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I've just started work in Romania, helping the National Roads Administration to set up commercial companies to carry out road maintenance, using its own regional government employees to do the work. This is a two year contract, with frequent visits for one or two weeks at a time. Romania is the second largest country in Eastern Europe, after Poland. With 23 million inhabitants, it's much larger than Hungary or the Czech Republic, which receive more in Western aid. This is partly due to the legacy of Nicolai Ceausescu who, despite standing up to Soviet Russia, made some bad mistakes in the 1980s and was eventually assassinated by his own people.

First impressions of Bucharest coming in from the airport: everything is grey and dirty from pollution, with old cars and lorries belching fumes. We get stuck in a long traffic jam. My local minder, Florentina, has just come back from the UK and praises English people's patience in traffic which, she says, the Romanians do not have. Her husband, who is driving, drums the steering wheel and confirms, in word and deed, that patience in traffic is alien to the Latin temperament.

Wide boulevards reflect a French influence, right down to a replica of the Arc de Triomphe. There are some lovely old buildings, looking the worse for wear and tear. The "company flat" is in a grey apartment block hidden away in the side streets. It's decorated with expensive furniture and carpets, but there's nothing inside to make you feel at home. There are expensive wardrobes that clothes don't actually fit inside, so coat hangers are provided to hang from the knobs. There are beds with solid wooden frames exactly 6 feet long (I'm 6'l"). There's no TV or radio, though I discover later that most Romanians have TVs and get a good selection of satellite channels.

I get settled in the flat and Florentina rings up to tell me it's raining outside - does she think we don't have rain in England? I ask if it's safe to walk around and she gives me some dire warnings about crime against foreigners. Apparently one of my colleagues decided to take the local tram last week and got robbed. According to her, the thieves can smell a foreigner a mile off, but I go for a walk anyway, looking suitably shabby, and hardly attract a second glance let alone a mugging. It's been raining hard and the pavements are flooded with rainwater and mud, so you have to watch your step the whole time. The shops are open to buy food up to 8pm and probably later. There are plenty of local people shopping, contradicting reports in the West that they can't afford it. I don't see any beggars - later I discover a few in the city centre, but not many compared to London.

Back to the flat. The cooker, toilets, heating, lighting and phones all seem to work, though the lighting flickers occasionally and the phone lines aren't as clear as they might be. Florentina has told me the water is good, but may not agree with Westerners, so I've bought plenty of mineral water. I put the mattress on the floor and go to sleep to the sound of stray dogs barking. The office, when I get there the next morning, is civilised and well equipped. The toilets are clean and have toilet paper, making the bog roll I brought from England unnecessary. On a more Eastern European note, there is only one tiny lift, which is permanently occupied by a lift attendant, reducing the space to barely enough for three people.

A Romanian colleague and I take the train to Cluj, a provincial town with 400,000 inhabitants, seven hours away as the train trundles. At this time of year the journey is unfortunately under cover of darkness, so there isn't much to see. In our carriage we have a long conversation about "Caritas", a pyramid selling scheme that originated in Cluj and lasted almost three years before going broke due to a shortage of new punters. The scheme brought much wealth to Cluj, as the people at the top of the pyramid lived in Cluj while the rest of Romania got drawn into it later. One of our travelling companions won several million lei from Caritas, around $20,000. This is serious money in Romania, which is presumably why she can afford to travel first class.

There's a restaurant car on the train, which serves a reasonable schnitzel, chips and pickled cucumber with beer. Everyone is smoking and the atmosphere is like an English pub in the 70s - you don't realise how bad it was till you step outside and breathe fresh air again. Fortunately we are in one of two non-smoking compartments. There are six first class smoking compartments, all of which are packed out.

The hotel has the mandatory tiny lift, but on this occasion it isn't working, so we climb six flights of stairs with heavy baggage. The next day it works but, later that night, I try it again and get stuck. The lift moves but the outside doors won't open on any of the 6 floors. I go back to ground level and hammer on the door. Eventually they hear me - "wait a minute please". I thank God I've gone to the toilet and decide to give it half an hour before I sit down on the dirty floor and try to sleep. In fact, it's only 17 minutes before they get the door open, and I go very thankfully to bed. The hotel isn't bad - plenty of hot water, a duvet that's just the right weight, a TV with 17 channels and a pleasant view over a lake. Apparently it was an old haunt of Nicu Ceausescu and his cronies, but they probably say that about all the hotels around here.

