Today we went on a tour of the massive, opulent mansion that Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife built for his family in 1964, when he was the dictator in Romania. We heard it has 80 rooms and is 53,000 square feet, and even has a swimming pool indoors
We saw lots of marble floors, columns and stairways, fancy specially made silk rugs, some walls with carved wood and other have silk wallpaper, fancy crystal chandeliers hang in almost every room (even in bathrooms), gold accents and fixtures all over, stained glass and custommade furniture that mimics things from French kings of many years ago. Even the children’s bedrooms, which were called suites, had a sitting room (with a desk for studies), a room for dressing, a bedroom and their own bathrooms.
And that swimming room, all the walls are specially designed and made mosaic tiled pictures of rainbow coloured ocean scenes with fishes and sunshines. The tour guy said it took two men two whole years to make it.
So much over the top – opulence!
The mansion may have had some interesting things to look at but it was all much too gaudy for our liking, but outside we found some fun peacocks in private gardens to watch, and listen to. We heard that Ceaușescu saw peacocks in Japan when he visited there, liked them, so he brought some home.
The story we heard is that peacocks are supposed to bring good luck, good fortune and immortality, so that’s why he had them. He also had pictures of peacocks in his paintings and tapestries on his walls and stitched into to patterns on his furniture. It all seems a bit over the top, but that’s just like everything in the house we suppose. Anyway, we thought peacocks were they were fun to see.
This afternoon was time to relax a bit after so many days of touring, learning new things and so much. We found a little patio cafe for tea and lunch, then we headed to the Cișmigiu Gardens Park. This is the oldest park in Burcharest and started being built in the 1800s. It has artificial lakes and fountains and lots of different kinds of trees.
We watched some people rowing boats in the lake, people feeding pigeons and even found a rounded pathway of Roman era pottery and statues. We wandered down the pathways looking at all the trees that make the park so pretty, up the trails to a little hill and even crossed a couple of bridges over the little lake.
Well Behaved Kids Travel 