Day 3 in Bucharest

Yeah, I'm late. Profuse apologies.

Anyway, Day 3 was our last day, but since we had an evening flight we could still enjoy it! We decided to stay around Old Town so we wouldn't have to hike all over creation, thus maximizing our activity-to-travel ratio for the day. Our first and only real stop was the National History Museum, which Florence and I had been dying to see every time we'd walked past. It was again incredibly inexpensive to enter-- I think a couple of euros for the two of us! But in keeping with the other museums, they offered photography rights for much more, and in keeping with my record, I passed. You would think I'd have learned by now. So, note for future travelers: always purchase photography rights. Learn from my mistakes. Your life depends on it. Sort of.

Anyway, the first gallery we entered was full of marble sarcophagi and statues (it was comic how much it felt like any old museum in Italy or France, since the inscriptions were mostly Latin). There were some more recent ones (we're talking medieval or renaissance) as well, and we were both very amused by one tombstone in particular. At first glance, it was just a traditional fifteenth-century gravemarker with a relief of the deceased lady carved into it, but it was very heavily graffitied-- so much so that we wondered where it had been before the museum. Upon closer inspection, we realized that a lot of the graffiti wasn't recent at all; one miscreant had been good enough to put in the date: "J.K. 1789"

Spiraling upward from the floor below was the base of a huge column, which looked very familiar. "Wow," Florence said, "that's a lot like Trajan's Column in Rome!" We ran downstairs to check, and... "Replica of Trajan's Column in Rome". Oh. Turns out (for anyone who is as abysmal in Roman history as I am), the Trajan Column was built at the beginning of the second century to commemorate Emperor Trajan's victory against King Decebalus in the Dacian Wars (101-102, 105-106 A.D.) The land making up Dacia, as you may have known or guessed, is nothing other than present-day Romania! The Romans were well justified in celebrating their triumph, as this marked the beginning of a particularly prosperous period due in large part to rich Dacian gold mines. I thought it very interesting, however, the amount of work the Romanian museum had put into recreating the monument-- they had painstakingly copied every single panel in plaster. It does make sense though: a fair amount of Romanian heritage, including the language, dates back to the Roman occupation.

The only other exhibit we got to see was the treasury, but it was well worth it. James would have loved the gold. They had gold jewelry and artifacts from the Bronze Age through present day, with some of the royal jewels (yes, even though Romania is a republic, there is still a royal family) on display. A lot of the stuff was pretty much in the styles we'd seen before in Western Europe, but the collection included some really different pieces pieces as well. Some of the jewelry, especially the earrings, were very reminiscent of patterns we'd seen in India, and the iconography in particular seemed Russian. Side note: I want to be a princess, if only for the diamonds. Holy cow, the royal jewelry was breathtaking.

After the museum, we spent most of our time wandering through Old Town, buying (and consuming) different flavors of Fanta, and enjoying a sandwich for lunch. A relaxing end to a busy trip!

P.S. Our taxi driver back to the airport was delightful, pointing out all the sights we hadn't quite made it to, and speaking to us again in a mixture of Romanian, Italian, and English. However, he had very strong and unusual political opinions-- said he'd never been happier than when Ceausescu had been in power (he'd been granted free housing then), and was a huge fan of Berlusconi. I wonder what he thinks of Trump.