Bucharest

After accidentally boarding a train in the wrong direction—adding four hours to our journey and an extra coach across the Bulgarian-Romanian border—we arrived in Bucharest. The Romanian capital is a city of contrasts. It has a small, 19th-century baroque old town surrounded by communist-era brutalism, dotted with reminders of Romania’s position as a buffer country, including the caravanserai housing the Manuc Inn, and Byzantine-inspired churches. Chelsea has been reading Olivia Manning’s novel The Great Fortune, which captures the ‘Paris of Eastern Europe’ culture of inter-war Bucharest, and you can still spy vestiges of this heritage in the old town architecture. Our main purpose here was social though: friends from Sydney, Cat & Eduardo, were in town to celebrate Edo’s 40th birthday. We arranged to coincide on our way through, and utterly destroyed our organs and vocal chords in the process.

We checked out the Christmas market, visited the National Palace (the heaviest building in the world!), and took a walking tour of the city’s history and architecture. Bucharest was the seat of power for Vlad the Impaler (inspo for Stoker’s Dracula), and Ceaușescu, the Communist dictator ousted in ‘89. The city was heavily bombed in WWII, and almost all of what was left was destroyed in the communist period to enable vanity infrastructure projects. Still, there are some beautiful old banks, hotels, libraries and churches, gorgeously festooned with lights and Christmas ribbons at this time of year.

Bucharest’s old town is crammed with restaurants, bars, shisha lounges, and clubs. These can be hit-and-miss, mostly catering to a seedier clientele, with lookie-look guys lurking creepily (lurky-lurk guys?) on every street in their synthetic black puffer jackets. The nightlife is consequentially something of a sausage fest. No matter, Cat and Chelsea have enough dance moves to go around, and we hit the tiles every night, joined by additional friends from London, Hamburg, and Rio. The weekend concluded with Dan crawling into the hostel at 7.45am on Sunday. He was then promptly awoken for check out at 10.30, and bundled onto a train. Chelsea is a month off the sauce and has used this stop to research the optimal number of espressos to sustain the requisite vibes. On five she can go until 3am. On six, her heart begins to beat a little too fast and she has to lie down.

We’ve got a week left in Romania and are very much looking forward to the quiet of the mountains and not sleeping in a dorm with 15 snoring men.Lue lisää