The Heart of Bucharest

Cris goes to university in Bucharest, so she took me to school with her one rainy day. The first place we visited was the university library ... just have a look at all the towers and pillars and fancy windows! The inside has thousands of books, in Romanian, French, English, German, Italian, Hungarian, and all sorts of other languages. The English ones were too grown-up for me, and I couldn't read the others, but it was fun to play hide and seek among the bookshelves. The National Library is smaller, but it has beautiful white galleries and arches inside. When we visit the Mallorytown library we go to the community centre basement, but these libraries had several floors full of books.

Unfortunately I didn't have a library card, so Cris took me to some bookstores afterwards. Some are more like markets, out in the streets with a tarp to protect the books from the rain. Cris took me to a little place where they sell books that I read when I was her age. The seller sat me on the top shelf so I could look around. Cris found a treasure: a storybook that she'd loved when she was my age. We couldn't find a bag big enough to fit it so we covered it in a newspaper to protect it from the rain. It looked a bit silly, but she was so happy to have it!

Carrying the book carefully, we strolled through the downtown. (We thought about taking the subway, but I was afraid of getting squashed even flatter than I already am.) There's an art museum on one side of Revolution Square (which used to be called Palace Square, until Romania had a revolution twenty years ago). The museum used to be the Royal Palace. My favourite picture was a portrait of Santa Claus, painted before he moved to the North Pole and started raising reindeer. Back then he was called Nicholas.

Even though it was so rainy, a furry rat was scuttling through the park looking for something to eat. We tried to get close enough to take his picture, but he hurried away to hide under this piano.

Kris and I were getting a little damp, so we stopped at another book shop. Look at all the new friends I found here!

The shop was selling postcards, so I bought a set to mail home to Mallorytown. I almost toppled into the box mailing them ... luckily Cris grabbed me by the ankle just as I was about to tumble in after them.

By now it was getting late, so we hurried to the bus station. It's as big as a shopping mall! The buses are all a normal size, though. We took ours back out of the downtown, through the rain, to Cris' house. As soon as we'd hung up our raincoats and left our umbrellas to drip dry, Cris opened her newspaper package to make sure her storybook hadn't gotten wet. It's all about a trickster called Păcală and his friend, who are basically kind-hearted but love to play tricks on nasty people. Once we'd put on our pyjamas, we snuggled up in bed with the stuffed animals. Cris read me story after story, until Păcală was somehow mixed up with Vanda and huacas and the Old Sea Lion Hotel ... and I was fast asleep.