Bucharest (Romanian: București) is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River. Known for its wide, tree-lined boulevards, glorious Belle Époque buildings and a reputation for the high life (which in the 1900s earned its nickname of "Little Paris"), Bucharest, Romania's largest city and capital, is today a bustling metropolis. Chaotic jumble of traffic, looked streets, ugly concrete apartment blocks and monumental but mostly unfinished communist developments are often enough to send the majority travelers scurrying off to the more obvious attractions further north. Yet it's.1 city that rewards patience: behind the congested arteries lies a tangle of backstreets where concrete is softened by abundant greenery and the inhabitants — a cosmopolitan mixture of Romanians, Gypsies, Turks, Arabs, Africans and Chinese - manage to rise above the bureaucratic obstructions and inadequacies of the city's infrastructure. The architecture of the old city, with its cosmopolitan air, was notoriously scarred by Ceausescu's redevelopment project in the 1980s, which demolished an immense swathe of the historic centre - including many religious buildings and thousands of homes - and replaced it with a concrete jungle, named the Centru Civic. The centerpiece of this development was an enormous new palace for the communist leader, now known as the Palace of Parliament, which currently lays claim to being Bucharest's premier tourist attraction. The palace aside, other sites that can on their own justify a visit to the city include the superbly renovated National Art Museum, housing a particularly fine collection of Romanian medieval art, and the Village Museum, a wonderful assemblage of vernacular buildings garnered from Romania's multifarious regions. Once you've tired of the museums, there's plenty of greenery to explore — most obviously the Cismigiu Garden in the heart of the city, or the more expansive Herastrau Park to the north - as well as a generous sprinkling of cafes, bars and restaurants to sample. From Bucharest, there are excellent train and road connections to the rest of the country.