Halfway down the Danube

National Day

December 1 was Romania's National Day. National Day celebrates the union of Transylvania (which had a Romanian majority, but was part of Hungary for about 400 years) with the rest of Romania. That happened in 1918, right after the First World War. Maybe sometime I'll do a post on the weird story of what happened to Romania in that war... but anyhow, Monday was National Day, celebrated with all sorts of festivities and parades.

Unfortunately, we completely missed all of it. Both kids had a restless night -- David woke up again and again, while Alan got up at 5:30 -- so we ended up taking turns sleeping throughout the day. Also, the day was grey and rainy, which didn't really encourage us to go out and explore.

I did manage to walk up to the Arcul Triumf, the big war memorial, with David. (No, that's not the French Arc de Triumph. It just looks like it. Built in 1935, and I think it's a bit bigger than the French one.)

But we didn't get up there until after 3:00 in the afternoon, and everything was finished by then. The only thing left of the parade was a single lonely mariachi band... and no, I have no idea why a mariachi band; but there they were, big hats and all, playing their brass by the Arcul in the rain.

We did see one other thing of interest: a couple of Romanian flags with big holes cut in their centers. This was the symbol of the 1989 Revolution against Ceausescu. The flag of Communist Romania was the old Romanian tricolor with Communist symbols added in the middle; the revolutionaries simply cut out the symbols.

I had seen these flags in films and videos from the Revolution, but on Monday I saw some hanging from houses. Whether they were original flags from 1989 I have no idea, but it was interesting.

After a while it started raining harder, so we went home. And that was our Romanian National Day.

Posted by douglas at December 4, 2003 08:08 AM