The balcony from which dictator Nicolae Ceausescu addressed a crowd shouting "Jos (Down) Ceausescu before fleeing Bucharest in a helicopter is still there and so are the bullet and shrapnel holes in the neighbour buildings around the square.

Now, where protesters waved the blue, red and yellow Romanian flag with the hated communist era symbols torn from the centre to expose a ragged hole, stands a rather bizarre white marble spike with what could be a brain skewered on it.

The new Renaissance Memorial in memory of the 1,104 people killed in the 1989 revolt against the Ceausescu tyranny is hardly a tourist magnet in its own right but it's hard not to stand beneath it and not be moved by the memory and visible legacy of the most bloody of the eastern European revolts against communist rule.

When I lived in Bucharest in the mid-1990s, I used to walk or drive through Piata Revolutiei most days. In winter, filthy snow hid its cavernous potholes and in summer they filled with dust. Coming back as a tourist for a friend's wedding I was struck by an odd sense of how much had changed but also how little.

The potholes, like the bullet holes, are still there yet also there now are new luxury cars, hoisted high on plinths to advertise the ultimate consumer statement. Behind the façade of one shattered building in the square, left as a Hiroshima-like symbol of the uprising, stands a gleaming new glass and steel office block in a weird juxtaposition.

It is the very weirdness and incongruity of Bucharest that I love. It lacks the thrusting Hapsburgian pride of Budapest or the chocolate-box beauty of Prague and yet it is somehow as beautiful and certainly more raw and real than either. Yes, it is dirty, dusty and run down but it run down on such a grand scale you have to love it.

Architecturally, Bucharest is one of the wonders of Europe. An extraordinary flowering of often impressively kitsch overwrought design came with the turn of the 19th century. Then between the wars a modernist school flourished, creating spectacular and often very elegant curved art deco-style homes and office buildings. One of the first proper New York-style skyscrapers in Europe is in Bucharest.

More or less everything post-World War Two, however, is crap. The Stalin wedding cake Casa Presa, where I used to meet the head of the national news agency with his hotline to the president, is a monster, impressive only for the threat it was intended to convey to a cowed populace.

Ceausescu's ironically named Casa Poporului (People's Palace) is an obscenity though none-the-less impressive on its hillock where medieval Bucharest previously stood. The sprawling communist-era flats are horrible, decaying, hulks.

Very few of the modern post-revolution buildings are worth much either - shallow copies of Dallas mirrored buildings or Frankfurt bank headquarters.

And yet the city is beautiful in a dusty, run down sort of way. Transylvanian influenced houses that look like sets in a Tim Burton film are everywhere. A few are being restored either by the owners who have clawed them back from those who took them under communism or by the mysteriously new rich.

Wide, cobbled, boulevards, slice through lush if run down parks. A walk along the narrow streets between my old office on the main Nicolae Balcescu Boulevard back to my old home, reveals wonderful vignettes of Romanian life - a Trabant, graffiti "Jos Vacaroiu" against a premier of my time there, crumbling mansions whose real owners, maybe Jews sent off by Hitler's willing Romanian executioners, will never come back.

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