ICPS 2006 in Bucharest Romania

In August Georg, Sanja, Dina, Mateusz, Nicolay, Klaus, Ingvild, Yngvild and me went to Croatia for a beach holiday and then to Bucharest in Romania for this years ICPS. We had a very interesting and fun time. Georg has written something about Croatia, so I won’t mention much about it here, but we had a lot of fun.

Romania on the other hand was more an “interesting” experience. I expected that the country was poor. What was waiting for us, however, was not what we expected at all. It is not that I expected the people there to be extremely nice to us all the time, but here the people were often directly rude, impolite and if you expected people to smile back… think again. For instance at restaurants, waiters were standing behind you ready to take your plate the moment you were finished. Sometimes they did the same when we were not even finished yet. We got very tired of being treated like this all the time. But in the end we did find a couple of good restaurants with good waiters. We once spent the whole day there… It was our little refuge.

Apart from the people, the Romanian culture and language was very interesting, and we both felt that we wanted to learn more about it when we got home – this never happened, because we immediately had to start preparing for our trip to Japan. They are really proud of their Roman heritage and show that in every way possible. Commercials show Romans, buildings have Roman-like architecture and they still got their roman language (very much like Italian). It is also very interesting to see how much Romania wants to be a part of the EU….it is a LOT!! You see EU flags everywhere. If there is a Romanian flag somewhere, next to it is always an EU flag. It is a bit too obvious…:)… fast cash.

We also went to see the parliament palace. It was HUGE. It is the second largest administrative building in the world (just after the Pentagon). No wonder Romania is poor after building this enormous thing.. Wikipedia writes the following: ”Effectively, the building, due to its immense size, cuts the city into two—an urban planner's nightmare. Constructing the Palace and the Centru Civic required demolishing about one-fifth of the historic districts of Bucharest. The neighborhoods and churches that were razed to make way for the behemoth are remembered to this day.” The guided tour through the palace we took was very interesting and rather honest though.

During the ICPS we got to see some of the countryside of Romania, and that was a lot more beautiful and calming. If we will go back to Romania, this is where we will go. We went to visit two castles, among Bran Castle where Dracula was supposed to be living according to Bram Stoker. But in real life Vlad Dracul (Vlad the Impaler) was there for only two weeks for refuge. And no vampire stuff either. We expected to see blood and vampire stuff…boy were we disappointed, nothing more than an old castle. Furthermore there was a huge queue, and when we were out of the queue, we were out of the castle…

The ICPS was a lot of fun, a bit chaotic though, but with the amount of struggle the committee had been through the last week they managed to do a great job. Can`t be easy to live in a “democratic”(……ehh) country. The Republic Party took away all of the student dorms set away for the students at ICPS a week before the conference, because the organization for physics student refused to join their party in return… horrible. But we had a great time, with lots of parties and meeting new people….and we are now looking forward to next year in London…bound to be good. At least in London it won’t be 46 degrees Celsius in the shadow….puh…that was HOT!

Fore more pictures look here.