day and how their daily life was. It was really cute but between the heat and the fact that we were all ready for some food, we didn't stay too long.

There weren't too many taxis around the area so we walked a little and caught one off the street. We had gotten this "in your pocket" book on Bucharest so based on the list of restaurants listed in there, Sonia wanted to check out this "Tex Mex" place called Amigos. We showed the taxi driver the street address and info and turns out he was a newby and didn't really know his way around town yet. He had to call his boss twice and even pulled over to ask a fellow taxi driver how to get there. Kind of a mess - and I think we drove all around town to go somewhere that was maybe 10-15 min. away from where we were. Luckily we don't have to pay for taxis and they're pretty cheap - but another adventure...oh wait! not done w/the adventure yet. So we finally get to Amigos and it's around 3pm. This book said that the restaurant was open from noon to 1am, but failed to mention hours during the day that they'd be closed. At 3pm when we get there, the sign on the door says it'll open at 5pm. soooo - we ask the taxi driver to just take us back to the hilton (we were all a little frustrated by then). He said "no"....haha - the taxi driver doesn't speak English and I'm not exactly sure what the confustion was, but he called on some guy who had just parked his car across the street to try to translate for us. Just our luck, but the guy happened to be one of the owners/General Manager of Amigos! When he realized we had gone there for lunch, he said "don't worry - we won't let you leave hungry...c'mon in and we'll fix you something". His English was great and he was soo nice to us. He was having a staff meeting, but opened the restaurant for us and had a waitress serve us, etc. The food wasn't too bad either. Tasted like something you'd get in the States. Turns out the guy lived in the States for 30 years (LA, Vegas, and Ft. Lauderdale) and then moved back to Bucharest about 10 years ago. Really great guy - Viorel Mihailescu. If anyone's ever in Bucharest, you should check it out. It's on of 2 "tex mex" places in the city and i've heard the other one isn't that great. He just opened the restaurant a few months ago and mainly gets his business from Ex-Pats and a few tourists/visitors. So he told us that he has a DJ at night and asked that we stop by later. As they were soo great about serving us when they were technically closed, I thought it only right to go back and support him.

- we all needed a good Corona after our crazy day of Taxis.

After lunch, we headed back to the hotel for some R&R and "quiet time" as I like to call it. Basically - I need some space from my coworkers! I mean, there's only so much time you can spend w/people. We agreed to meet for dinner around 9:30pm...when we all met up and walked around the area to see what's close, we realized that none of us were hungry! we'd eaten such a late lunch that it hadn't even digested by dinner time. We found a nearby restaurant of locals and ended up just ordering dessert for our meal :-). I had this crepe w/chocolate (nutella) and vanilla ice cream - yum!!! Rafael had some ice cream and Sonia had some donut-type thing. we were all pretty satisfied and then decided to hit up Amigos to see our new friend and have a few drinks. Apparently there was a pretty big party there from the American Embassy (40-50 ppl) and some of them hung around afterwards. The margaritas were yum! we hung out for a while and chatted up w/the owner and one of the managers. they were both really nice and gave us their card if we ever had problems with anything or needed anything. The owner, Viorel, also told us a few places to check out but Rafael wanted to check out this Coyote Cafe that sounded like it was a Live Band place. When we got there it was pretty lame and was just disgustingly filled with smoke. At that point, I just couldn't take it anymore!! I had to leave and I didn't even want to go anywhere else. I was pretty disappointed because Viorel told us about this club called Planters that was supposed to be pretty good and I just didn't want to be around all the smoke anymore so we went back to the hotel.

All this smoke is really getting to me. I woke up Sunday morning and felt like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes - it was disgusting. Unfortunately, the only way to get around it is if just stay in my hotel room for the next 2 weeks - which definitely isn't going to happen!

Sunday - 6.17.07

Today was kinda "do your own thing day". Sonia and I felt like watching a movie so we went to the local Bucaresti Mall and did a little shopping (turned out to be window shopping cause everything was so expensive!) and then watched Fantastic Four. Not great, but not bad since I had low expectations. That was pretty much my day today...unfortunately I have to do some work today, so nothing exciting. Rafael has a late night ahead of him as he's heading to a local sports bar to watch 2 football (soccer) games starting at 10pm.

Check out the link above for my Bucharest pics. I only posted a couple on this site. Next weekend - Greece!