"perceiving life as a perpetual film."

First off, this is not Hannah here..haha...so whatever views, improprieties expressed here are not hers but mine. mea culpa...
Okay, think it's my turn to blog as Hannah's been doing it all this while and it's only fair that I chip in de temps en temps. =)

We're in Bucharest right now. For the uninitiated/ geographically challenged, it is the capital city of Romania; think Transylvannia and Dracula country and you're just about there. We've been here for 2 nights and it's been erm..well...ok. Pardon the marginal apathy but I guess Romania has been a mixed exprience thus far, especially when cast in the light of the other places that we have traveled to and seen. But befrore talking about Bucharest, here's some really excellent pictures of the Communist Statue Park in Budapest.. =)

A bit of history and info on the Park, though I think the name sorta gives it away..The Communist Statue Park...like communist statues in a park..duh. As we all know (right right?) that this side of the world was, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, part of the Communist bloc and with the fall of the former USSR between 1989-1991, the countries that were under the iron curtain broke free from the vestige of Soviet control and many soviet monuments have been torn down. In Budapest, they have collected these ginormous statues and made them into a park; a communist Disneyland of sorts. And these statues are muay muay huge, like 6 to 8 metres each. Take a look at the pictures...

Marx und Engels standing guard at the entrance of the Park...JWP would be so proud...

Comrade Hannah gives thanks to Comrade Stalin for the gift of finest wheat in this monument to the abundance and wealth that communism brought to the plebian.

As I said, the statues are really really huge...no wonder Napolean and Hitler lost fighting the Russians and the US with their superior arsenal could only hold them to a stalemate. If the damn soldiers were all so big...man...

Lenin contemplates das boot and saw that it was good.

It wasn't all that big a park, with just 43 statues and we managed to look at it all in about 40 minutes, but it was terribly inaccessible. From Budapest we set off for Bucharest, and in between Man Utd had the temerity to lose to Chelsea. *$&%@! Watching Mourinho jumping like a crazy horse was not the most pleasant image to leave Hungary with...come to think of it, twas rather omnious afterall, considering how Budapest is.

It's been raining intermittently all day and its rather grey and dreary. Added to that, the city itself isn't all that pretty. I mean if you have ever traveled to Europe, there is this old world charm that takes your breath away, that you can just feel. I'd call it beauty. There is no beauty, or rather it's rather hard to find it here. As I said, it's just my own opinion, but Bucharest just does not exude the same charm. That said, it's been a different kind of experience and I guess it's not completely fair to say that it's a disappointment. Romania is probably one of the poorest countries in the EU and there exist a plethora of problems, social, political and economic that have to be resolved. Anyway, here are some pictures of the city:

In front of the Plaza of the Revolution, where the first shot were fired and where the revolution commenced on the 13th of September 1989. Wet wet wet...

A fine example of communist excess. Under the dictatorship of Ceaucescu, he razed 5 kilometres squared of the city in order to build a boulevard like the Champs Elyses and that culminated in this monstrous edifice. It is really huge; a little hard to imagine it, you have to see if for yourself.

Probably the one spark in an otherwise overcast day. There was a race, the Bucharest challenge, going on and so there were pretty pretty cars. Nice.

Okies, that's all for now, will post more soon. Stay tuned for another exciting episode of Comrade Hannah visits the former Soviet homelands.