This room was intended to be the meeting room for the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The guide told us that there are sixty chairs around the table, one too few to fit the committee. A 61st chair was indeed planned, and it would have been in gold, intended for you know whom. At this point a young lady in the group protested and said this was a lie. This was an English-language tour, but the group included several Romanians who were in company with people from outside Romania. This lady told us that her step-father had been one of the architects of the building, just one in the crowd of 700 architects that worked on this project. She also said something like "it would be completely alien from what he [Ceauşescu] stood for". Judging from her looks, she can at most have been a teenager in 1989. The group also included some guys from the US who objected and who were accused to believe in everything CNN told them. The discussion was certainly interesting and added extra spice to the tour, but I stayed out. I'm still appalled by some of the things I heard.