Laura and I really had only a day and a half in Bucharest, our final destination on this trip. We started out with lunch at Caru’ cu Bere – the Beer Wagon restaurant. This is a gorgeous place with a huge outdoor patio. A “student’s lunch”, consisting of 4 courses (soup, salad, main and dessert), is served daily for about $6. This was a very good start to a short time in Bucharest.
We left lunch to join an afternoon walking tour. In just a few hours we covered a lot of ground, and heard a lot about the communist regime under Ceausescu from the 60’s through the 80’s, and how Romania has been transitioning into democracy since then. At one point, our tour guide noted how many celebrities, including Michael Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, and Ozzy Osbourne, have come to Bucharest and thanked the lovely people of Budapest for having them there. It’s become so much of a joke that they’ve even created a website devoted to it. Of course, once this was said it was in my brain, and for the next day and a half I was constantly making the mistake of saying Budapest! Very embarrassing.
Due to massive reconstruction during Ceausescu rule, Bucharest architecture is an odd mix. Vast amounts of historical buildings were demolished and replaced with communist style apartment buildings. Luckily, a good portion of the “old town” remained preserved, which features a lot of French-inspired architecture. Most of the grand old mansions and palaces that remain have been converted to museums, banks or high end hotels. Local architects developed a system to move entire churches and other historical buildings to save them from demolition, and they were randomly placed wherever there was room. The end result is a rather schizophrenic looking city combining old and new, beautiful, ugly and just plain weird.
Our last day started with renting bikes and taking a long (2+ hours) ride through Herastrau Park and around Lake Herastrau. Being off season, rental paddle boats and tour boats were docked, rose gardens had already been clipped down, and most of the lakeside restaurants were closed for the season. But the trade-off is that we had the entire park mostly to ourselves.
After our ride, killer fatigue started to set in, and we just couldn’t decide what to see or do next. It also started raining, ending our streak of nice fall weather. So we had lunch and made appointments for a little pampering – it was massage time. The massages were great, but the rest of the day just didn’t fall into place. Luckily, we were able to salvage the day with a late night bite at a cute restaurant in Old Town, then returned to the hostel to pack up, go to bed and get up just a few hours later for a 4am ride to the airport.
I wish we had an extra day or two in Bucharest. Not that I’d trade any time from anywhere else on the trip, just wanted an extra day or two here. The travel books and blogs we read prior to the trip really underplayed Bucharest, and I think unfairly so. It deserves more than a day and a half. I’m hoping to finagle in a 2-3 day layover here someday, on my way to or from something else in the region.
It was raining as we left Wednesday morning. My trusty red umbrella had pretty much given this trip it’s all – but now it no longer wanted to stay open (much like my eyelids at 4am). I decided to give Red its final resting place in Bucharest, and left it on the couch in the hostel lobby. With that, we said goodbye to Romania, and started our trip back home.
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