Out of boredom/curiousity I googled my name to see what would appear. One of the things that did appear was my write-up in the 1991 Cambridge Underground journal of my trip to Eastern Europe the previous year (1990). Also appearing was my editorship of the previous 1990 journal and my feeble attmept at humour at the end. The Eastern Europe trip has been something that I have thought about a lot over the last couple of years as we look at the democratization of Iraq and, with luck, the rest of the Middle East, not to mention Ukraine, so I'm glad to reread my account again.
Much of the account is about caves and cavers and thus not likely to interest most of the readers of this blog, but the section about Bucharest could - I expect - be reused by visitors to Baghdad if the names were changed.
Bucharest was full of bullet scars and nasty buildings; I got a guided tour by Mihai, my host, who tended to say things like: "And here was where I stood when Ceaucescu made his last speech" (it was about 300 metres away from Ceaucescu) or "This was the police station the miners took me to and nearly beat me up in". He also had some photos which he had taken on the days of the revolution, which were the sort that made you glad to have been somewhere safe. While Romania is certainly not a democrat's paradise now, the improvement since the overthrow of Ceaucescu is enormous. The only problem is that the government seems to think that not being oppressive unless you speak out against it is what is meant by democracy and sadly many of the people are so relieved to be shot of the blatant oppression of Ceaucescu that they don't complain enough, yet, about the limited freedom and justice they are being offered now. But all is not so dim, Bucharest has a lot of political graffiti, most of which claims that the current government is almost the same as the old one and a number of newspapers which print more and more depressing tales of Securitate chiefs making huge profits now that they are officially allowed to.
Ceaucescu really did wreck Bucharest. His palace of culture, which was never finished, is absolutely enormous and a classic example of the Architectural style known as Totalitarian Giganticism as are the boulevards leading up to it.