Bucharest to Budapest

Bucharest, Romania

We arrived in Bucharest after a few flight delays, at approximately 9:30 pm. The taxi system at the airport was a bit strange. We first tried to grab an Uber, which apparently works in Romania, but it didn’t work for us. We then tried to ask for a taxi, but all appeared to be taken. Then we looked inside and saw a little taxi ordering kiosk. It gave us a printout with a license plate number and a time. We asked someone for help and eventually a taxi with matching plate showed up. Although the taxi clearly displayed a price per km on the door of the car, our driver still screwed us over, even though I asked him to run the meter (which he didn’t). Not a great intro to the city.

The next morning, we joined a tour at 7:30 am to visit Peles Castle, the city of Brasov, and Bran Castle (aka Dracula Castle). We were expecting a small minivan, but it ended up being a full-size bus of tourists – who knew people visited Romania? I sat right in front of a guy who snorted the entire trip (picture the scene in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles when they get picked up by Owen). Thank God Meli had some air pods that I could drown him out with (his travelling partner also did the same snorting thing, so I had “stereo” snorting at one point). Do I need to mention the other tourist with godawful B.O. sitting behind us? Ugh. Anyways. We arrived to Peles Castle and were very impressed - located in a beautiful setting in the hills surrounded by an old village and the snow-capped Carpathian Mountains in the background. We entered the building in a throng of tourists. The castle filled with elaborate rooms of all different types – there was a Turkish Room, a Weapons Room, a Library, Dining Room, Music Room, etc. All were filled with all sorts of decorations and the walls were covered in very detailed woodwork, including beautiful inlays. It was constructed in 1873 for King Carol I and would have cost $120 million to build in today’s dollars.

Our next stop was the city of Brasov in Transylvania. The city had a very old European feel to it – a large open square in the centre surrounded by restaurants and cafes. Atop the hill was a sign in the style of the famous Hollywood sign for “Brasov”. Our guide did a walking tour for our group, but we decided to opt out and wander off on our own. We ended up walking the streets and settling on a corner bar/café to enjoy a drink. We saw our tour group pass by and were happy to be where we were (why do we sign ourselves up for these tours?). The last stop was Bran’s Castle – arguably the most famous tourist spot in Romania. It is also known as Dracula’s Castle, however, there is no real basis for this. The castle itself was nice, but not overly remarkable, and certainly didn’t hold a candle to Peles Castle. The only connection to Dracula is that Vlad the Impaler (real name Vlad Dracula), for whom apparently the title character of Bram Stoker’s fictional character was based, had once lived at the castle. However, most historians agree that this was not even true. The castle itself is decorated with items from Queen Marie from this time she lived there – there was a bedroom, kitchen, living room, etc., all decorated with articles from the time. There were no real references to Dracula, so we all left a bit confused. Interesting to see, but a bit of a disappointment. We were hoping for some ancient lairs and dungeons.

At 6 pm, we boarded the bus back to Bucharest. For whatever reason (likely toll avoidance) our driver took some detour over the mountains which landed us back in Bucharest at 9:30 p.m. – precisely 14 hours after we first boarded the bus. We were glad to be back and did a quick shop and made some pizzas at our apartment and then off to bed we went.

The next morning, we packed up and switched to a hotel that we had previously booked for one night a while back. (We had only intended to stay in Bucharest for one night originally, and only picked this hotel since we were having our paper train tickets delivered and wanted to have someone reliable to receive them for us.) As soon as we got to the new hotel (Hotel Capitol), it started to pour rain. Nice timing. Our room wasn’t ready, so we hung out waiting for the rain to pass, when it didn’t, we decided to grab the buffet lunch at the hotel which turned out to be very good and was reasonably priced. After lunch we dropped our bags off in the room and went out to get haircuts. We have gotten our hair cut in the most random places – Thailand, Vietnam, Zambia, and now Romania. Regardless of location we have been surprisingly happy with the results every time (beats the hell out of Sports Clips in Barrie!).

