May 14, 2004
Lost in the Palace (2)
So up and up the little spiral staircase I went.
Up and up again. The Palace is something like 25 stories high. I soon realized that it wasn't such a great idea to do this in a suit while carrying a folder full of papers. Also that I really, really need to start running again.
Still, all staircases end sooner or later. For this one, the end came at a strange low landing under a dirty skylight. I say "low" because there was only about a meter and a half of clearance between landing and skylight, maybe less. Anyone over the age of ten had to hunch or squat.
The skylight itself was propped open; a fat snake of cables ran along the concrete ceiling, up through it, out and away. If I'd been feeling very brave, I could have pushed it open further and crawled out onto the Palace roof. Since this would have involved leaning far out from the little landing over a 20-story drop down the center of the staircase shaft, and then doing a sort of diagonal chin-up and belly-crawling out over the dirty glass, after some consideration I decided that I'd rather not.
At the end of the low landing there was a little metal door. It looked locked, but when I hunch-shuffled over and turned the handle, it swung open.
Beyond was a vast dark space with an uneven ceiling, where a lot of big mechanical things moaned and hummed to themselves. The Palace's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems? I don't know. In the distance was an area lit by a fluourescent lamp. A man was standing there, doing something to an upright surface -- it looked like he was writing on a whiteboard, but that seems unlikely.
Suddenly self-conscious, I closed the door and turned back down the stairs. I went down a couple of flights, picked a floor and random, and walked out.
Offices and more offices. People walked past me, but nobody gave me more than a cursory look. I went up and down stairs. At one point, I briefly blundered into the "Parliamentary Lounge". It was unoccupied except for a lot of tables, a waiter in a white coat, and an old lady sitting on a couch and knitting -- some Congressman's mother? -- but I ducked out again quickly.
Then I wandered in front of a window that looked out over Unirii Boulevard. It was a vast, spectacular, panoramic view, looking down on the great balcony (big enough for a dres ball) and out along the great tree-lined street stretching far, far across the city. This was the view Ceausescu had destroyed half of downtown Bucharest in order to get. But the fountains along the boulevard were turned off -- they cost far too much to run -- and the boulevard itself dead-ended, two miles away, in a wall of ugly apartment blocks. (Was that end of it left unfinished? Or was this how it was supposed to look?)
Still, it was impressive; and since nobody else on that floor seemed interested, I had it to myself.
Far below me, I saw some guys with weed-whackers mowing the Palace lawn. Since the lawn is the size of several golf courses, they weren't moving very quickly. It occurred to me that, by the time they had finished, it would be time to start over again; they were probably in orbit around the Palace, circling endlessly from April to October.
Eventually, I joined a little knot of people standing in front of an elevator. After some minutes, the door croaked open and we pushed in. The operator didn't look twice at me, and we all rode it down to the ground floor.
A few minutes more of aimless wandering brought me to the Museum of the Romanian Parliament, which meant that I wasn't lost any more -- the Museum, a single room, is quite close to one of the main doors.
-- It was actually pretty interesting, that little museum. (Well, okay, to me. I am a history geek, it's true.) It started with the assembly of boyars under the Russian occupation in the 1830s, moved forward through the 1848 revolutionary assembly to the royal years, and ended -- as a lot of things around here seem to -- just before the Second World War. It had all sorts of odd but interesting items. I particularly liked the royal chairs (not thrones!) in which the Kings sat when attending Parliament.
I was the only visitor.
And that was the end of my hour of wandering around the Palace.
Posted by douglas at May 14, 2004 04:41 PM