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Published: April 29th 2015
Random 4x4 in downtown Bucharest
Next to Porches, Mercedes, Audi's, BMW's, Bentley's. Ironic!Did you know that Romania has the largest population of brown bears in Europe (over 6,500) next to Russia? (Random Ned Fact #47) So hike with caution my friends!
Today was our ‘day off’, our rest day from our vacation. How ironic that we felt like we needed a day off from our vacation; however we did. It's been busy, and wonderful at the same time, but behind on blogging, we haven’t really had time to sit back, smell the roses, read a book as we’ve both been so interested in seeing as much as possible while away. These were 4 new countries for Dennis (3 for me) and both of us wanted to absorb as much as possible. Truthfully things are a tad bit fuzzy for me, which is why I keep blogging the most recent as I have to go back and do some research on the 3 days in the middle!
We’ve been having a heap of fun doing our 'Google' searches (and yes I'm using quotes for a reason as it became a game). During our exploration, if we have a question that we couldn't answer, or see something and we don’t know enough about;
we Google it. So every day we’ve been literally been making a list on the things we will Google once we get home. Everything from how many First Nations there are in Canada (percentage of the population - about 6%) to where is Sophia Loren was born (Italy) (the hotel in Bucharest had heaps of photos of her which got us curious), to where to the gypsies come from (Egypt), to pounds vs. poundals (we had a physicist on board who had fun confusing me about pounds vs kilograms) to bone density (are people really big or smaller boned? {No}) and on and on. One thing I can say for sure; traveling with Dennis we have yet to run out of things to talk about - I’m loving every second of it. Political debates, philosophical conversations, food matters (pun intended for those of you who know) playing devil’s advocate on extreme topics and so on. And then we chat about skydiving, music and silly things as well, but it hasn’t stopped and I’m so happy we have not grown bored or tired of each others company. Sure there are times we just sit back and quietly reflect; but I have
to say; it’s rare to find a traveling companion this easy to be with; and I’ve left an open invitation to him to join me on anything going forward.
Our goal was to sleep in, of course both of us were up by 7:30, but laid in bed checking Facebook, drinking Nescafe and chatting. Eventually we headed down for a leisurely breakfast, then decided to ‘hit the city’ starting at the Old Town of Bucharest. We made it there, and if you recall those crazy traffic circles I mentioned earlier that would make your hair stand on end? Yes we had to cross one to get to our destination and I started to break out in a nervous sweat the second I saw it. There is a little story to that however……
(visualize Wayne’s World doing the do-do-do-do-dudodulooo- sound and taking us back in time)
When I was in Paris in 1994 I was walking down Champs E'lyesse to the Arc de Triumph and wanted to walk up it for the view. It was surrounded by a 5 or 6 lane traffic circle, which of course being a traffic circle had no lights. I sat there for
Randome scene:
Old building under construction, but people sitting on sidewalk looking like waiting for something but nothing is there. Weird. a while perplexed and finally went OK, suck it up sister, if you want to get there you have to pay the price. So I crossed that traffic circle, one lane at a time, terrified, getting honked at and wondering how messed up this was and why Parisian’s had such a hate on for tourists. Made it, a bit disheveled and stressed, but enjoyed the view, it was (almost) worth it! Then I noticed people were disappearing down a flight of stairs, so curious to see if it was another tourist site, I followed and discovered it was an underground pedestrian tunnel. Sigh. Sometimes I am my own worse enemy :-)
(visualize now the forward movement of hands and music bring you back to current day…..)
So, now dear reader you probably understand my terror of 6 lane traffic circles as a pedestrian (mind you in this city I wouldn’t drive either), when to my immense glee there was, yes, a pedestrian underground tunnel. YYYAAAYYYY!!! The under ground part reminded me of the Toronto subway downtown, with 6 exits and some shops in the middle. We made it, safe and sound and spent the next 4 hours wandering
Man, Time and Space Statue
I had to Google this. We thought it was a man with a broken back in a wheel..... around and around and around, and repeating and relaxing.
