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Top hotel in Bucharest is the Athénée Palace, a cozy confection dating from King Carol's day. The neighboring Ambassador is newer but less colorful, though the city's restaurants make up for that. True to Rumania's Latin inheritance, they offer ciorba (a minestrone with sour cream) and mititei (diminutive salami as garlic-laden as any in "Little Italy"). A bow to the West takes in mamaliga—cornmeal porridge that resembles Russian kasha—which is often accompanied by sarmale, stuffed cabbage Hungarian-style. Unlike most Latins, Rumanians are not great winebibbers. Their national drink, tuicā, is as clear and catastrophic as Yugoslav slivovitz.
The Bullfight. Outside of Bucharest, the Latin influence fades quickly into what visitors call "Turkish baroque"—a conglomerate of minarets and mud walls, soaring spiked fences and rambling cattle. Cluj (formerly Klausenburg) is Rumania's second city—with a population of 170,000 and an undeserved reputation as headquarters for Dracula, the world's first Batman. Heartily Hungarian in mood (it is the capital of the Magyar Autonomous Region), Cluj is an intellectual center that serves Bucharest in much the same way that Cracow does Warsaw, or Leningrad Moscow. There the works of Absurdist Eugene Ionesco get a frequent hearing, and the late Rumanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi is much admired.
Cluj is also the home of Editor Dumitru Radu Popescu, 30, who touched off a storm of criticism last October with his story The Blue Lion, a scorching critique of early Communist schooling in Rumania. In one scene, Popescu and his classmates are being searched by a zealous Paukerite teacher for "poisonous" books from the perennially locked school library. "They frisked our pockets and passed their hands over our bodies," wrote Popescu, "and since this didn't seem to satisfy them, they ordered us to take off our clothes. I opened my mouth wide and said 'Aaaaaaaah,' just to show I had no books inside." Though Red bluenoses scored the book as "decadent, trivial and pornographic," Popescu seems safe from chastisement: the party paper Scinteia (Spark) endorsed him as "a talented author, justly praised by both readers and critics." The regime has no praise, however, for Novelist Petru Dumitriu, a defector whose superb 1964 novel Incognito viciously dissected the Communist seizure of power in postwar Rumania.
Unfulfilled Plan. Rumania's cultural progress lags far behind that of its neighbors in the more popular aspects. Hungary's cocky cabarets are a fond font of Red satire and sensuality. The Budapest Night Club features sleek strippers and dexterous caricaturists, while the riverside Duna Hotel is a terminus for the 60-knot hydrofoil that plies the Danube between Budapest and Vienna, carrying 8,000 tourists a year.
Czech Performer Jirí Suchý, 34, is Communism's top show-biz personality. His singing (4,000,000-record sales), writing (his musical, Jonas, is still packing them in after four years), and disk jockeying (600 songs that he wrote himself) have made Suchý the first "kroner millionaire" entertainer on the Czech list. His $63,000 income is 25 times the national average, and Suchý's latest book is a summation of Eastern