Since I start this every day with an update on the breakfast room situation, today we had two football team in, which is much smaller than the coach tours we’ve had most mornings. They drank all the orange drink.

I packed up my stuff and was out much earlier than I really needed to be to cross off the last few places – Piata Romana, the Romulus and Remus statue (which is not at Piata Romana!) St Nicholas-in-a-day, the old town (got some badges for my blanket!), a better look at the Palace, getting some use out of my metro ticket, sit in a park or two and then back to Gara de Nord for the 15:50 to the airport where I found myself sitting next to a poor idiot boy who didn’t realise the at least 10-minute stop at the big station where everyone got off the train and everyone got on the train was in fact the end of the line until the train started moving, in the wrong direction. Off at the first stop and back for another go.

I made it successfully to the airport, through security with my bag getting swabbed twice and my sewn-in belt getting me out of a manual search that really should have been done, through passport control and now I’m sitting at the lounge with this balanced very precariously. It’s hard to be loquacious when you have to touch the keyboard really lightly in case all belongings fall over backwards onto the floor but I’m at the airport!

Breakfast without a coach party! Breakfast where I had a seat and there was space down the narrow aisle to get the food! Oh, the small things you learn to appreciate!

Today’s adventure was to Brasov. In 2009, I jumped off the train 20 miles early at a small town in the Carpathians called Predeal so today’s job was just to successfully get to Brasov. The first hour was mostly just not very much to see, with the occasional power station but an hour in, the mountains rose up and that was great, although the train then stopped every ten minutes all the way to Predeal. A lot of them were covered in orange and brown trees with the occasional dark green one but some of them were absolutely sheer bare rock and you could imagine Castle Dracula perched on top of them with nothing but a thousand foot drop underneath. Actually, I almost began to wish I wasn’t going to Brasov but stopping in this autumnal wonderland.

But Brasov was quite nice. I bought a day bus pass (which I utterly failed to validate) and saved myself the 45 minute walk down to the Old Town which was a lot more medieval and just a lot more laid back than Bucharest. Kind of like Poland, if Poland had a habit of Dracula-related things. Well, actually, there was Dracula’s Restaurant and in the middle of the square was an undead horse and carriage to draw people’s attention to Stoker’s pop-up wine bar. And there was a great big Gothic church! It was 20 lei, I think, maybe 25 lei to go in. Not so Gothic inside and not worth the admission price for the interior. Worth it to save me sixteen years of wishing I’d gone in, though.

The narrow interesting street leaning off the opposite end of the main square turned out to kind of be an ordinary high street but it eventually led me up to the walls of the city and to the cable car that goes up to the panoramic restaurant. That was definitely something I wanted to do! It took 45 minutes to an hour to queue, which was mostly because there’s only one cash desk and the poor woman couldn’t get through everyone fast enough. The cable car was going up barely three-quarter full.

Now, there’s an excellent view from the top but the only place you can actually see it is from is the landing platform of the cable car. I walked around the top and over the top and through the panoramic restaurant and I just couldn’t comprehend that there’s nowhere to look at the view unless you manage to get the front window seats at the restaurant. 45 lei is an excellent price to save me 16 years of planning to come back and go up the mountain but it’s not a great price for a view you don’t really get to see.

Then I had an other hour basically to wander around Brasov before I had to get the bus. I tried again to validate my day ticket, which wasn’t playing nice with either the contactless pad or the stamping slot. Seeing me standing there looking bewildered, a man invited me to come and sit next to him so I did. Probably shouldn’t. He talked at me in Romanian, all the more as he discovered that the only word of Romanian I can pick out is “gara”. A boy standing nearby assured me it was fine that I couldn’t validate my card but then when my drunken seatmate kept appealing to him for translation as I failed to understand him, he just stared straight ahead. The drunk man tried to give me a present, I think. Maybe a plant, wrapped up in a plastic bag? Anyway, he kept asking me questions very seriouly and I kept having to say “I don’t know, I don’t understand” but when he kept going, I eventually said out loud “My Romanian is not getting any better as this conversation goes on!”. A woman opposite said that he wanted to get up and get off the bus, so I got up but it turned out he didn’t – but it got me away from him and my ticket-saviour murmured to me that he was just drunk and talking nonsense. Then someone in a wheelchair got on so we all shuffled around and drunk man got off and I found myself a seat. As we approached the station, a woman who’d been close enough to witness everything leaned down and said “this is the train station”. I said “thank you” out loud and not out loud “I know, I’d figured that”. There’s a really handy map with a moving bus logo where you’d normally have the next stop announced but also I could recognise it. I may not be able to validate a day ticket but I can get around by bus.

