Recent news reports from the Romanian capital of Bucharest are either shaggy-dog stories or stories of shaggy dogs.

After asking for a map with the city’s metro stops marked out, an elderly German couple found themselves stumbling from massage parlour to massage parlour wondering where things had gone so wrong (or, perhaps, so right).

Meanwhile, in the city’s suburbs the problem of stray dogs continues to worsen. Estimated figures suggest there are 65,000 homeless mutts – one for every 30 residents. Still, judging by the ongoing Sunday marches, with locals rattling stones in bottles and calling for more dogs’ homes (as well as fighting American fracking invaders Chevron), the canines are not wholly unloved.

The problem, according to city TV producer Ana-Maria Caia, are the tykes who ran off with their wages for neutering the virile pups without starting the job. Now the government has lost patience and wants the dogs rounded up and, if not claimed, put down.

“My friends are not speaking to me because I’ve not spoken out in support of the dogs,” she said, revealing just how divisive the affair has become.

Yet, the most noteworthy news from the banks of the Black Sea arrived in early November: the architect known as the Albert Speer of Communism, Anca Petrescu, was killed in a road accident, aged 64.

She designed Bucharest’s Palace Of The Parliament – an awe-inspiring and ostentatious monument to totalitarian might (and kitsch), begun in 1984 and still not finished. Despotic dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu chose Petrescu’s vision for his new civic centre. He cleared 40,000 people out of their homes in two days to make way for the second-largest public administration building on Earth after the Pentagon.

The building has become a mecca for history and architecture buffs. It hosts Halloween parties, Christmas dos and is still home to the country’s parliament.

But it remains the starkest reminder of what Romanians had to endure in 24 years of Ceausescu rule: a Draconian economic policy (to help pay for it), nepotism (Ceausescu’s wife Elena was deputy prime minister) and ruthless secret police (objectors were not permitted).

For Caia, the building stirs memories of Christmas Day 1989, a few days after the revolution, when the former dictator and his wife were executed by firing squad. “We are some barbarians,” says the 31-year-old as we pass through the building’s grand anterooms, admiring the white and pink Transylvanian marble, mile-high velvet curtains, cascading crystal chandeliers. State television broadcast the execution live. The country tuned in.

“There was sadness and joy at the same time,” continues Caia. “I remember my parents’ friends – a teacher and his wife – came to our house They celebrated. It is so messed up but many normal people were relieved.” We potter up monstrous staircases cut to fit the dictator’s minuscule feet, through a giant ballroom, out on to the balcony where Michael Jackson greeted the newly- liberated people in 1992. A small gift shop selling toy dolls in traditional dress and keyrings reveals where the EU country sees its future.

There’s less tat in Sinaia, a mountain resort in the Carpathain Mountains, 100km north of Bucharest, where composer and national hero George Enescu used to retire. The country’s first pre-republic king, the German Carol I, loved the setting so much he built a railway to connect the capital to his elegant 19th-century castle perched high up a mountainside.

Trains weave through tree-lined valleys, a rusty canvas of red, gold and ochre in autumn, broken only by Austrian-style chalets and odd, out-of-place factories, built by Ceausescu to turn peasants into workers.

Peles Castle has a breathtaking Gustav Klimt-decorated theatre, Venetian mirrors and a Middle Eastern-style smoking room (for the women, who weren’t allowed to puff in public). A secret staircase from the library to the bedroom suggests a king who would never let research get in the way of a royal romp.

On the road back to Bucharest – past unploughed fields, roadside flower sellers, women in headscarves working wells, half-finished homes, horses and carts holding up traffic – is rural poverty which seems perversely picturesque.

The National Village Museum, next to Lake Herãstrãu, gives weekend-breakers a chance to stroll through Transylvania, Banat and Moldavia without ever leaving Bucharest. Its authentic reconstructions of houses, churches and wind-mills are so accurate that a group of homeless people clandestinely making use of one were only discovered when a winter fire roared out of control.

Down the Calea Victoriai, a boulevard lined with art nouveau houses in a country whose aristocrats’ taste for Paris led them to talk in French when the country gained independence from the Ottomans, is a pretty and compact old town which escaped Ceausescu’s grand projects. Romanians – approachable, talkative, humorous – sit in cafes and smoke. For dinner, they eat bean soup in bread bowls, chicken schnitzel, polenta, baked trout with walnuts and plums. They drink the fiery spirit palinka, the delicious porter beer, Ursus black, and red wine made with home grape, feteasca neagra.

In the evening they parade from bars with mission statements which reveal Romanian irony. Above Bordello is the motto, “Sometimes love is worth paying for”. Glasgow pub declares, “We proudly welcome heavy drinkers”. At The Address, where an Amy Winehouse tribute performed, Gabriel Butnaru explained Romania is happy to be European again.

“Our language is 80% Latin and we have Latin roots. We have warm souls, we are open and we want to belong.”

  • EasyJet flies London Gatwick to Bucharest from £38.49 one way. Visit www.easyjet.co.uk
  • Weekend doubles at Hotel Intercontinental Bucharest (www.ihg.com) start from €89.50 a night
     
  • In Bucharest, try the bustling but homely restaurant Hanu Berarilor (www.citygrill.ro)
     
  • In Sinaia, try the light and airy restaurant Kuib, which serves modern European and traditional Romanian dishes (www.kuib.ro)