In Cluj it seems that everything has to be paid for in cash. I have £120 in lei, which isn't enough to cover everything. We spend some time after work trying to cash a travellers cheque or get a credit card advance. None of the banks are open. Someone thinks the Inter-Continental hotel will cash TCs - they can't, but suggest the Hotel Transylvania, who can. The Transylvania takes 5.5% commission, but I'm just relieved to be solvent again and cash £100 in travellers cheques. My Romanian colleague is appalled by my Western profligacy.

Cluj city centre is a pleasant surprise after the endless grey concrete apartment blocks of the suburbs - some nice old municipal buildings, theatres, churches etc., most of which derive from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later, a Bucharest taxi driver tells me that people in the west of Romania (i.e. Cluj and Timisoara regions) are harder working, more honest and generally nicer than those in the East, which he attributes to Western influence. As this taxi driver is seriously eastern in appearance, I wonder if he's winding me up, but he seems to mean it and it certainly seems to be true.

My local colleague is a mine of information on all things Romanian, which passes the time pleasantly outside working hours. He's convinced that Ceausescu wasn't all bad, though certainly misguided when he starved the people in the 1980s to pay back foreign loans. He thinks that Ceausescu's successor, Iliescu, was wrongly tarred with the same brush, and isn't optimistic about the new opposition government that has just been elected to replace lliescu. I ask whether the Securitate (state police) weren't all bad either, but uncharacteristically he changes the subject - perhaps he has something to hide here. My colleague says he believes in freedom, but had no problem about being a member of the communist party when it was in power. He says that conservative people (with a small c)just adapted to the existing social structure and worked within it, and he made good business contacts through the Party. As this conversation ends, I feel that he and other "respectable" Romanians still have strong links with the old regime, and could perhaps have been Securitate informers themselves.

My colleague and I have two evening meals on our own in Cluj, one of which is passable while the other would have been hard to eat if we hadn't been very hungry. For the third meal we're joined by our local translator, who knows the best restaurant in town. This is brilliant and costs around £20 for three people with wine.

We fly back to Bucharest with Tarom, who fly old Russian Tupulev 154s - very noisy propeller driven aircraft with the least legroom I've seen on any flight anywhere. There's nowhere for my legs to go, except straight into the back of the person in front. Fortunately there's some space on the aircraft (Tarom has lost a lot of business to a new competitor) and I manage to find a bit of leg room after takeoff. Tarom charges four times as much for foreigners as for Romanians, and this flight costs $55 for 250 miles. Apparently inflation rose to 300% per annum in 1993 and is now at around 30%, so hard currency is highly valued.

I have time to walk around Bucharest on Saturday before catching the late afternoon flight back to London, and walk through grimy suburban streets towards the centre, where the concrete apartment blocks give way to some stylish but run down 19th century (or earlier?) architecture. Most of the embassies are here, the most imposing ones being from Iran, Libya and Algeria. Apparently Ceausescu forged close links with his fellow dictators.

On through the city centre and out the other side to Ceausescu' s palace, which is remarkable. Not only is this the largest building in the world, but huge, wide boulevards stretch away from it in all directions, immaculately paved with small paving stones. That's just the road - there are ornamental fountains in the middle, looking badly neglected, and various decorative bits on the pavements.

Apart from a few cars passing through, the whole vast area is almost deserted on a Saturday morning, while the bustle of city life passes by via the Plata Unirii half a mile away. On a weekday it will not be much busier. This is an incredible waste of scarce resources that could surely have been used to heifer effect, but Ceausescu has certainly left his mark on Bucharest. Off the main boulevard, the streets that weren't demolished for this grand design are struggling to pull themselves together again, with building sites all around.

Back for lunch to the flat in the residential area north of the city, which is surrounded by parks and lakes. I go for a stroll in the parks and am disappointed. First, there's a decayed, grimy look about Eastern European parks, with blackened trees and more mud than grass. Second, a feature that looks on the map like Hyde Park, with a large lake in the middle of parkland, turns out to be surrounded by a fence and to have only one entrance along a half-mile perimeter. This entrance is guarded by a couple of surly youths in uniform who emerge from their box to ask what I want. They don't understand, but shrug and let me in anyway. I only see two other people and don't stay there long - not a good place for a stroll around the lake! Then it's off to the airport for the flight to London.

I have a lot of unanswered questions about Romania, but then I was only there for a week and had work to think about as well. I don't have a clear view about whether it's recovering from the Ceausescu regime, how bad poverty is or what they really think about Westerners, though the people I met were mostly friendly. I'm puzzled by claims that the abortion rate is very high, that Westerners come here to adopt babies, and that most Romanians would leave Romania given the chance. It doesn't look that bad, though I know I'm seeing it from a privileged point of view. I'm looking forward to the next visit.

First published in VISA issue 24 (spring 1997)