I was at the station with plenty of time for my train back to Bucharet but just like last time, it was delayed. There are no announcements or boards or anything on the platform. There’s a departure board in the main station hall but I wasn’t running backwards and forwards to that. When I looked, it said nothing about the train to Bucharest but claimed that the incoming train from Cluj Napoc was going to be 50 minutes late. Luckily one major difference between 2009 and 2025 is that I have a smartphone now and there’s a handy website that lists each train so I could see that it had been late departing pretty much every station since it left Cluj Napoc 11 minutes late at 10:33 in the morning. It had got up to 19 minutes late at its 2nd stop, caught up at Sighisoara and somehow left Augustin 43 minutes late, getting in to Brasov 64 minutes late. In 2009, I’d have just stood on the platform and hoped a train was coming. In 2025, I could watch the delay grow as I waited and then see that it moved from platform 5 to platform 4 – which I’d expected, because by the time the train was actually on its way in, there were two unrelated trains already parked at platform 5, one of them with the loco detached. I was a bit dubious about the train when it came in – IR1734 also had IR1735 on the window, so I initially ran away, thinking it was the wrong train, but everyone who’d been standing on the platform for over an hour got on so I had a second look. IR1734 in one direction, IR1735 in the other. I found my seat and the woman sitting in immediately moved to sit next to rather than opposite her husband and no one else turned up to turf me out of it, which seemed a second good sign that I was on the right train. The conductor scanning my ticket and it beeping in approval was a third good sign. We made up a lot of time and were only 50 minutes late by the time we left Ploiesti, the last stop before Bucharest North. Then we crawled through the outskirts of the city and were a whole hour late by the time we finally got in. That was 9:40pm, nearly three hours after finally leaving Brasov. But the two people sitting opposite me had been there since Sighisoara, at 2pm and yet never moved in the three hours from Brasov.

So I walked back home an hour later than planned, ate the bread and cheese I’d planned to eat on the train and now it’s bedtime.

Breakfast remained chaotic because there was another coach party abandoning their luggage right outside the lift again and taking up all the seats and tables – but with a new bit of fun, using all the glasses! And because the juice dispenser dispenses a certain amount, you can’t just grab a coffee cup and fill that because it overflows! One of the wide ones nearly works as long as you slurp it before you try to carry it anywhere.

Anyway, breakfast survived and it was time to catch two buses which took nearly two hours (including time waiting for the second bus at Gara Baneasi) out to a village 40km north of Bucharest. This is apparenty a popular place for summer days out for city folk but I was the only person who got off the bus at Monastery Street. I was going to the grave of Vlad the Impaler. Seemed a suitably spooky Halloweeny thing to do and an interesting half-day adventure anyway. I was a bit nervous. I’d been nervous about the journey a few days ago but now I’ve figured out how the buses work so that’s fine. I was nervous about the kilometre walk through a very villagey village to the causeway to the island where the monastery is situated and I didn’t really stop being nervous about that until I’d arrived on the island. And I was nervous about dogs. In 2009, Bucharet was overrun with street dogs, a side-effect of systematization, which feels like a big word for “Ceaușescu demolished entire neighbourhoods and villages and moved everyone into apartment blocks” in which dogs apparently didn’t fit. It was the first thing I noticed on Saturday night, the utter lack of street dogs and I googled it. No, it wasn’t the most successful TNR programme of all time. After a four-year-old was viciously mauled, Romania revolted and an old law about stray dogs was brought back. 25,000 dogs were put down, 23,000 were adopted out (mostly to other countries; Germany and the UK were big adopters) and 2000 are still in shelters. Bucharest is pretty much free of street dogs but you’ll find a few on the outskirts of the city and there are about half a million still roaming the rest of the country. Ilfov county, north of Bucharest, still has plenty, and Snagov is in Ilfov. So I was nervous about the dogs. In Tbilisi, they’re all vaccinated and neutered and are generally good-natured and belong to everyone. Romanian street dogs have more of a tendency to be vicious.

