Bucharest

Cleaning Lady at Chauchesku’s Palace, Bucherest

Wedding Dance at Hilton Bucharest

On a recent trip to Bucharest shooting a commercial we took a drive into the country side who’s highlights included Dracula’s castle, horse drawn farmers’ carts and a power station. I spotted some great looking buildings and some equally great looking people.

Sleeping

• The best place to stay in Bucharest is The Hilton. This grand old building is smack bang in the middle of town - handy for all the cafes and restaurants as well as the Old Town. There’s a wedding in the main hall most nights and it’s worth poking your head in to see traditional Romanian dancing against a back drop of a grand old ball room lit with mirrored balls and strobe lights.

Eating

• If you’re not into eating endangered species or game, you might be careful about which restaurants you choose. Caviar from endangered sturgeon, bear ragout, boar and hare all make regular appearances on a lot of menus.

Sight Seeing

• Central Bucharest’s architecture is a mix of beautiful old buildings (the city is 800 years old after all) and bleak, Chauchesku Communist-era monoliths. Chauhesku’s Palace is, they tell you, the biggest building in the world and is definitely worth a visit - not for its beautiful design at all but for it’s place in recent history. This architectural mix makes the general mood of Bucharest, very 007.

• An hour and a half’s drive out of Bucharest, through fairy-tale country side, past haystacks, castles, horse drawn carts and fields of sunflowers, is Dracula’s castle. The real deal. Vlad Dracula got his blood thirsty reputation from impaling the heads of Turks on stakes in the woods around his castle which towers over a small village atop a craggy stone mountain - just like in the movies. The tour through the castle itself isn’t as Gothic or plain old scary as you would expect (it actually ends up being more Disneyland than Nosferatu) and I couldn’t help thinking it would be much better if they ran them at night. Still, I did walk away from the gift shop with a top rate pair of plastic fangs.

Watch Out For

• The currency has recently had a zero dropped and some of the old notes are still in circulation so take care not to get suckered in by any shifty shop keepers.