The Sights of Bucharest

The Palace of the Parliament (#1 in a collectible series)
This picture doesn't do the sheer scale of this building justice. Its massive, 270m by 240m to be exact. It stands 12 stories tall (86m) with another 92m underground and contains 1,100 rooms. It is also the heaviest building in world, who and how they work that out blows my tiny mind. Its the largest building in Europe, and the second largest administrative in the world after the Pentagon. Its made solely of Romanian materials and is 10% bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, wicked cool.

It was intended to be a prestige project. Building starting in 1983 and it was hated as a symbol of decadence (it cost billions to construct) when the Romanian people were suffering food and fuel shortages. It was still unfinished at the time of the revolution and despite talk of dynamiting it and even turning into a casino, construction was finished so it could be used as the parliament for the new democracy. It is the largest parliament building in the world. A guy who works in the administrative side of things at the school, who was actually a conscript in Bucharest during the revolution, told me that they couldn't blow it up, there weren't enough explosives. A lot of historic Bucharest was destroyed to make room for it and Unirii Boulevard that leads upto it.

Now you can wow your friends in the pub.