I saw three or four stray dogs in my kilometre of Snagov. None of them looked vicious. Mostly they looked bored. One was enjoying the sun on a stone seat. It’s when they run in packs that things get bad but these were solo. So I got to the bridge unmauled, walked across, enjoyed the autumn woods around the lake and arrived on the island to find a small child feeding three large goats in a paddock. Very nice. Very rural. Very- what is that?? That is an ostrich. I’m used to ostriches on farms and petting zoos and places of that kind. I’m not used to ostriches on tiny farmsteads on tiny villages in Romania.

It’s all of about 100m from the bridge to the monastery, which is also a tiny church, founded by Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes in Romanian. Vlad Dracul, it turns out, was his father, and it means that the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg invited him to join the Order of the Dragon. Vlad the Dragon and it wasn’t even the famous one. The famous one is (allegedly) buried in the monastery. As I entered, a man stood up and said in English “the entrance tax is 20”, which I was expecting, hence getting cash out yesterday and breaking my 100 lei into something more manageable on the way to the bus this morning. Since there were signs up saying no photography and he hadn’t mentioned it, it kind of felt like offering a bribe to say “And I hear another 10 for photos?” which he nodded at and recorded it all formally in a book.

It’s a tiny church but every inch is painted. Almost every inch. There are a few sides hidden from certain angles that haven’t been painted. And then there’s a slab on the floor with a candle, a vase of flowers and a picture of old Vlad. Actually, there’s apparently no tomb under there and even if there was, his head was supposedy removed and sent to Turkey. But this is where they advertise as his grave and no doubt the monastery does a good trade in Vlad tourists who would otherwise have no reason to even know this place exists. That’s about it for the entire island. It’s tiny. The bridge is relatively new, although Vlad apparently had one in his day. If you wanted to tourist over here a few years ago, you had to hire a boat from a local and row across. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I have no idea where to start with hiring a boat from a local and I’m not brilliant at rowing. I’d probably get there but it would be a bit of a zigzag.

Back in Bucharest, I crossed a few things off my to-do list. Lunch in the massive park, walk to the aviator statue (which is not at Aviator Square, obviously!) and then bus down to the Roman Athenaeum, which isn’t Roman. In fact, it turns out that isn’t even its name. It’s the Romanian Athenaeum and it’s a concert hall with a big domed roof and columns at the front which was built in the 1880s/90s. It also turns out to be a 17 minute walk from my hotel, which is a minute quicker than the quickest way of getting home via public transport. Cross the road opposite the Athenaeum and just keep walking. Crossing the road is the slow bit.

Tomorrow I’ve got another old error to fix – my trip to Brasov. In 2009, I jumped off the train 20 miles early. Tomorrow I’ll be waving at Predeal as I pass and actually arriving in Brasov.

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…

Mistake number 3 from 2009 was eating the so-called hotel’s breakfast, which had mould, or at least suspicious grey speckles on the bread. That one I fixed! The Accor Group hotel had an excellent breakfast, once I’d figured out where to find plates and that I shouldn’t even be looking for a tray. The only issue was that the apple juice drink seemed to be just water that had once been shown an apple but the orange juice drink was nice. Not orange juice but it had some colour and flavour. I’ll try the raspberry drink tomorrow.

Over breakfast, I watched the big TV and managed to deduce that the breaking news from the National Cathedral was in fact an inauguration ceremony. Well, I like a cathedral and Google Maps informed me that this is a controversial one, since it’s very big and very gaudy and very expensive. It’s actually less than two kilometres away, next to the People’s Palace, which is one of the sights of Bucharest and also a place where I can pick up the hop-on hop-off bus that I planned to use to discover the city.

Mind you, after breakfast I came back to my room and scrolled and sort of was lazy. Last night was late and the clocks changed and so on. So I was sort of surprised by the time I’d walked all the way down to the cathedral that the ceremony was still in full flow, and that half of Romania seems to be packed in around it, despite the number of people I saw walking away from it as I approached. It’s a pretty big cathedral with a pretty big courtyard, all the roofs gleaming gold and according to the live footage from the TV and on the big screens out the front, very, very gold inside. I’m strongly reminded of the Mango Musselini’s changes to the Oval Office and the White House’s East Wing. I think he’d really like this cathedral.

