Romania - Bucureşti and Ploieşti - 20/5 - 24/5

Wednesday 20 May

Olly and Chris missed their train yesterday also, and Dave and Jenny were leaving today too. So the 6 of us were on the train to Ruse on the Bulgarian side of the border and then on to Bucharest together. It was a fairly uneventful trip, we left @ 7.20am and arrived in Bucharest around 4.30pm so we lost most of the day travelling. We parted ways with the Varna crew as we had arranged another couch surf. It was to be our 3rd time. We were staying with a couple - Madalina and Lucian (Lu-chee-an). We met them at the university and from there we headed to a bar (called Oktoberfest) to meet some of their friends. One of their friend also hosts couch surfers so there were a couple of Germans there too. We had a few drinks before heading home to their place. Their place was a very small unit and we crashed on the floor in their room.

Thursday 21 May

We slept in until nearly lunch time before heading into the city to have a look around. We ended up spending most of the day online trying to arrange our next few weeks worth of travel plans. A friend of Madalina's had mentioned a bush party on the weekend so we decided to stay for it rather than moving on after a few days as we had planned. We worked out to get a weekend in Belgrade we'd have to cut our trip to Germany short because it was logisitcally too hard and expensive to get to Germany from Serbia, so we decided to spend 4 days in Budapest Hungry and go from there.

We met Lucian and Madalina in the city and headed to a friend of their's shop where he sells board games, and we played a game called Shadows over Camelot, which was cool for fantasy nerds like us. There were 6 'loyal' knights and 2 hidden traitors playing for evil of which I was one. The traitors ended up winning the game (evil triumphed :P). We then headed to a nice park area to kill some time before dinner as it wasn't until 9pm. Dinner was at a place called Excalibur - a medieval restaurant, we were really looking forward to it for obvious reasons.

Excalibur turned out to be well cool. The decor was more impressive than our wedding venue in some ways - the food and drink were served on clay plates and in clay goblets without handles. There were lots of roasts on the menu, you could even order a whole piglet with 48 hours notice. There were 13 of us at dinner, and Steve, me, the 2 Germans and 3 of the Romanians ordered a 6 person feast with 2 whole chickens, pork, bacon, sausages and salad - which came around the edge of the platter of meat. The platter was so wide my plate almost didnt fit on the table. We had no eating utensils medieval style, so we all ate with our hands. The 7 of us didn't quite finish our meal, but only by a tiny bit. Steve and I had 7 beers between us and the total bill for us was around $45 Au, so expensive for Romania but still good for what we are used to at home. At dinner we met Alice, and she had a couch at her place that was bigger than the floor space we had a Madalina's so we stayed there but left all our stuff at Madalina's. We crashed at about 3am.

Friday 22 May

We didn't get up until after 12 on Friday, but we used the rest of the day to check out the city properly since we hadn't seen much the day before. There are lots of beautiful buildings in Buchrest, many of them run down and in need of restoration, but lots of ones in good condition too.


We headed out to the village museum which was a collection of relocated Romanian village buildings or recreated from originals. There were traditional dwellings dating back centuries. We weren't allowed to photograph inside or any of the churches which was a bummer as they were amazing.
We just wandered around and took some pictures before heading back to Madalina's to do grocery shopping for dinner that night and the bush party on the weekend. Steve cooked spaghetti and after we had dinner with Lucian and Madalina we took the left overs for Alice as she was doing work at home until late. We stayed at Alice's place again.

Saturday 23 May

Bush party day had arrived! I was extremely excited about it and keen to hit the road. We got away a bit after 2pm and it was a couple of hours drive away as the traffic was really bad. We arrived around 4.30, set up the tent then wandered around taking pictures while it was still light (and not trashed). There were 6 arenas - a live arena on which a band was playing when we arrived, a psy arena, a funk arena, the Lollipop arena, the Pisi Love arena (say that however you like :P), a reggae arena and a chill arena. When we saw the decor at the psy arena we were convinced that was where we would stay for the whole night as it was by far the coolest. There weren't too many people around while it was light but as the light faded the place really filled up. All of the arenas had good crowds all night, and we spend a bit of time in each. The lazer in the Lollipop arena occupied a lot of our attention, and when it hit the tree canopy over our heads it looked like the videos you see of the ocean taken from under water, where you can see the sun light streaking down through the water. It was a full colour lazer and so we watch it for ages. Madalina passed out fairly early so Lucian, Alice, Steve and I hung out most of the night together. We all had the best time, Steve said it was one of the best party experiences he's ever had. I can't really put into words how fun it was... so I'll just leave it at that.

Sunday 24 May

We stayed at the bush party until aournd 4pm then drove back as we had a 9.20pm overnight sleeper train to Belgrade in Serbia. We slept in the car most of the way back. By the time we arrived at the train station we were pretty tired so we were asleep by 9.30. We were very glad at that point that we had splurged and spent the extra money on a sleeper train (instead of 25 Euros/50Au it was 50Euros/100Au each) but the trip was over 12 hours so we'd decided to go the sleeper since we hadn't done a train trip over 9 hours yet and they had been pretty uncomfortable. We did quite well with keeping our spending down in Romania even though we partied and did touristy things.

Ruth