Playing House In The Palace of Parliament (Bucharest)
Nobody had warned us that on Romanian Airlines flight #153 to Bucharest, there would be no Sky Mall Magazine. Within moments of plopping his thirteen-year-old rear end into the seat, my son, Kesha, declared that it “sucked” to anyone within earshot who had a cursory grasp of English. “Don’t say ‘sucked’,” I told him. “This is the worst airplane in the world”, he went on to explain, as if I’d somehow missed the significance of ‘sucked’. No in-flight movies. No magazine. And the water tasted funny. But that was because the expiration date on the bottle was 1998 and it was now August of 2015, as his fifteen year old sister, Carley, pointed out. She’s the sort of person who thinks it’s interesting to read expiration dates on water bottles.
Kesha, an unapologetic materialist, would rather have gone on vacation to Dubai. Kesha would always rather have gone on vacation to Dubai. Or the Ritz Carlton, or the nearest Ferrari dealership, as well as many other bling bling places he’s never been. Instead he’s going to Romania, one of the poorest Eastern Bloc countries. I’d say he’s lucky to travel. He’d say you can’t pick your childhood.
How did I choose Romania? I thought it might be more fun than Bulgaria? This is often how we've traveled, asking ‘Why not?’ rather than ‘Why?’ As long as a place was cheap, new to us and not in the middle of a civil war, we were game. As a single mother living in the Hamptons, I rented our house out every Summer and used most of the money to pay the mortgage. Then we used the rest to travel, spending as little as humanly possible.
I do not know how Kesha got this way. He’s been raised in a family that’s so bleeding-heart liberal, we’re practically hemophiliacs. We waste nothing and donate everything. We drive old cars and wear old shoes. We travel mostly to third world countries where we eat street food and try not to use plastic forks that will end up in a landfill. Poor Kesha. Sometimes I think he looks at his family as if he’s been beamed down from an alien planet and wonders, ‘Who are these people?’
For those who like to travel off the beaten path, you’d love Romania. It does not seem to be on anyone’s bucket list of top 10 or top 100 or 5000 places to see before they die. My first clue was that Barnes & Noble, with a travel section the size of our living room, had not a single guide book for Romania. When Michael Jackson played in Bucharest in 1992, he greeted the crowd with “Helloooo Budapest!” He was probably high, but still. In 2012, four hundred Spanish soccer fans accidentally flew to Budapest instead of Bucharest and missed seeing their Bilbao team play. By 2013, the need for recognition grew so acute that the Romanian chocolatier ROM ran a less-than-appetizing billboard campaign, “Bucharest…Not Budapest!” Even when Bram Stroker wrote his critically acclaimed novel, Count Dracula, which was set in Transylvania, he never actually set foot in the country.
Eventually, we’d end up loving Transylvania and the Carpathian mountains. The castles and old Saxon churches. Hiking through fields of wild flowers and visiting dubiously historical Dracula sights. Buying a pen that looked like a syringe filled with fake blood from a Dracula themed restaurant. As far as my kids were concerned, any country that was good enough for Vlad The Impaler, was good enough for them.
But first, with a day to kill in Bucharest, we visited the Palace of Parliament. Romanians do things like roll their eyes when you mention that you’re going there. They can’t fathom why we, and thousands of Chinese tourists, choose to visit this tribute to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s career of ruthless tyranny and monumental squander.
The Palace of Parliament sets a few records. It’s the worlds’ largest civilian building and the second largest administrative complex in the world next to the Pentagon. It’s the heaviest building in the world, as well as the most expensive to operate. Heating and electricity alone cost as much as they would for a medium sized city. The carpet in one of the ballrooms takes seventy people to unroll.
And here’s the incredible thing. Until you’re almost an hour into the tour, there is not one single public bathroom. Not so much as a port-o-potty anywhere in the massive weed filled parking lot. Not at the kiosk that sells too many hot liquids. Nor anywhere within a quarter mile of the crowds waiting in long lines to enter. To relieve yourself, you must first surrender your passport and follow your tour through a labyrinth of marble hallways and meeting rooms the size of tennis courts. You must patiently listen to a guide with black paint-on hair and the enthusiasm of a funeral director, as he prattles on about the history of everything. While lightly dancing from one foot to the other, you will pray not to visit all 1,100 rooms before you reach these illusive facilities. Eventually you will reach Nirvana, but will remember nothing prior to it, except maybe that Nadia Comaneci was married here.
Carley amused herself with stupid questions she wanted to ask like, "Who is in charge of taking care of the long row of dust-covered plastic ferns lining this podium?" With a government round table that rivaled that of the United Nations, "Why are there supermarket scanning tags still affixed to the giant leather chairs?” She has the uncanny ability to find fault with almost anything that moves, as well as most sedentary objects.
I could see why many Romanians hated this shrine to megalomania. Over twenty thousand “volunteer” workers labored around the clock to build it (about 3,000 of whom died on the job). It employed no less than 700 architects. The construction of the palace, which began in 1984 and initially should have been completed within two years, continues today. Currently the government occupies only 30% of the building. As we wove our way through the parquet terrain, it felt to me like the perfect Soviet blend of drab and spectacular, as if no matter how many high-wattage chandeliers were installed and no matter how much gold leaf reflected Romania’s past or potential glory, it was still a good place to fall asleep in a meeting.
If I found the tour onerous, I assumed Kesha’s brain must have been going into lock down. I assumed wrong. The Parliament Building has 480 crystal chandeliers! The marble isn´t your plain old white New Hampshire marble. It´s pink marble! Only Kesha and the tour guide seemed to know why pink marble was better than white. He had spent the entire tour playing house, reconfiguring every room for his own use, with full plans as to which of the eight levels of underground bunkers he’d use to store his Lamborghinis. And who wouldn’t want a home bigger then the Great Pyramids of Giza and capable of being seen from outer space?
Kesha was also undeterred by the hazards of the job, such as world condemnation and death by firing squad. We learned that Ceausescu elevated his seat in government meetings to appear as if he were sitting on a throne. As the guide put it, "Under Communism we are all equal. Some are just more equal than others.”
Later, over a plate of cabbage rolls and french fries, Kesha calculated that the red carpeted staircases throughout the palace were wide enough to drive down with a row of Hummers. Tired of his exaltations, his sister finally asked, “OK, but what if in order to have all this, you had to be this really mean dictator. Would you do it?" He paused. “Yes!” And then he considered his audience. "I mean, I´d just be bad for a little while and then I'd be really nice.”
The Palace of Parliament turned out to be a fun family activity after all. Why spend your summer at the beach getting sand in your sandwich when you can shoot for the stars? Czars are long gone, and being a ruthless dictator may be out of fashion, but for boys like Kesha, you can always dream.