Halfway down the Danube: Belgrade v. Bucharest (1)

October 20, 2003

Belgrade v. Bucharest (1)

We've been in Bucharest for four months now, after two years in Belgrade. So how do they compare? Here are some first impressions.

General layout. Belgrade is defined by its two spectacular rivers and its hills. Bucharest is mostly flat as a tabletop, and the only river is the tiny and stagnant Dumbovitsa. Point: Belgrade.

Streets. Both cities are very confusing to navigate, with a complicated mess of non-parallel streets connecting various sqares and circles. Bucharest's famous "piatsas" (very large traffic circles) do not help much.

Belgrade's streets are in better condition. Much better. One third of Bucharest's street grid seems to be under construction -- very, very slow construction. And much of the rest is in just awful shape -- crumbling asphalt, decaying road shoulders. The potholes can be terrifying.

But Bucharest at least has trees, pretty much everywhere; and the annoying Serbian habit of parking on the sidewalk doesn't seem to exist here. Yet.

Call this one a tie.

Architecture. Both cities were architecturally very impressive at one time. Belgrade, alas, got flattened by the Luftwaffe in 1941, and then again by the USAF in 1944. So a lot of the beautiful old buildings were destroyed... replaced after the war by, of course, nasty-looking blocks and ugly government buildings in the socialist realist style.

Bucharest got through the war OK, but then Ceacescu tore the heart out of it to build the People's Palace and whatnot.

Nevertheless, Bucharest still holds the edge. There are several neighborhoods full of lovely old buildings here -- we live in one -- and where Ceaucescu didn't reach, there are lots of run-down but still beautiful buildings. Point Bucharest.

Driving. Well, if you've been reading this blog, you know who wins this one. Belgrade has about three times as many cars as Bucharest, and most of them are old cars, and people drive pretty wild... and it's still much, much better to drive there than in Bucharest. Point Belgrade.

Taxicabs. Belgrade wins this one running away. Cabs are everywhere in Belgrade, and cheap. They're cheap in Bucharest, too, but they're annoyingly hard to find -- especially when it rains. You often have to call one, and even that doesn't always work.

-- I've been cheated worse in Belgrade, mind; I'd estimate that about one cab in five there has a jimmied meter. On the other hand, by far the most annoying attempt to cheat me was in Bucharest. That was the taxi driver who negotiated a fee with me at the airport -- say $20 -- and then spent the entire 20-minute taxi ride pleading, cajoling, blustering, wheedling, and generally making a non-stop nuisance of himself in an attempt to get a higher price. Unforgettable. And both cities have a, shall we say, laissez-faire attitude towards making sure their taxies are clean and in good repair; and both Serbian and Romanian taxi drivers are likely to view the use of a seatbelt as vaguely insulting.

But I take a lot of taxis, and statistically speaking, it's just way better in Belgrade. You can get a taxi in Belgrade, and that's the big thing. Point Belgrade.

Public transport. Very inexpensive, but always overcrowded, and uncomfortable in hot weather. That's true for both cities. I think Belgrade has better buses, but Bucharest has a metro (subway) which Belgrade doesn't. The Bucharest metro has its little quirks -- its incredibly badly signed, so you have to count stops -- but it's cheap and it's clean. So point Bucharest.

Shopping. Talking about groceries and other essentials here, not the darling new handbag from Prada.

It's Bucharest. Belgrade had only one superstore when we left (a Mercator), though I understand more are coming. Bucharest has six or eight of them, including one right in the city center.

Now, you can curl your lip at superstores, but when you have a couple of very small kids, they just become very, very attractive. In Belgrade Claudia had to go around to three or four different C-Markets to get her shopping done. (C-Market is a chain. They're little general grocery stores, about the size of an American 7-11.) And the stores were always plagued by strange shortages. Sometimes only one store in the neighborhood would have, say, canned tomatoes; sometimes nobody would. But you couldn't know that until you'd pushed the stroller to three or four or five different stores...

In addition to the superstores, Bucharest also has Nics. These are OK neighborhood grocery stores -- like the C-Markets, but bigger -- and there are a couple of them just a few minutes up the street from us.

About the only downside is, we can't find good meat here. In Belgrade, we had a great little local butcher shop right around the corner. Here in Bucharest... well, we're considering giving up on red meat altogether. It's mediocre at best. At worst it's scary. And the ground beef has, um, things in it.

Nevertheless, Bucharest clearly takes the prize for shopping. If we couldn't buy our milk in bulk, well, we'd be making a lot of milk runs.

Weather. Seems to be about even so far. We had a beautiful September here; it's been raining like mad the last week or so. Maybe an edge to Bucharest, but it's too soon to be sure.

Baby-friendliness. Belgrade, hands down. Serbs are completely baby-mad. Sometimes intrusively so -- it can be a bit annoying when strangers stop you in the street to say that your baby's feet aren't covered -- but on the whole it's nice. We never lacked for help in, say, carrying a stroller up stairs.

Romanians aren't hostile or anything like that, and they can be very friendly once the ice is broken, but they're much less likely to initiate.

Do I need to point out that this list is completely subjective and idiosyncratic? I take a lot of taxis, so I can make the comparison. I don't have a lot of time to visit bars and dance clubs these days, so I can't really tell you how the night life compares (though I suspect Belgrade has better music and Bucharest more, mm, adult entertainment venues).