It actually manages to overpower the People’s Palace next door, which is quite a feat considering that’s the heaviest building in the world. No idea how they weigh large buildings but it’s very big and very solid-looking and yet somehow doesn’t seem to even dominate its own square anymore. I don’t know if it’s usually open to the public, or if it’s open on weekdays but you couldn’t get near it today. At the opposite end is a semi-circular square (in the town architecture sense rather than the strict geometric sense) and that is just a big car park for tour buses, as is the road leading up to Union Square. I had an odd encounter with an older Romanian woman who handed me a phone, saying “Samsung, Samsung!” quite urgently and pointing at the fountains. Ok, you want a picture with the fountains. Why are you standing behind me? And when I’ve taken the photos, why are you miming swiping on your hand and repeating “Samsung! Camera! Camera! Samsung!”? I have no idea what happened. I hope she wanted a gallery of pictures of her with the fountain and I hope she found someone who could do whatever else it was she wanted because I left utterly confused.

At Union Square, I discovered that the hop-on hop-off bus doesn’t operate in the winter. As it only started in late August after several years’ suspension, I thought it would keep going for a while. That had been my plan – transport and information all in one. Well, I’d been planning to get to know the metro later in the week so that came a bit early. Faced with a ticket machine and four options to put passes on a magnetic ticket, I opted for a week pass. I don’t need a week but the next option was 10 journeys and I don’t know how many I’ll use and whether it’ll be a hassle to top it up. £7.73 for unlimited metro rides while I’m here seems fine to me. So I took the metro north to the park next to Free Press House, then jumped back on it for one more stop because there’s a supermarket next to the next metro station, whereas it’s 22 minutes each way on foot to the nearest one from the park metro station. The supermarket turned out to be a fairly large Carrefour Market in the basement of a shopping centre, so I stocked up on enough basics to get through the day, got back on the metro (there, three journeys gone already) and went to have lunch in the park.

My plan to walk through the park was scuppered by an open air museum. I’m sure it’s interesting and it’s gone on my list to do Tuesday afternoon or Thursday morning but it meant I had to leave the park which at least took me to Arcul de Triumf, Bucharest’s answer to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, which also has a roundabout around it where no one seems to know the rules. This one isn’t quite as big or as bad as the one in Paris but I wouldn’t want to drive round it. And then it was some 15-20 minutes of walking up the busy avenue to Free Press House at the other end.

I remember it being bigger in 2009. I also don’t remember seeing it from this angle. I remember the lake and feeling like it would be nice to spend some time enjoying the lake and the park and I have no idea why I didn’t just do that. I did today. It’s a massive park with a pretty massive lake in it, surrounded by orangey yellowy green autumnal trees. But now my feet hurt. I’ve still got lots to see in Bucharet but it was a late and stressful night and my plans got scuppered by the lack of tourist bus and I was at least present for a moment in history and I decided to come home. That meant figuring out the bus. Not the HOHO bus but the ordinary one. That was my first mistake in 2009, the lack of validation. However, in 2025 you can either use an app or text a number or just tap your contactless card on the reader. It made a hideous beep but then the screen flashed green and although it was entirely in Romanian, I eventually took the green a a sign that it had worked, even though it had made a hideous noise. So that was another mistake re-done and repaired.

I popped out later to one of the two small supermarkets on the other side of the road (four crossings, I think) to get something to drink. Nice to know they’re there but I’ll probably not think to get food until halfway through the afternoon most days, like I usually do.

Plans for tomorrow are exciting and not scary, once I’ve figured out the bus that takes up the second part of the journey…

It’s 23:53 Bucharest time and I should be going to sleep but it’s been the sort of evening that needs a few minutes to decompress first. I’m here for two reasons, the second of which will come along on Monday but the first is to correct some mistakes from my last trip here, which was in 2009. I said I’d come back in a few years, when Bucharest was beginning to make some visible progress in its journey away from its Communist era and see how I liked it.

So, story begins in Bristol with a Ryanair flight. Definite downgrade. Last time I flew BA from Heathrow T5 and judging by the photos, had hold luggage – there’s a picture of a full-sized bottle of suncream on my bathroom shelf. This time, personal item only. Fine. I brought my tablet because 1) long enough flight to want something to distract me (Gilmore Girls; I’ve never seen it before and without the sheen of nostagia… well, it’s not going to become a favourite series unless it makes a lot of changes in Lorelei Gilmore) 2) to write this blog on! I had a delightful neighbour who wore her big coat draped over her shoulders, thus pushing me into the wall, when Ryanair is already cramped enough but fine.

