I had three reasons for going to Romania last month. One was Therme București, the second was seeing Bucharest a bit further on from its communist day and the third was to correct all the mistakes I made on my trip there in 2009. So this us everything I did wrong back then and how I fixed it 16 years later.
Mistake 1: not validating my bus ticket
I knew enough to know I needed to buy a bus ticket and how to do it. What I had no idea was that I then needed to validate it. Now, in 2025, that’s less of an issue. I used my contactless card to tap in at the pay machines on the bus. No need for validation! On the airport train, you can buy a ticket online or from the machine on the platform (although apparently only for certain trains) and the guard will just scan the QR code on it or you can just buy directly from the guard. On the metro I had a weekly pass which you put in the slot in the turnstile just like everywhere else. No validation required!
Mistake 2: staying in a semi-derelict hotel
The Marna (Marta? Marla?) was cheap and well located within easy reach of Gara de Nord but it was straight out of a horror film, right down to the blood curdling scream in the middle of the night. The shared bathrooms were grim, the brickwork was crumbly and the back overlooked wasteland piled high with bricks from some demolition or other, the sort of shrubbery that grows through piles of bricks and hosted huge gatherings of barking, howling feral street dogs. I used to look out of my window at the glowing sign of the boring but reliable Ibis hotel at the station and wish I was there.
So in 2025, I booked the Ibis closest to the station! It’s not the same one, the building having been bought by a different company, it’s an Ibis Styles rather than a plain Ibis and it’s actually a full kilometre from the station. And yes, someone messed up leaving me sitting in reception for nearly an hour at 11pm, with someone already occupying the room I was supposed to be in, apparently no empty rooms and a receptionist calling every staff member she could find a number for and yelling almost on the verge of hysterical tears before finding me a room. But once I was in, it was everything I’d dreamed of for 16 years. Clean, whole, quiet, modern lift, no dogs, no dereliction.
Mistake 3: eating the hotel breakfast
The Marna did that B&B-style breakfast where you order from a menu and the bread had suspicions grey speckles on it so I skipped it after the first morning. I did eat the hotel breakfast at my lovely Ibis Styles but it was a buffet and everything was edible, except the apple juice drink which may have once seen an apple in the distance but certainly didn’t contain any juice. The bread rolls were perfect, the butter was wonderful and I even indulged in a couple of mini croissants with strawberry jam that didn’t need to be packed with food colouring to convince you it had ever seen a strawberry. I had breakfast at the hotel every morning!
Mistake 4: going in June
In 2009, I wasn’t a polar bear, or at least I didn’t have a blog whose title declares that I wilt in the heat. I just stepped out of my bad so-called hotel and immediately sweated through my clothes. Yep, I hadn’t considered that Bucharest is further south than Florence and that the summer was likely to be a lot hotter than my rainy Northern European island ever gets. So in 2025, I went the last week of October, which oscillated between t-shirt weather and wearing a checked shirt open over the t-shirt weather. A lot like Iceland in July. Much more me.
Mistake 5: setting off into Bucharest with no idea where I was going, what I wanted to see or why
I had a guidebook but I don’t think I opened it before I went off to explore Bucharest. As a result, I had no idea where I was even trying to go, let alone how to achieve it and if I crossed the big tourist sights off a list, it was entirely accidental as I had no list. In 2025, I’d made a list and decided that the tourist bus was the best way to be transported to them all while being told about them. Beautiful plan, utterly scuppered by the bus no longer running as it’s not summer season anymore. That meant I had to find my own way around, which is helped hugely by knowing where I want to go and having Google Maps in my pocket at all times.
Mistake 6: walking all around Bucharest
Bucharest is very walkable, pavements and benches and parks everywhere, but it’s also on a much larger scale than you realise, hence it being a kilometre from the station to my hotel “just down the road”, or there being a 25-minute walk from the Arcul de Triumf to Free Press House clearly visible at the next junction of a straight (if busy, 8-lane) road. How I walked from the Palace of Parliament to Free Press House in 2009 without even knowing where I was going in will forever be a mystery to me. In 2025, I made use of both the metro and the bus network to get around the city and still managed to wear my poor tired feet out.
Mistake 7: getting off the train in the wrong place
Oh yeah, here we go. My first major travel mistake and probably my most infamous. I absolutely trusted that the train to Brașov would run on time and so I jumped off twenty miles early in a small town in the Southern Carpathians called Predeal. In 2025, I was generally wiser in the ways of trains, extremely cynical about CFR Călători’s punctuality and possessed of an internet-enabled smartphone which allows me to check my real time location and make sure I’m actually at Brașov before disembarking. Result: after sixteen years, I got my day in Brașov and it’s rather nice in autumn.
Actually, I think that was it! I think I didn’t do quite as badly in 2009 as I’ve always thought I did, with only 7 mistakes and the breakfast being a side-effect of the bad hotel and therefore not really a mistake in its own right. But everything went so much better in 2025, knowing where the pitfalls were and how to avoid them. So that’s how to have a good trip, have a bad one first.
I Am A Polar Bear 