Ever since Eastern Europe opened to tourists in the early 90s, it's been a race to find places that are truly different and get there before Starbucks and Gap do. If you're sick of doing cowboy slammers with IT consultants in Wenceslaz Square, then the place to head for is Bucharest. The crazy, beautiful capital of Romania, Bucharest regards the outside world as a distant, unattainable place of rumour. Its population is still coming out from under one of the most extraordinarily strange regimes of the 20th century. You won't find Bucharest easy, but you will find it different.
The first thing you need to know is that Bucharest is a wreck; a junkyard of remains and ruins from half a dozen historical eras. Concrete buildings stained black by soot crowd the boulevards that once featured the grand residences and elegant arcades that earned the city the nickname 'little Paris'. The boulevards are still there, but many of the impressive buildings were swallowed by the earthquakes that strike Bucharest every 50 years or so. The first earthquake gave the city a wealth of stylish Art Deco apartment blocks. A second, in 1940, gave the post-war communist regime a chance to throw up a series of gloomy Stalinist buildings into the wreckage.
By the time a third earthquake hit in 1978, the country's loopy dictator, the infamous Nicolae Ceaucescu, was determined to rebuild the entire place in North Korean-style splendour. He aimed to adorn the city's fountain-strewn avenues with bizarrely ornate apartment blocks. He was about a quarter of the way through when he was shot on Christmas Day, 1989.
The crazy, beautiful capital of Romania, Bucharest still regards the outside world as a distant, unattainable place of rumour.
That any part of the old city has survived is a miracle, especially since the country's desperate poverty has made restoration work all but impossible. But survive it has, and the area known as Lipscani is now one of the strangest and most alluring nightlife places in Europe. To get to the clubs you have to go down cobbled streets, complete with roaming dogs, gangs of kids and potholes. The area is safe enough, but it helps to have a bag of sweets or plenty of coins if you want to make it through easily.
It may not sound picturesque, but a visit to Lipscani is worth it. The old and new jostle together in a way that's vanished elsewhere. Two doors up from a rave bar, a wedding party will have crowded out a cafe, with ancient hipsters playing trad jazz; turn the corner and a gypsy band will be playing a beer garden, with people tucking into huge plates of pork sausage and marmelik, a sort of local polenta.
Alluring as Lipscani is, what really makes Bucharest otherworldly is its new sectors. The area south of Lipscani, once known as Socialist Victory Boulevard, but today called Unirii (Unity), was built after Ceaucescu visited North Korea in 1971. He became smitten with the idea that the best way to build socialism was to create an imperial cult of ancestry around himself and his family. Here, multi-storey apartment towers march to the horizon. Because Romanians are a Latin people, the style of the buildings was like a post-modern Italianate rococo, with concrete curlicues and parapets, flowery metal balconies and overhanging verandas. It's fair to say there isn't much like it anywhere else.
To get to the clubs you have to go down cobbled streets, complete with roaming dogs, gangs of kids and potholes.
And if the Unirii is distinctive, then what it leads to is like nothing on earth. This is the notorious Casa Poporului, the Palace of the People. A massive parliamentary edifice, it's the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. To call it kitsch would be generous - marble inside and out, flute columns and more than a thousand chandeliers; it is the world's largest wedding reception centre, a monument to tawdry ideas of splendour. The building houses the Romanian parliament, but it is 90% empty - it is simply unfillable. After the revolution there were plans to blow it up - except there wasn't enough dynamite in the country.
Now it has become the symbol of the city, an undeniably unique feature, while around it swirls the old city: the broken streets; the roaming dogs; the sharp-suited EU elite, and the locals in dusty tracksuits; the cripples flashing their broken limbs outside the shopping mall; and the hookers near the ruined Metro entrance crossing themselves when a priest walks by.
It is a beautiful, tragic, harsh city. It is something else. Get there quick - it joins the EU in 2007 - because before you know it the world you left will be there with you.
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