A Real Rundown on Bucharest

One of the most fantastic developments that has arisen from the world of blogs is the ability to find out what a place is really like, free from the puffery and “everything is wonderful” glossy reports you read from magazines that are, well, glossy. With no big advertisers to please and not a whiff of care about whether you actually go visit a place yourself or not, bloggers can rant on about the less savory aspects of a city and can compare it in an honest fashion to more desirable places elsewhere.

Which brings us to this Bucharest report from Leif Pettersen . Full disclosure, Leif has written about Romania for Perceptive Travel and since he wrote about Romania for Lonely Planet you could reasonably expect him to hold back. He doesn’t though, because on a blog there’s no editor telling him to tone it down (because otherwise people won’t go there and won’t buy guidebooks about the place).

Though not nearly as demoralizing as driving in Bucharest – which has unbelievably gotten worse in the past three years – five days on foot in Bucharest could break the patience and love of Gandhi himself. Hell, just sitting on a street corner can drain the hardest man’s will to live. The incessant car horns, the dense pollution, people screaming at each other, half-dead dogs and filth… Vlad Tepeş wouldn’t last 10 seconds in modern Bucharest. The first time someone drove by with a cigarette in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, splashing him with a totally avoidable puddle, he’d completely lose his shit. If only skewering wrongdoers from asshole to neck was still legal, people would probably have better manners around here.

Yes, Romania is one of The World’s Cheapest Destinations and still one of the best deals in super-expensive Europe, but that doesn’t mean you have to hang out too long in the capital.

The funniest part? He mentions at the beginning that Naples, Italy is worse. This comes on the heels of me meeting an Italian general manager at a hotel last week. We were talking about crime in developing countries and he said, “It’s not like Italy is some safe place for Americans either, yet they go there in droves. Even if you paid me a million euros a year in salary, I wouldn’t live in Naples.”