We walked, stopped for coffee, then walked some more, then stopped for lunch. This was after trying to find the Lebanese restaurant we had spotted earlier in the day and could we find it again? No. But we were not starving and determined to find it so kept going, around and around. Found it finally, sat down being the only people in the restaurant, only to be joined shortly afterwards by a sports team that had them crank the Middle Eastern Dance music and chat very loudly (as excited sports teams do) to the point where I was ready to cry! Dennis in his infinite calmness just laughed, I moved us away as far as physically possible; only to have a table sit down beside us 2 minutes later and start smoking (allowed in Europe). I give up, some days I’m too Canadian (space, quiet and no smoking), alas our peaceful vegetarian lunch was turning into a nightclub ecstasy experience (Murphy's Law and me, we are *this* tight).
The food was delicious, well worth the noise and smoke but I was happy to leave as soon as we were
done. We wandered some more, saw Vlad the Impaler’s ‘city apartment’ (I guess making the castle his weekend cottage lol), another lovely church and some really cool old, old buildings that are slowly being restored. Eventually we wandered back to the hotel; with a stop at Chocolat (again) for an outdoor coffee, the weather was a nice 20 degrees, there was a slight breeze and we were in the shade and well, it was bordering on perfect.
The day before we had talked to Marianne our local guide about what was going on in Romania in 1967 as that was the year my father had escaped. He was never one to talk about it much; other than he ran away, walked over the mountains to Italy and took a boat to Canada. He did joke that he was number 366 refugee trying to get to Canada, and the airplane took 365 people, so he ended up on the slow boat to freedom. Marianne was thrilled to find out I had Romanian blood in me, and I wanted to understand what it was like living there during that time. It was still in USSR control, communism was prevalent and a
Coffin via motorcycle
I think most of my riding friends would love this option! lot of corruption, but overall in her mind it wasn’t bad. She did say when you grew up in a communistic society you really didn’t know any different, so no reason to think it was bad. Some people were thinking outside the box and wondering what was beyond, which probably reflects my father; knowing him today as I do and I'm sure he recognized/felt that there was more to life so to speak.
Chilled out for a while in the hotel, then after it got dark we went out to explore the light show that was going on. Hendrik had shown us his photos from the night before, and basically it was a laser show the city was putting on, all over the old buildings. And it was incredible! Reminded me of the firework events in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal (Symphony of Lights) that were utterly spectacular. This was same but with lasers. They ‘drew’ on buildings, outlined them, crumbled them, made them dance, did rainbows, drew moving solar systems and on and on. It was so cool! Tonnes of people were out exploring and enjoying, families and all ages alike. Felt really safe and had so much fun
looking at the city at night and the laser displays; total fluke we were there for it, but happy we had the opportunity.
Walking back to the hotel we decided that we wanted food (ate a very late lunch but no supper yet) but also in search of a crape. My grandmother used to make them for me (super thin pancakes) and we ate them plain, sweet and savoury all the time, and we had been served one at lunch the day before but it just made me want more. Finally we found a restaurant that was still open and served them, so we shared a plate of bean stew (seriously) followed by crapes stuffed with bananas and Nutella (to our surprise) and drizzled in chocolate. Our waiter thought we were seriously odd ducks as we didn't even order anything to drink and this was around 11:30 at night. Yup, 2 happy travellers wandered back to our hotel room and crashed out - latest night yet at almost 1am! (my skydiving team mates would be proud!)
Next day was flying home day and we didn’t have to rush too much in the morning, our only goals were to
have a long breakfast and pack (and check every flipping nook and cranny in the hotel despite me not unpacking much). The day was relaxing and wonderful, it was a perfect end to a near perfect vacation (minus losing my passport and almost missing the trip, leaving behind have my (favourite) clothes on board and just being a general dork). As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. so please continue below to more photos as they also tell a story :-)
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Andrea minshull
non-member comment
Light show
Something similar was done in Quebec City, it was more of a history lesson in lights and images, put to beautiful music. It was displayed on large container warehouses down by the St Laurent river. Really cool! Except you had to stand for it...45 minutes or more....