Second largest office building in the world (the largest is the Pentagon).
First time I’ve been required to leave a passport while visiting a building.
While waiting for the tour to start American soft rock is playing, Elton John’s Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, and now Aerosmith Dream On. It’s the 1970s again. A group of Chinese tourists is lining up, listening to Aerosmith in Bucharest, a postmodern pastiche.
The Chinese group has apparently booked their tour in advance. I, however, haven’t. While I wait for the next tour a bus with an American tour group arrives. The group is mostly couples, all in their 50s and 60s. Many men and women wear shorts. It occurs to me that I’ve seen German male tourists wearing shorts sometimes, but the men in the various countries I’ve been traveling through don’t wear shorts. I did not pack shorts before I left the States last year. Everyone wears a plastic lapel name tag: „Insight Vacations“. I have no tag but don’t feel underdressed. „Insight Vacations.“ I don’t feel that I’m on vacation – I feel I’m just traveling. But insight – insight I like.
I had thought the name „Palace of the Parliament“ was a euphemism, and had expected long corridors of offices, along the lines of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin. This was way off the mark. It’s difficult to communicate the scale of this building. We walked a kilometer over an hour and the guide said we saw about 4% of it. The rooms are enormous, and there is marble, crystal, oak everywhere. It’s incredible.