Overall, Laura and I had a fabulous experience with people we met in both Bulgaria and Romania. We had a few unscrupulous cab drivers, but as much as I hate to say it, that is to be expected pretty much anywhere in the world. We consider ourselves lucky that we know enough to know when we’re being scammed and can hold pretty firm on what we think (or have been told) is a fair price. Yep, we just wear them down until they take what money we’re offering and throw us out of the cab.
As far as non-taxi drivers go, the drivers in both Bulgaria and Romania are pretty normal by our standards. No incessant horn honking, lane lines actually have meaning, and traffic signals are generally obeyed. Overall, the city roads were pretty sane. In the countryside, Laura had to navigate around a number of horse drawn wagons, the occasional chicken or goose, and a cow here or there. Most of the major roads between the cities we visited were only 2 lanes, and a constant game of chicken with oncoming traffic is played by anyone wishing to pass slower cars or trucks.
When it came to the languages, we quickly learned Romanian is a lot easier than Bulgarian. First, with Bulgarian, there’s the whole Cyrillic alphabet to deal with. If that’s the only thing you have to go by, you’re pretty much lost. Romanian has the latin roots and uses “our” alphabet, so with a little effort we could figure out a lot of things. We learned a bit of the basics in both languages – hello, thank you, please – to at least let people know we were trying. We constantly butchered the Romanian thank you (multumesc), but it seemed people appreciated the effort. We also learned that sometimes language just really isn’t that important. On our horse & wagon tour of the Romanian countryside, our guide Yurgi spoke no English, and we spoke meek Romaneski (little Romanian). But somehow we learned quite a bit about each other.
The food in both countries had one common theme – giant portions. We really enjoyed a lot of the local dishes, but were leaving about half of our food wherever we went. We had a Romanian version of chicken paprikash, polenta, lots of sheep cheese, and piping hot bowls of soup – tomato soup, vegetable soup, bean soup, pork soup. The pastry and dessert selections were amazing – chocolate creations of all sorts, papanash (fried donuts with cheese and cherries), strudels, croissants, and the list goes on and on. Cheese pretty much came in two forms – cow or sheep. We tried various other cuisines just to mix things up a bit – in Brasov, Laura had guacamole and Mexican tortillas, and the next night I had a delicious spaghetti carbonara.
And finally, the people. Pretty scenery and good food is a great reason to travel, but it’s the people who really make the lasting memories. We met so many kind, funny and interesting people on this trip, people who went out of their way to guide us, help us, feed us, entertain us, point us in the right direction, and make our experiences the best they could be.
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