Sightseeing in the Mindfields
Current Events 80: From Luxury to Whimsy
October 06, 2022
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After a lengthy dinner with Simona and our friends from Israel, Miri, Petra, HL and I took a costly taxi ride back to our tour group's Bucharest hotel. It was the tour's final night. We checked into a Radisson conference center with hundreds of rooms, office facilities, a large gym and an indoor pool. The anonymous corporate style of the facility s...
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Current Events 79: Caru' Cu Bere
September 28, 2022
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For our first dinner together, our friends and we went by taxi to Bucharest's central historic district of Lipscani. Simona told us that we were going somewhere special, and that was obvious as soon as we entered Caru' Cu Bere. Caru' Cu Bere is a shortened form of a Romanian expression for a beer wagon, a fitting name for the oldest brewery in Buch...
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Current Events 78: The Village Museum
September 20, 2022
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It was late afternoon when we arrived at one of Bucharest's premier tourist attractions, The Village Museum. It was situated in Herastrau Park, an extensive urban green space that enclosed a lake. Adjacent to the park was the Arcul de Triumf, modeled on the much larger memorial in Paris. The Village Museum consisted of 272 houses, windmills, barns...
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Current Events 77: The People's Palace
September 14, 2022
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While everyone was questioning Egmund, the hero of the Revolution, HL took pictures of the Kretzulescu Church. The Orthodox church was distinctive in shape as well as size. It reminded me of a ship that had docked at the edge of the square, had ships been made of brick. Its two towers could have been smokestacks. We walked to the front of the churc...
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Current Events 76: The Romanian Revolutionary
September 07, 2022
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Whatever its artistic or civic merits, the Impaled Potato was an incongruous addition to Bucharest's central plaza. The space was defined by the Royal Palace, which had become the National Museum of Art, and the University Library, the Athenaeum, and a grand hotel. All of these were exemplars of Parisian formality. The square was the place where Ce...
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Current Events 75: The Impaled Potato
September 01, 2022
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Bucharest was the largest, most densely populated city on our tour, with more than two million people. It had the fastest pace, too. Trams lumbered alongside cars and public buses in the heavy traffic. The sidewalks were full of pedestrians, including bejeaned young people walking in packs. Bucharest was undergoing an economic boom, and I could sen...
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Current Events 74: Very Little Paris
August 24, 2022
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As we approached Bucharest, the countryside yielded abruptly to equipment yards, truck depots and exurban excrescences familiar to anyone who has ever taken a highway into a North American metropolis. Before the Second World War, Bucharest had been known as Little Paris, owing to its bridges, handsome boulevards, and many buildings in French Second...
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Current Events 73: The Crossing
August 18, 2022
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We reurned to Ruse for our last night aboard the M/S River Aria. Towards the end of our farewell dinner, the chefs and their deputies emerged from the obscurity of the galley to parade around the ship's dining room. Crowned with starched white toques, they bore aloft cakes sporting lit sparklers. The servers filled and refilled our champagne glasse...
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Current Events 72: The Black Sea
August 10, 2022
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Our final stop in Varna was at the Sunny Days resort complex, where at last I could gaze upon the Black Sea. I looked across the water to the east, towards Georgia and Armenia. Tall, white hotels rose from the sand, not spaced so closely as to wall off the view but still dominating the shoreline. We were conducted to the luncheon buffet in one of t...
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Current Events 71: Rosh HaShanah in Varna
August 04, 2022
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Varna's population had increased steadily in the post-Communist era, and exceeded 330,000 by the time that we arrived. Under the Ottomans, Varna had a small Sephardic Jewish community. After Bulgarian independence, its numbers had increased enough to support a synagogue in the Neo-Moorish style. There were Ashkenazi Jews as well, some from Germany,...
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