Despite all the 25k+ miles of traveling I’ve done this year, I decided to squeeze in one more big trip over the holidays. I left for a long day/night of travel arriving in Bucharest on my birthday. My plan is to spend my birthday, Christmas, and into the New Year in România. This is too long a trip for lots of posts (e.g., every day), so I’ll consolidate the high level of my travels into a few posts. This will be the first time I’ve spent the holidays outside the US. I was interested in seeing how the holidays passed in another country, but it’s also a chance to experience December and January in the snowy mountains for the first time in a long time.
I left home in the morning traveling by bus and BART to the airport, and arrived in the late afternoon of the next day. The flight was long but bearable. Flying in, I transferred planes in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, which was my first time in France (if the airport counts). Too hectic a changeover to be an enjoyable first visit. Despite diligently disinfecting myself and wiping things down, I was starting to get queasy again as I landed in Bucharest. This may have partially been do to lack of sleep leading up to my trip. In strong contrast to when I visited (arriving over a holiday weekend) in the spring, the traffic in Bucharest was insane when I arrived. It took me a long time to get picked up as my ride couldn’t even get into the airport, and it took a while for me to find her. Then, traveling back through town was also a mess. Despite the traffic, the town was illuminated with Christmas lights all over town.
București
The first few days of the trip were spent in Bucharest, to give me a chance to recover from the trip with one major site seeing tour planned. The Airbnb apartment was in the same building I stayed in previously, but it was higher up and looked towards the Palace of the Parliament, which was the main planned tour for this leg of the trip. We managed to hit a few nice restaurants including the historic Hanu’ lui Manuc where I also ate last time, and another restaurant in the old town Caru’ cu bere where we had a nice breakfast before the tour of the Parliament building. This was a beautiful old restaurant, dating from the end of the 19th century, with wooden furninshings and lots of spruce trees hanging from the ceilings decorating the place for the holidays.
The Palace of the Parliament is the 2nd largest administrative building in the world (behind the pentagon), and is the largest by volume. It is where the government meets, and where the federal bureaucracy is based. It also has a number of large venues that can be used for conferences and meetings. Construction was started under Ceaușescu but not completed till after the revolution when he was killed. We managed to get a tour that include the first few floors and the basement. It is beautifully adorned with marble and gold and is almost entirely constructed out of materials from Romania. They had some interesting historic displays in the basement depicting the communist era. After leaving, we came across a nice Christmas market.
One evening before we left we got an emergency notice about a fire in the area. The next morning the fog was pretty thick, and you could smell the smoke in the air. After a few days in Bucharest, we made our way up into the mountains of Transylvania where I would be spending the majority of my trip, based out of the city of Brașov.