"Bucharest - The Pits." a Bucharest Travel Page by RockTadgers

I hate to dismiss a town out of sight without giving it a fair shout, but Bucharest is a toilet. Correspondingly, it should be treated like the kind of public convenience you find in the local park - filthy, smelly, covered in graffiti, and full of shady characters - visited as a matter of necessity rather than choice.

I've said this to several travellers on their way to the city, and they've condescended to tell me you've got to expect a certain amount of Socialist greyness and ugliness when travelling in Eastern Europe. No ***, you patronizing wankers. Having spent time in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria, I'm a fully paid up member of the panelaky fan clulb. And having spent a short while living in a Socialist project on the outskirts of Prague, I know they can have a certain kind of battered charm. Consequently, my favourite city in the Balkans, Belgrade, is as ugly as arseholes.

So we come to Bucharest. The town where the number one selling postcard is reputedly of the monstrous Intercontinental hotel. The filth and the shocking underdevelopment of a capital in a country supposedly striving for EU membership is unbelievable. There's a depressing amount of beggars in the street, dodgy characters loitering in every doorway. There's none of the proud, outward swagger of the Serbs or the Bosnians in the citizens. They just meander around aimlessly, in a nightmare of cheap clothes and bad haircuts. The people look tired and on the breadline, and even babies have worry lines and look like they're smoking forty a day.

There are bars, restaurants and clubs to be found, but there are also vast swathes of the city centre where there's not even a small down home pub open, and if you really luck out, Saturday night's entertainment can be sitting on the kerb with a can of beer, watching a couple of stray dogs hump.

A stay in Bucharest can feel like a paranoid version of 'Groundhog Day', where each day is the same, and each time you find worse ways to make bad decisions. If you have to go there, treat it like that public toilet in the park - get in, do what you need to do, and get out as fast as you can. Bucharest is a depressing blight on Europe.