What's the must-see thing in Bucharest?

The Palace of the Parliament is the thing in Bucharest you cannot get anywhere else. Every European capital has a cathedral, a river walk, a park. Only Bucharest has a 365,000-square-metre monument to one dictator's ego, finished 8 years after the revolution that killed him. The building weighs roughly 4.1 million tonnes. It sits at the end of Bulevardul Unirii, a 3.5-kilometre axis that Ceaușescu reportedly made 1 metre wider than the Champs-Élysées. You walk through marble halls so over-scaled that your footsteps disappear into the echo before they reach the walls. The standard tour runs about 40 RON (under $9) and lasts 50 minutes. Book online at least 2 days ahead, because walk-ups regularly get turned away, and bring your passport or national ID. The terrace tour adds another 25 RON and puts you on the roof, where you can see Herăstrău Park 5 kilometres north and the thermal smog that sits over the southern districts in summer.

Your second stop should be Muzeul Țăranului Român, the Romanian Peasant Museum on Șoseaua Kiseleff 3. Founded in 1906, it won European Museum of the Year in 1996. The ground-floor rooms are dim and cool, lit mostly by the textiles themselves. Hand-woven rugs from Maramureș in thick wool reds and blacks hang floor to ceiling, and the air carries a faint lanolin smell that takes you off guard in a museum. A full visit takes 90 minutes. Admission is 15 RON (about $3.30). The basement holds a reassembled communist-era grocery, complete with empty shelves and propaganda posters. It is the most disorienting room in Bucharest, because you can still smell the dust on the wooden shelving units. The National Museum of Art of Romania on Calea Victoriei 49 is a reasonable alternative if you prefer European painting, but the Peasant Museum gives you something Paris and Vienna do not have.

Curtea Veche, the Old Princely Court on Strada Franceză, tends to get lost inside the noise of the Lipscani bar district that grew up around it. The ruins date to the 1450s, when Vlad III held court here. Admission is 10 RON. You might spend 20 minutes among the exposed brick walls and the small Curtea Veche Church next door, built in 1559 and still holding Orthodox services. That said, Lipscani after 9pm is loud and beer-soaked, the cobblestones sticky underfoot, and the restaurant touts aggressive. Go before noon, when the streets are quiet and morning light hits the limestone at a low angle. Skip the overpriced terrace restaurants on Strada Covaci. Walk 2 minutes south to Caru' cu Bere on Strada Stavropoleos, a beer hall operating since 1879. The sarmale here (cabbage rolls stuffed with pork and rice, about 35 RON) are properly sour from fermented cabbage, not vinegar.

The Arcul de Triumf on Kiseleff looks good from the road, but the interior opens only a few days per year. From ground level it is a traffic island surrounded by 4 lanes of cars. Herăstrău Park covers 187 hectares of lake and greenery north of the center, worth a morning walk if the weather cooperates, but it is a park, not a destination. For your first day, start at the Parliament, take a Bolt taxi north to the Peasant Museum (about 20-25 RON), then walk south through Piața Romană down to Lipscani for Curtea Veche. That sequence runs roughly north to south and fills 7 or 8 hours without backtracking.