We planned to visit the Mezeul Satului (village museum) and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and caught the bus from the campsite, getting off at the Herastrau Park. The park is very large and surrounds one of the large lakes in the north of Bucharest. Being a Saturday, the park was very busy, with people sitting on the many seats on the edge of the lake, fishing or just strolling. We walked all the way through the park by the lake until we reached the western side where there were pretty formal gardens including a floral clock that reminded us of the one in Greenhill Gardens, Weymouth. It is here that the Village Museum is located and we had seen glimpses of it from the park and were beginning to think that it was closed as we couldn't see any sign of activity. Fortunately, it was open and we paid our entrance fee of 6 lei (£1.60) each and decided to invest in an audio guide for a further 10 lei. We were amazed at the size of the site and began to realise why we hadn't seen any activity – even though there were a lot of visitors they were soon very thinly spread over the huge area. We were given a map with the audio guide, without which we would have certainly missed some of the exhibits. Starting in 1936, typical buildings had been bought from all over Romania and reconstructed on the site. The audio guide told us about 85 buildings but there were even more than that in a lovely setting of trees and the lakeside. Every building had traditional furniture, fabrics and objects from the area in which the house was originally located. Some of the exhibits consisted of whole farms with barns, stores and pigsties. Decorated carts and farm implements were kept in the barns and traditional hayricks, constructed around a vertical pole (still a common sight in the countryside) were scattered around. One common feature in all of the buildings was wood, most of the buildings being entirely made of wood with just a few having a lower, stone-built storey. On the lakeside were all manner of mills – windmills large and small, watermills of many different types powering grinding for flour and oil, fulling, wine presses etc.
Four and a half hours later, we left the museum! It was after 14:30 and we were hungry (there was nowhere to eat in the Village Museum) so we decided to give up the idea of visiting the second museum and headed back across the park to a collection of restaurants that we had seen on our way. They were very smart and expensive by Romanian standards - one main course without vegetables cost more than our total bill for lunch yesterday! However the food was excellent and well received.
I had asked some bus inspectors at a bus stop near the museum about buying bus tickets before we caught a bus as you can't buy them on the buses. They went into a huddle and decided that we would have to walk a considerable distance before we could buy one. We had therefore decided to take our chances by trying to find somewhere near where we had got off the bus this morning as this was close to the restaurants. This turned out to be a mistake. We must have walked for over two miles in the very hot sun, passing only one closed ticket office. We gave up and caught a bus to the airport where we knew that we could buy tickets. This was not as easy as it sounded but after asking three people, we were finally directed to the correct place and were soon on our way back to the campsite.
Photos: Herastrau Park; A complete farmstead in the village museum; This 19th century mud hut is sunk into the ground to protect it and its occupants from the high winds, very hot Summers and very cold Winters. This design was used right up to the middle of the 20th century; This tiny 19th century house has a single room surrounded on two sides by a balcony. To the left is a summer shelter used by shepherds, lumberjacks and farmers gathering hay. The design is thought to have remained unchanged since prehistoric times.
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