Before we arrived in Bucharest, I joked to Bedlam that to do something entertaining we should attempt to make ourselves “interesting” to Romanian intelligence services. With the upcoming NATO summit, the cops are out in full force and tensions are high, so they’re on the lookout for troublemakers.  He pointed out that these intelligence services were likely full of ex-Soviets and KGB types, but that was a long time ago right? It all seemed like a good idea at the time, but let’s start at the beginning.

Our plan was to meet up with Oasim and Liviu, two most excellent members of Isotx. I’ve been working with them for a while now but had never met them in person. Since they both live in Romania, I can’t go to Romania and not see them! We headed over to Unirii to meet up with them for lunch and also got to meet Oasim’s buddy Ali. Ali is a guy you want to know if you’re traveling since, as Oasim puts it, “Ali knows the best places to go and the best places to eat in any city in Romania”. We deferred to the expert and after some discussion ended up at one of the finer dining establishments in Bucharest: KFC.

This KFC was closer to the American version than the one I had been to in Greece. Gone was the authentic silverware, the ceramic plates, the healthy green choices on the menu. This KFC delivers the greasiest food imaginable, complete with garlic butter sauce, bread, and french fries (which we don’t even get in the US)! An artery clogged death guaranteed in 17 visits or less or your money back!

After lunch we took a walk over to the Palace of Parliament building built by Ceauşescu, which is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. The Palace itself was closed because of the NATO summit, so we just walked around the outside and marveled at the large number of police concentrated all over the area. If you were of a mind to go breaking into stores or spraying graffiti on the walls, this would be an excellent time to do it somewhere else in the city since approximately the entire police force was concentrated around the palace.

As we walked, I made another interesting observation: there are casinos approximately every 36 meters, making Bucharest a sort of mini-Vegas. There are many stories about people being ruined by gambling debts here, including one bank manager to who stole $100K from the bank (without thinking to disable the security cameras first!) spent it at the casinos. I was tempted to go in and check it out, but at the same time thinking about a repeat of the “I love you, buy me a drink!” fiasco from Athens.

We walked around the old town and saw some of the old buildings from original Bucharest that escaped destruction during the world wars and the communist regime. There is some really beautiful architecture there, so it’s lucky that we got a glimpse of this era.

After a quick walk through the old town, we did what any self-respecting group of Romanians would do on a Friday afternoon – we went to a hookah bar. I had never tried a hookah before, but Oasim convinced me to embrace the local culture. He ordered us up some flavored hookahs and fifteen minutes later I was puffing smoke and discussing politics like the men of old. We had a long discussion about Romanian history and culture. We discovered that the government is completely dysfunctional and doesn’t really work. There are so many parties which are basically the same, but there is no consensus on anything related to politics. The prime minister passes down laws which are supposed to be debated in Parliament and either approved or rejected, but since there is no consensus nobody cares and nothing ever happens. Politicians can be seen surfing the internet or playing with their phones on public TV, and not much seems to happen. We also learned that the Romanian minister of finance has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Every prediction that he has made so far has been wrong: whenever he predicts a recession the economy enjoys a booming success and whenever he predicts expansion then the economy tanks. It’s gotten to the point where everyone ignores him, although they’d probably do well to bet against him. If the prime minister catches wind of this and starts announcing opinions opposite to what he really believes and starts a race to outsmart the guy that’s outsmarting you, the economy would probably just implode like a dwarf star in it’s final stages. We also swapped some entertaining stories, such as the time I managed to get a concussion on my second snowboarding outing.

After the hookah action, we took a walk through the main park.  Ali (our resident culinary expert) was telling us about some traditional Romanian foods that we should try. These included bear and wolf (available seasonally or depending on which animals were rooting through the trash) and a special soup made out of cow stomachs (which the receptionist at our hostel later described as “One of the most horrific things she has ever tried”). We did get to walk around a lot of the city though and see the Arc de Triumph, the parks, and some of downtown.

Oasim and Ali had both lived in the middle east for a while, so they could speak Arabic and were fond of yelling curses in Arabic at random people who couldn’t understand what they were saying. As discussions between happy-go-lucky computer nerds tend to do, they took a turn toward the ridiculous and in between the Arabic cursing our group was loudly discussing  the upcoming NATO summit and the imminent arrival of President Bush from the USA. The general consensus among the locals was that Bush’s arrival was a bit of a pain, since they closed down all the streets and jammed cell phone traffic while he was traveling. Politically incorrect, perhaps, but at least Romania has freedom of speech right?

We walked down the main street of Bucharest talking and laughing, occasionally poking into the various shops that were along the road, when suddenly four policemen materialized in front of us. These weren’t your every day police officers, they came dressed in kevlar and carrying machine guns. One stern faced officer stepped forward with his hand on his gun, looking right at me, and said “Excuse me sir, do you speak english? Please come with us”