Halfway down the Danube

BYKAPEWT spells Bucharest

Svoboda Square, in Ruse, is nice. Really nice.

It's a huge square, so big it's really a small park, with grass and lots of trees. In the center is an enormous statue of Mother Bulgaria stomping on the Turks. Around the sides are various big buildings: the City Hall, the courthouse. Several of these buildings are quite impressive and a couple of them are downright attractive. There are also lots of cafes, restaurants, and little shops.

Around the square is a small "downtown" area, with a short pedestrian mall, tree-lined streets, another park, and more shops. It isn't very big, and you can tell that Ruse's economy isn't exactly thriving. Like, there was once a McDonald's just off the main square, but it had shut down, leaving just the arches behind. An economy that can't support one McDonald's is, let's face it, pretty feeble; Belgrade has four or five, and Bucharest has at least ten. Nevertheless, the downtown area was quite pleasant. There were plenty of parents with strollers, lots of kids on rollerblades and bikes, and every other park bench had a couple of young folks in a passionate clinch. And people smiled at us.

We walked down the pedestrian street, slowly. Stopped at one point to buy a hamburger; got persuaded to buy a strange sort of Bulgarian salad sandwich instead, which would have been very good if we (okay, I) hadn't ruined it by adding ketchup. Chatted briefly with a bookseller, who had an impressive selection but nothing in English. Window-shopped a little. Ended up at a park with some sort of enormous memorial.

It was the Tomb of the Martyred Heroes, or something along those lines, and -- if you ignored the graffiti -- was really pretty impressive. I would have been interested to find out more, but there wasn't any way to get more information just then... and anyhow, there was another playground, with a really cool slide. So we turned Alan loose again, and he had an absolutely wonderful half hour going up... and down... and up again.

We walked back by a different route, which took us past a memorial cemetary full of Soviet soldiers. There were fifty or so, all with death dates in 1944. This struck me as odd, because I thought Bulgaria got out of WWII with hardly a shot fired -- the Red Army rolled up the border, the Germans pulled out, and the Bulgarians 'joined the Allies'. But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe "hardly a shot fired" was correct, but these kids were the victims of those few shots that were fired... on the scale of WWII, 50 or so deaths wouldn't even get mentioned in the footnotes. (If anyone reading this knows more, I'd be interested to hear about it.)

Getting home from Ruse involved a lot of staring intently at maps, but it was doable. It helped that there were road signs showing the way to the bridge: BYKAPEWT, more or less, meant Bucharest.

(We'd have been in trouble if we didn't know Cyrillic. But the fact is, if you're going to a country that uses Cyrillic, learning Cyrillic is not actually that hard. Dirty little secret: it looks scary as hell, but it's not actually that bad.)

Summary: we liked Ruse just fine. Nothing spectacular, but a pretty town center and friendly people. Good place to spend a quiet weekend, say. We'd go back any time.

Posted by douglas at October 16, 2003 02:40 PM