Ho, ho, ho... I know the city (as I know a lot of eastern Europe)... There are also some Romanians on this board, so they can chime in later.
I don't know about the sites you visited, but it's defintely NOT an old sSoviet city. If ou want an old, Soviet city, go to Poland, the country's full of them, and Warsaw's probably the worst.
Anyway... Bucharest used to be called before WW2 "the little Paris"... it's got a lot of nice houses, villas and museums (except smack downtown, where the dictator they had until 1989 built this enormous palace - seconds largest building in the world or something like that). So there's much beauty left in the older parts of town, although the city is not as glorious as, say, Prague or Budapest (cities which bear more of the German influence, as opposed to Romania, which has some Oriental flavour, being influenced by Greeks and Turks).
The city's got a lot of parks, too, and some of them are modelled after Austrian and French parcs.
Street kids and wild dogs are more like "tourist scarecrows"... yes, there are beggars in the street, but you'd be surprised how rich they and their families are usually (it's a long story, but basically they're 99% Gypsies, and they know how to sucker tourists, otherwise you can see them being picked up by Mercedes and BMW cars at night...)
The wild dogs were indeed a problem in the early 90's, but I heard that they exterminated or neutered most of them by now.
Depending what you're interested in (museums vs bars), I can probably scoop up more data, I have to look through my notebooks and videotapes. What do you want to see or do mostly?
Facebook
Twitter