I was concerned about passport control, about arriving at 9.20pm and then having four hours of queueing for the new biometric controls thing, can’t remember what it’s called, can’t be bothered to look it up at 23:57. But it took two minutes to get from the plane (admittedly via a short bus ride to the terminal) to passport control and then I was only fourth in the “all other passports” (we took back control, yay for us!) queue and they haven’t implemented it yet, so that was all very quick. By 9:22 I was heading for the exit! By 9:29, I was buying a train ticket to the city centre. Last time I was here, in 2009, mistake number 1 was to not know I needed to validate my bus ticket. Well, now they’ve opened a direct rail link to Gara de Nord. Got on the train and noticed the ticket was for the 23:52 train when I was on the 21:31 (when it failed to move, I went to look at the sign on the platform. It arrived at 21:31, it was departing at 21:52. So off I went to the website and then to the app and discovered that the 21:52 did not exist. Fine. See what happens when or if the conductor comes round. Which he did the second the train started moving. I held up the ticket and asked “Is this ok…?” and he didn’t even look at it but just went “NO!” and immediately and with barely a word, sold me a ticket from the machine. Both together came to about £2.75 which is very cheap for a direct airport train.

Another unremarkable journey and then I walked out of the station and along the road to the hotel. I’d checked the directions but hadn’t taken into account that Bucharest has a lot more major roads than it used to and I had to use 3 crossings at a junction when just walking across six lanes of traffic would have been only 1 crossing. Got to the hotel the best part of an hour earlier than I’d expected, thanks to passport control being so close and so easy.

And this is where disaster struck. Mistake number 2 in 2009 was to stay in a truly terrible hotel, demolished less than 5 year later, according to Google Streetview, where the whole place was semi-derelict and the breakfast had mould on it and someone screamed like they were being murdered in the middle of the night. Maybe they were murdered in the middle of the night. So this time I booked a reputable chain hotel of the international Accor Group. Luxury! Non-mouldy breakfast included! Great!

I successfully checked in, took the lift up to my floor, let myself in my room… and discovered open suitcases. So I went back to reception and said “There’s already someone in there!”. The receptionist, who was not wearing a name badge, checked that I’d gone to the room number written on the card (I had; my Romanian is very weak but I can read numbers), looked at the computer, made concerned noises and then went upstairs presumably to check whether I’d just imagined open suitcases. I waited. And waited. She came down, she made more noises at the computer and then she disappeared out the back where raised voices were heard. I was concerned, but not overly so. The more noises she made and the more tearful she looked, the more I began to realise they probably didn’t have a room. But I’d booked and paid for if it several weeks ago and if they’d messed up, they were going to have to fix it. Whatever happened, I was not going to be turned onto the streets.

It took forever. The poor girl shrieked into her phone, got colleagues on the phone, got colleagues to the desk, sent me off to sit in the restaurant with a complementary drink while making distressed noises that almost made me feel like I was the one who had to reassure and console her. More shrieks, more tearful noises and I began to seriously think I was going to be roomless. Matters were complicated when someone came down to complain that their room card wasn’t working and I spied my room number on it. No, your card isn’t working because that’s my room! Receptionist checked whether she’d swapped with the person in the next room or whether she was supposed to be in the next room, sent her back up and I just sat there, thinking “if you’ve got no rooms, you’re going to have to find me one and taxi me there because this one, this time, isn’t on me”. Then she went upstairs for quite a while.

At last, and it’s at least 11.30pm by now, she came back and presented me with a new card for the next room. This would be easier with numbers but it’s stupid to put your hotel and room number on the internet while you’re still there. The room next to my original room, the one the current occupant may or may not have been supposed to be in. I have no idea what’s happened, whether someone had marked her as being in this room but had given her the card for the other one and why it took so long to untangle that – and a problem for tomorrow, whether anyone’s going to try to move in here tomorrow. But for the time being, I have a room and it appears to be all mine.

But the “fixing mistakes” counter is now on two mistakes not entirely solved, just changed. Evolved. Upgraded.