For the time being, that’s everything I have to say about what I did in Romania but as I’m trying to get into the habit of doing an itinerary for as many trips as possible, I’m going to do that as my final post. I was in Romania for about five days – I arrived late (very late!) on Saturday evening and I left on Thursday evening.
Day 1 – Sunday
I arrived about 10.30 or 11pm on Saturday night, took the train into town, discovered my hotel had given away my room and had to wait for nearly an hour for someone to find the one empty room left in the hotel (or for someone to find a room in a sister hotel and taxi me there…) so we’ll start with Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, I got up, indulged in a hotel breakfast and saw that the National Cathedral was holding its huge ceremony to consecrate its artwork/celebrate its inauguration. That was only 2km away on foot and I love cathedrals so that seemed an obvious starting point to my trip. It was chaotic; half of Romania was gathered in the vicinity to watch the ceremony on big screens around the cathedral grounds and nearby streets and I imagine getting inside the place for the next few months is going to be hard. Then I walked on past the Palace of Parliament, which was on my to-do list because it’s huge and significant and really ugly.
My plan was to continue to Piata Unirii as the most convenient place to get the hop-on-hop-off tourist bus, since all bus stops in the vicinity of the cathedral and Palace were closed for the day, but it turned out the tourist bus stops the first week in October and I had to make my own way around. So, fine. I got a metro pass and hopped on the M2 up to Aurel Vlaicu in the north of the city, walked down to the big shiny Promenada Mall which has a supermarket in the basement and stocked up on enough picnic food for the week and then took the metro back down to Aviatorilor. I was expecting that to be where I’d find the Monument to the Heroes of the Sky but no. However, it is right next to Herăstrău Park, officially called Parcul Regele Mihai I. Parks are great places to sit on benches and eat lunch.
After that, I walked up the park, enjoying being out of the hustle & bustle of the city, which was more hustling and bustling than usual thanks to the cathedral’s inauguration. I ran into the open air ethnographic museum which I put on my “to do later in the week” list as I wanted to go to Free Press House which is at the top end of the park but it meant I had to leave the park as it blocks my way north, and walk up the main road that borders it to the west. That was fine because the first exit from the park was straight onto the Arcul de Triumf, also on my to-do list, and then I continued on up to Free Press House, which is three-quarters of a mile away, although it only looks a couple of hundred metres. Because, like all the monuments and sights in the north of the city, it’s on a busy road junction, it turns out the best view of the Brutalist skyscraper is actually from back in the park rather than through the traffic, so I went back into the park.
And that was about it for the day. I’d had a late night the night before, Bucharest is big, I’d walked more than seven miles – imagine how far I could have walked if I hadn’t taken the metro from Piata Unirii to Herăstrău Park, just like I didn’t in 2009!
Day 2 – Monday
Spa day! I’d deliberately chosen my second day in Romania to do Therme București for two reasons. The first was so that I’d got my bearings and didn’t have to figure out buses first thing on my first day. The second was that I was expecting the Therme to be a lot quieter on a Monday morning than a weekend day. I was wrong!
I took the airport train back to the airport, since I was within walking distance of Gara de Nord (in true Bucharest style, what looked like “just down the road” turned out to be a full kilometre away) and that seemed easier than figuring out how to get a bus to Gara Baneasa, a couple of stops up from Free Press House – and was definitely faster. Then the bus from the airport to the Therme which took ten or fifteen minutes. Wait another ten or fifteen minutes in a queue in the atrium of the Therme because everyone had the same idea to arrive at opening time and it was very busy, and then the best part of eight hours in the Therme.
That one’s got its own blog post so I won’t repeat most of it here but in short: Therme București is very big but a huge chunk of it is the Galaxy zone, which is basically the children’s play zone and it echoes with screams and screeches. The Palm main pool is very beautiful, there are lots of saunas upstairs in Elysium with a range of temperatures and themes to suit everyone, every zone has a restaurant/cafe and an in-water bar, the small outdoor pools are open in winter (October onwards) but the outdoor sunbathing zones aren’t and there are far too many people there, even on a Monday in October.
