A Post for Wednesday or how to get around in Bucharest

 In this picture you can see two of the many ways of transportation around Bucharest. You see taxis and if you look hard you can see a bus. There are also trams (like buses but they run on tracks like trains), the Metro (Bucharest's subway), and of course you could drive your own car. While many people here drive their own car many others use these forms of transportation. Today I went to Gara de Nord, the main train station in Bucharest. I could have used any of these forms of transportation (well except my car, I left it in Livermore). Which one do you think I used? Good guess, I used the Metro. One of the nice things about the Metro is that it does not matter how far you go, it all costs one price. So if you go one station or to the end of the line the cost is the same. Here is a math problem for you, I bought a Metro ticket that allows me to go on 10 trips on the Metro. It cost me 20 Lei (the name of the currency in Romania), if the exchange rate is 4 lei for every dollar, how much does each trip cost me? Oh come on the math is not that hard.
I bought my ticket to travel to Lugoj where I will be teaching. I leave here on Sunday and begin classes on Monday. Lugoj is about 285 miles from here and the ticket cost $25. So you can see that the country of Romania subsidizes the transportation systems quite a lot. For those of you who might want to know where this picture was taken, remember the one from yesterday that had the McDonald's logo on the top of the building? Well the building to the left is that building and although you can not see it in the picture the McDonald's is directly to my left.

This is a picture that I took in the area they call the Old Center, or Centru Vechi. It is the oldest partof Bucharest. When I first came to Bucharest in 2007 this street was all torn up and a huge mess. As you can see they have made it into a pedestrian friendly area, no cars are allowed into the Old Center. The replaces the streets with cobblestones, just like they would have had when nothing but horses and carriages rode on the street. Many of the side streets are so small that even a horse and carriage would not fit. It was hot here today and humid but not as hot as I hear it was in Livermore. For those of you who don't want to go to the comments section to see the answers I thought I would answer the questions from the previous day here. So, I asked what time it was in Livermore when it was 6pm here and the answer is 8am. I also asked what sport the local Dinamo team played and that is Soccer. Lastly I asked where the name Tuesday came from, what I have read about it the name comes from the German God of War Tiu. Kind of like Tuesday in Spanish and Romanian come from Mars, the Roman God of War. I hope you are enjoying the pictures and my commentary. Until next time.