The following day we went to check out the Bucharest Opera House. The building was built in the 1880’s and was impressive – all different types of marble were used in its construction and the theatre was centred under a large self-supported dome. It felt strange to be inside – we were the only tourists there and we were allowed to walk anywhere we wanted, even on stage where they had several large (expensive?) instruments just sitting there. We would have loved to see a performance there! Afterwards we grabbed a cab to take us to the Village Museum. This was a large outdoor space filled with at least a hundred different buildings that had been either transported or replicated from different areas throughout Romania. The homes ranged from examples as far back as the 16th century up until modern times. Construction methods included timber frame, wood and plaster, waddle and daub, half buried homes, etc. It was a very cool way to explore Romania all in one place!

Budapest, Hungary

We boarded the night train in Bucharest to make our way to Budapest. The journey was 15 hours in total, and was comfortable, though the train moved from side to side quite a bit especially as we made our way to the Hungarian border. Just as we were getting back to sleep around 4:30 am, we heard a rap at the door – border police. They checked our passports on both sides of the border and then we managed to grab an hour or two more sleep before arriving to Budapest at 9:00 am.

The earliest we could check-in was 11:00 am, so we killed a couple of hours across from the Dohany Synagogue (the 2nd largest in the world). We really wanted to check it out, but entry for us would have been C$80, which seemed a little steep to look inside a building. In comparison, entry to St. Mark’s in Venice, arguably a much more famous and beautiful building, was C$18 for the four of us. After dropping off our luggage we wandered around the city making our way down to the Market Hall at the edge of the Danube. We ordered a selection of typical Hungarian dishes – a soup, goulash plate, and sausage plate. We crossed the bridge over the Danube going from the “Pest” side to the “Buda” side and made our way to the Underground Hospital/Nuclear Bunker Museum. In the 1940’s they connected a series of underground caves to build an underground hospital for use in WWII. As the Nazi’s bombarded Budapest, this was a safe haven where soldiers could be treated. Although built with a capacity of approximately 80 people, the number of patients would swell upwards of 600 during the peak leading to serious overcrowding. After the war, the space was converted into a nuclear bunker during the period of the cold war. Fortunately, it was never put in use for this purpose. After our visit we walked up the hill and were surprised to find that we stumbled upon the Fisherman’s Bastion. This was a historic castle and look out point over the Danube. There was a beautiful church at top of the hill (Matthias Church) with cool, colourful ceramic roof tiles. In the evening we grabbed dinner at a craft beer pub near our place. We shared BBQ platter that was good, however, it would turn out to be not good at 4:00 a.m. the following morning when I woke up with stomach cramps and nausea. Another bout of food poisoning. Fortunately, I was the only one affected. I spent the next day in bed recovering, while Mel and the kids toured the city to check out the Opera House and Parliament building.

The following day I was feeling much better, and we all went down to the ferry dock to catch the boat to go to Margaret Island in the morning. The ferry toured us up and down the Danube for 45 minutes and came complete with an audio guide and a free drink! We were dropped off at Margaret Island and we rented one of those ridiculous four person bicycles. We did a one-hour circuit around the island trying our best to avoid crashing into people and objects (successful in the former, not so much in the latter). We grabbed a quick lunch and then made our way over to the Palatinus Thermal Baths. Budapest is renowned for its thermal baths. The city has at least ten different baths which each contain several large pools at different temperatures. There is even a famous one called “Szechenyi” where they have a “Sparty” on Saturday nights which would be cool if we were in our twenties. Can you imagine bathing there on Sunday morning? Gross. We spent a couple of hours relaxing in the pools at Palatinus – it was a great change of pace for us, and we were very fortunate that it was a beautiful sunny day.

The next morning, we made our way to the train station on our way to Slovakia for a couple of nights before heading to Vienna.