Day 3 – Tuesday
This was the day I got the bus out to Snagov to visit the grave of Vlad the Impaler. Apart from it seeming an interesting and unusual thing to do – at least for a non-Romanian tourist in Bucharest brought here mainly by the spa – it also seemed like a hugely appropriate thing to do during Halloween week. Very Mary Shelley, to come to the grave of Romania’s most notorious and cruel ruler, the alleged inspiration for Dracula (although the title Vlad Dracul actually belonged to his father, in reference to his being a member of the Order of the Dragon).
Taking out the Gothic melodrama of the whole thing, it also meant I had a morning in a pleasant little village with a lake surrounded by autumnal trees being home to the beautiful little brick church in which you’ll find the grave, which is a nice thing to do on a warm October day.
That took half the day. I came home via Ikea and then spent the afternoon in Bucharest crossing off a few more items on my list – lunch in Herăstrău Park since the bus from Ikea went right past it and I was hungry after my adventure, then I went down to the Monument to the Heroes of the Air and then took a bus down to the big hitters on the edge of the Old Town – Kretzulescu Church, Piața Revoluției with all its massive buildings, the Romanian Athenaeum where they were setting up for a red carpet event and then it turned out it was a straight walk from there back to my hotel.
Day 4 – Wednesday
Brașov day! Having failed to get to the pretty city in Transylvania in 2009, my goal for today was just to get off the train in the right place and I accomplished that. Blog post about it here, so I’ll just give you the highlights of the day.
My train was at 10am so I walked the kilometre up to the station just after 9 to make sure I wasn’t running to find the right platform. The train got in to Brașov just before 1pm and so I had the afternoon to explore the town, see the Black Church, take the cable car up to the Tâmpa viewpoint on the mountain behind the city, come back down and explore the town a bit more and be back at the station a little after 5pm for my 17:58 train, which was then 64 minutes late. Because it had been quite a long day and it was dark by the time the train arrived, I’m genuinely surprised to note just now that the train must have arrived just after 7 o’clock in the evening which isn’t that late at all, and then it would have arrived in Bucharest somewhere around 10pm. 15-ish minutes to walk back to the hotel and I would probably have been in bed by 10.30.
Day 5 – Thursday
On my last day, I pootled around Bucharest some more. I wanted to get to Piața Romană to see the wolf statue but it turns out they’ve moved it since I was last here, so I took the metro south to Piața Universității and walked down the road to the statue. That led me into the Old Town, a maze of narrower streets filled with cafes and souvenir shops, where I finally got a long-overdue badge for my camp blanket. I stumbled over St Nicholas Church and then I deliberately walked up to St Nicholas-in-a-Day Church, which I had on my to-list as “Enei Church”. It gets its unusual name from the fact that it was allegedly built in a single day. Not the current church on the site but the previous one, or at least a previous one. It wasn’t open, or it didn’t look very open but at least I went and prowled round it.
From there, I was a short walk from Cismigiu Gardens where there’s a boating lake and a row of benches overlooking it which are perfect for lunch. I was carrying all my luggage so I was very happy to lighten the load a little, although as I was flying Ryanair with personal item only, the load shouldn’t have been able to be that heavy.
When I’d enjoyed the gardens for long enough, I headed south through Izvor Park for a second look at the Palace of Parliament without quite the crowds that had been there on Sunday. On Sunday, Piața Constituției, the big half-moon-shaped square in front of the massive building, had been used for coach parking which I assumed was because of the volume of visitors to the Cathedral’s inauguration but it turns out this is used for coach parking every day. I walked up Bulevardul Unirii to enjoy the shade, got the metro to Gara de Nord, had a mid-afternoon snack and then got the airport train at 15:50 for my 18:15 flight back to Bristol, which went more or less on time despite it being Ryanair.
So that was it. I daresay I could have done Bucharest a lot more efficiently and not needed more than two days to cover the basics but I spent a lot of time enjoying the parks and the open green spaces and understanding Bucharest in a way I simply didn’t in 2009. I had no idea where I was going, how I was getting there, what I was going to see, what I wanted to see and I did the whole thing on foot, so it felt good to understand the buses and the metro, to save my feet and to know roughly where I was at any given point. Yes, I’d go back, but mostly I’d go back because flying to Bucharest and getting the train seems to be the easiest way to get to Sighișoara, which is the next pretty town in Transylvania I’ve got my eye on… (no plans whatsoever as yet)
I Am A Polar Bear 