We left our guest house in Brasov on Friday morning and began our 3ish hour drive to Bucharest. The final city on our weird honeymoon road trip! It was sad though because it also meant leaving the Transylvania region. And also, it meant being in the car while still half-sick, aren’t you so thrilled this portion of the trip is still on-going. You know, I’m really wondering if I had norovirus.

Before we leave though, I had to stand on a sidewalk with all the luggage while Henry walked the mile or so away where he parked the car, and I’ll be real with you – I wasn’t feeling so hot. I hadn’t puked at all that morning but I was still squeamish at the mere sight of food, so imagine how stoked I was still be standing next to a truck making a potato delivery.

But…better than fish, I guess.

We saw this cemetery on the road! The geotag on my photo says it was from Sinaia, which is the area where Peles is. I forgot we had to drive back out that way in order to get to Bucharest.

To be honest, I slept for most of the drive there which is how you know I was sick because I am usually like if Aerosmith wrote “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” for a passenger princess on a road trip.

The hallway of our apartment for the next two nights! It had a tiny, rickety elevator and I loved it. Still sickly but smiling!

This apartment was very cozy and clean. And it had a washer so Henry was like YES, LAUNDRY TIME! MY FAVORITE!

He’s so weird. And domestic.

Ofc I had to add my name to the chalkboard wall! I lit up like a Kindergartener peeling glue off their fingertips in art class when I saw it and immediately went on the hunt of the chalk.

We had a little enclosed balcony and this was the view from it. (It also had a lilac Eyfel diffuser in there and I was determined at this point to finally go to one of the shops and buy some.)

The first thing on our agenda was to just basically get out and poke around while also walking to a post office so I could – GOD FORBID – buy stamps for my postcards. This has to be on Henry’s list of Reasons Not to Travel with ERK – being one of the only surviving postcard senders left on earth which means we are always having to find post offices in foreign places.

Sometimes in the US too! We had a bitch of a time finding a place to mail my post cards in Iowa and this was with me PRE-PLANNING by buying postcard stamps AT HOME before we left! (Actually, I made Chooch go to the post office for this and he was so annoyed.)

Anyway, no surprise here but Bucharest was way different than any of the places in Romania we had previously explored. I mean, obviously it’s the capital so it’s already going to have that gritty, urban vibe to it and the Communist / Bauhaus architecture was popping. I personally found it beautiful and unique but apparently travelers complain about it?

Fun fact is that Bucharest is known as Little Paris. It has been A LONG ASS TIME since I was last in Paris (literally mid-90s) but I didn’t really get that feeling? It’s also been A LONG ASS TIME since I’ve been to Berlin but if I had to compare Bucharest with a Euro city I’ve been to, it would be Berlin.

We spent most of our time in Old Town, I would say. It was really close to where we were staying and just had a really cool vibe to it. Yes, full of tourists but not overwhelmingly so. (Consider the season!) We had to pass through here on the way to the post office, so we also popped into the famous Cărturești Carusel bookstore that EVERYONE GOES TO when they visit Bucharest. It is so prevalent in all of the “things to do in Bucharest” travel vlogs that it very quickly turned Henry averse to it and he did NOT want to go.

I have to say you guys – I was very underwhelmed. I mean, it was pretty at its core but it wasn’t anything to LITERALLY write home about? Just a book store. However, I do need to mention that A SONG FROM BLOODFLOWERS was actually playing inside there and I NEVER hear songs from that Cure album, especially out in the wild. And that is one of my favorite Cure albums too. I took a quick video, of course, so that will be posted later once I compile all my clips from this day.

(And yes, we found the post office!)

This was the square outside of the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development where a farmer’s market type thing was going on. There were so many different stands with local honey and I was like I NEED TO GET HONEY FROM ONE OF THESE PLACES but it was so hard to choose.

Also, there were so many food stalls but I wasn’t ready to eat yet :( I wanted Henry to at least enjoy the cheese samples but he was being SO WEIRD about it and said he didn’t want to ask for samples when he knew he wasn’t going to buy any cheese. Like, wow, much martydom.

I did end up getting honey from here – a whole cute set of it – and I think I already wrote about this when we first came home but it got taken by TSA at the Dulles airport because of a checked bag that ended up getting UNCHECKED because we were put on a different flight and then they wouldn’t let us recheck it and LONG STORY SLIGHTLY TRIMMED, my carry-on was routed over to the SUS LANE and the TSA agent (super nice guy, at least) was like, “I’m so sorry but I have to take this unless you go back and check in your bag” and we were like, “We tried that” and then honestly the clock was ticking, we were already cutting it close, so I was like ENJOY THE ROMANIAN HONEY MY GUY and we left it there. :(

Literally we have the worst luck with these things, even when we initially do it the right way.

The fact that the TSA agent was actually nice and treated us like human beings made me less mad though, for sure. I know it was probably just thrown out but in my imagination, he took it home, smeared it on some toast, and shared it with his neighborhood squirrels while wondering if I made it home safely. (He was kind of cute, OK??)

Korean market!

And by this point, it was mid-afternoon and Henry was like, “WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO BE OK TO EAT” like just say it bro, I’m ruining your life by being sick! Anyway, we’ll talk about lunch in the next post because I have blogging fatigue. :(

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