I finally realised today – partly – why there was so much chaos on Saturday night, or at least why the hotel didn’t seem to have a single room empty. It didn’t hit me until this morning when there were a lot of ladies of a certain age dumping their suitcases four feet away from the lift and occuping every single table in the breakfast room and two coaches parked outside. They’ve all come to Bucharest for the weekend for the cathedral inauguration! They finished off the orange juice – I pressed the button for orange juice and nothing but water came out. Luckily, they don’t seem to have much of a taste for raspberry juice.

Today was my spa day! There’s a bus that runs from the city to the therme but it goes from Free Press House, which is 20 minutes on another bus or about 55 minutes on foot so I decided to go for the easy option, which is the train to the airport and get the bus 10 minutes up the road from there. Of course, it’s stil 1.02km to the station (which means walk to the station and back and even if I do nothing else, I’ve still got my daily mileage in) so it’s not the easy easy option but it’s easier than working my way up the city by road.

I arrived at 10am on the dot, which is opening time – which means a massive queue because almost everyone is arriving ready to go in at 10. It’s not exactly relaxing to walk straight into a crowd so big you don’t know which side of the room you’re supposed to be queueing on and it’s not exactly relaxing to discover there are only about ten changing cubicles in the Elysium locker room along with around 500 lockers. The numbers are over the door.

Therme Bucuresti advertises itself as the biggest spa in Europe but a therme isn’t a spa. A therme is a kind of waterpark with a big glass atrium and a sauna area attached. This one is big but the (semi-)adults-only areas of the Palm and Elysium wouldn’t qualify as biggest in Europe without the Galaxy area attached, which is the family-friendly area with all the slides. Also, a huge amount of it is outside and closed from October onwards and of the indoor area, a huge amount of it is sunbeds and loungy-things with umbrella-like covers and if you didn’t get in by 10:15 and drop your towel on one of them, you’re not going to get to sit on any of them. I don’t dislike it (now) but I think it’s overrated and nowhere near as big as it claims to be.

I spent quite a while in the Palm main pool and outdoor pool. I tried out the mineral baths (the salt one will find any minor injury and make it sting) and towards the end of the afternoon I had an ice cream at the vitamin bar, which is just the takeaway area attached to the Palm’s restaurant. I popped briefly into Galaxy but it echoes with shrieking and screeching and lifeguards blowing whistles and there are thousands upon thousands of children. Hiding round the side are three steam baths, a salt library (walls of salt bricks with shelves for leaving towels on) and another relax pool. Upstair in Elysium, I tried out most of the saunas. Alhambra is quite pleasant; Bavaria is excruciatingly hot and Himalaya really didn’t need to be a literal mountain.

Having arrived at 10am, I finally left the premises at two minutes to six in the evening, having watched the sun set and turn the sky purple and then watched the lights come on inside. The bus took forever because it has to get to the other side of the dual carriageway via a retail park (as I plan to find a supermarket to buy bread on the way home and watch a giant Carrefour and Lidl crawl by) and then we stopped two or three times around the airport before we actually got the airport bus top. Seven minutes and we were still only just opposite the junction we’d left from.

At the airport I got bread and cash and then failed to get to the station, despite having done it with zero difficulty 48 hours earlier. That train was slow too, 35 minutes for a journey that normally takes 20-25 and so two hours after I left the therme, I was finally standing in front of the lift getting frustrated that it just wasn’t coming down to floor zero. But here I am!

Tomorrow is an adventure that I think Mary Shelley would approve of, but it’s one that makes me the tiniest bit nervous…