I’m sitting on a comfy bed in our quaint hotel room in Brasov, Romania.  Located within the old city walls, we can almost touch the house across from us. We took a four-hour train ride here yes­ter­day from the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

An example of the grand, eccle­si­ast­ical archi­tec­ture found in Bucharest, Romania.

After our time in Madrid and Morocco, it was refresh­ing to see the lush envir­on­ment, farmer’s fields, foot hills and tree covered moun­tains out the train window.  The first thing I noticed about the build­ings and houses outside of Bucharest were the roofs. They reminded me of a mixture between a barn and archi­tec­ture com­monly found in Germany.

However, within Bucharest we were con­stantly sur­roun­ded by massive, sad looking apart­ment com­plexes from the com­mun­ist era, huge public parks and the few build­ings  (like the ones below) that sur­vived the 35% demoli­tion of the city by com­mun­ist leader Nicolae Ceausescu when he built numer­ous com­mun­ist blocks. Prior to his rule, from 1965–89, Bucharest was known as “Little Paris”.  I’m not sure what it looked like then, but today it is a very archi­tec­tur­ally inter­est­ing city.

Yet another example of the eccle­si­ast­ical archi­tec­ture in Bucharest, Romania. Huge modern bill­boards mix with an archi­tec­ture from the past.

We explored the most famous piece of archi­tec­ture, the Palace of Parliament, with our CouchSurfing host, Fatih.

Fatih, enjoy­ing some shisha at the Hooka cafe he took us too.

The build­ing is 330,000 m² (3.55 million sq ft). In 1989 they had all the mater­i­als to com­plete the con­struc­tion.  Construction was done around the clock and workers were extremely overworked.

The Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, Romania.

After enjoy­ing a one-hour guided tour (offered every 30-minutes) I real­ized the build­ing is not just big but abso­lutely over-the-top. Every hallway, stair­case and con­fer­ence room is con­struc­ted out of various types of marbles, numer­ous sizes and shapes of crystal chan­deliers and more gold than I ever ima­gined. Power. If Ceausescu wanted to convey this, he suc­ceeded.  The only hitch is the build­ing is still not com­plete! Almost 10% remains to be built because con­struc­tion ceased abruptly on December 25, 1989.

The memorial to those who died during the 1989 Romanian revolu­tion, and the build­ing in the back­ground is where Ceausescu gave his last speech.

The balcony in the back­ground of the photo is where Ceausescu stood on December 15, 1989 deliv­er­ing a speech to his rather upset country.  The crowds jeering and polit­ical protest­ing res­ul­ted in the police opening fire.  Thousands of people took to the streets the next day and before Ceausescu could do any­thing about it, power had slipped from his hands.  He and his wife found them­selves in front of a firing squad only five days later on December 25, 1989.  With that, Ceausescu’s com­mun­ist country came to a crude end, one that you can actu­ally watch on YouTube!  In memory of the people who lost their lives during the 1989 Romanian revolu­tion this monu­ment was constructed.