Bucharest holds on to a few corners of its recent past, quite literally: the house where a family lived until the regime's last day in power, a museum where the coffee is still brewed the way it was forty years ago, and a building whose underground floors remain, for the most part, closed to visitors. Three experiences you live with all five of your senses, not just from behind a screen or through someone else's story.

An Hour in the House Where Ceaușescu Lived

Primăverii Palace, the former residence of the Ceaușescu family at 50 Primăverii Boulevard, can only be visited with a guide, Tuesday through Sunday, between 10:00 and 17:00. It's closed on Mondays and on public holidays, and it isn't accessible to people with mobility disabilities, due to the building's layout. The standard ticket, with guidance in Romanian and a foreign language, costs 85 lei per person, with a discount to 70 lei for pupils, students, and retirees; the version that includes a documentary screening runs to 115 lei, and a private tour costs 295 lei. Preschool-age children get in free.

The tour passes through Nicolae Ceaușescu's office, the family's bedrooms, and the reception rooms, with marble, hand-crafted mosaics, and a collection of paintings by major Romanian artists of the twentieth century. Room after room, it doesn't feel like a museum. It feels like a house abandoned in a hurry, still holding the personal belongings of a family that never got the chance to take them along.

Communist-Era Coffee, Drunk in a Communist-Era Apartment

The Museum of Communism, at 6 Covaci Street in the Old Town, with its entrance on Soarelui Street, recreates a 1980s block apartment, complete with furniture, a television, and everyday objects from the period. An adult ticket costs 40 lei, with a discount to 25 lei for students and retirees and 10 lei for schoolchildren; children under 7 get in free. No advance booking is needed, except for large groups or special events. At the museum's coffee shop, which you can visit even without a museum ticket, they serve nechezol, the coffee substitute from the communist era that whole generations started their mornings with, back when real coffee wasn't on the shelves.

The same team also runs a periodic guided walking tour, "The Historical Tour of Communist Bucharest," led by guides from the museum, tracing the neighborhoods demolished for the regime's grand projects and the story of churches moved on rails to save them from the bulldozers. Exact dates are announced on the museum's page, undevaincomunism.com, so it's worth checking before planning a visit around it.

A Building With Nine Floors Underground

The Palace of the Parliament remains the heaviest building ever constructed, built using 700,000 tons of steel and bronze and a million cubic meters of marble. It has nine floors above ground and another nine below. The basement tour exists as a separate option, but at the time of writing it was suspended, along with the rooftop tour, according to the official website of the International Conference Centre.

The standard tour costs 60 lei for adults, 30 lei for students, and 20 lei for children, payable only on the day of the visit, in cash or by card, at the ticket office on Izvor Street 2-4. Tickets aren't sold online. Booking for groups of 1 to 9 people is done exclusively by phone, at least 24 hours in advance, at +40 733 558 102 or 103. An hour and a half of touring shows only a fraction of the building's 1,100 rooms. The rest has stayed closed since 1989, when Ceaușescu was overthrown before the project was ever finished.

Three tickets, three houses from the same period: one where the dictator lived, one where an ordinary person's apartment was recreated, one the regime never got to finish. You can visit all three in a single weekend, for a total of about 185 lei on the three base tickets, and come away with a far fuller picture than any guidebook written from a single visit could give you.