Welcome back to my blog for another adventure into the unknown. This time we’re headed for the Eastern Balkans: particularly Romania & Bulgaria. I don’t really know much about either country, so really intrigued at what we might find!
We’re flying with Ryanair from Dublin to Bucharest (the Romanian capital). It’s a 1:45am alarm call ahead of a 6:45 flight. I’ll spare you the details of the journey down to Dublin, but ashamed to say I was woken up by a loud knocking at the front door – I’d set the alarm for 1:45pm! 🤦🏻
We arrive into Bucharest at about 12:30pm local time. The passport queue is an absolute breeze – once again highlighting the advantage of flying out of Dublin on a British passport post-Brexit (pretty much all the other passengers go into the EU queue).
At the other side of passport control things aren’t quite so slick – the airport appears to undergoing quite major renovations, so there is a lot of building work going on both inside and outside. The airport is named after Henri Coandă, and his surname rings a bell, but can’t quite work out how yet. More on that later!
Building works have made navigation around the airport a bit of a challenge. We need to go from arrivals to departures to be collected by the hire car shuttle bus. A few wrong turns, and concerned calls to the car hire place later and we find the meeting point. A minibus soon shows up and the three of us (my mum, dad and I) are bundled into the back row together. It’s a bit close for comfort!
Through Ryanair, we’ve booked a VW Golf Estate with Klass Wagen. It’s a nice ride, but we’re spooked a bit by their terms and conditions. A single scratch will incur us a €700 fine. Ouch.
Interestingly, in their office I encounter what looks like a marble toilet lid. But looks can be deceiving. It’s not a heavy enough lid to be marble. I’m not sure I really see the vision here.
Soon we’re on the road and headed to our accommodation for the first few days. It’s in a small village called Căciulați about half an hour from the city centre to the north.
On the way there we encounter workers painting the road. I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever driven over a road as it’s being painted!
The guest house looks like it’s next to a farm. There are chickens running around next door’s garden.
Once we’re able to find out how to get in, inside is spacious and quirky with beautiful views over an elongated lake (which to me looks just like a river).
The living room wall is clad by neatly chopped wood, and there’s hundreds of books on another wall. The light switches are all strangely in the wrong place: bedrooms and bathrooms have their light switches outside the rooms. It’s beautiful on the surface, but needing a bit of work when you look up close.
All the decor is nice except a questionable bit of art chalked onto the wall of the second bedroom.
Turns out I’m on dinner duty tonight, so sit down to familiarise myself with the kitchen. It’s not terribly big! 😢 😆
We dump our bags and head back out to the car. We need to do a shop and identify a big Lidl supermarket in the nearby town of Snagov.
Snagov is known for its monastery – but now’s not the time for sightseeing, unless the sights we’re seeing are of packaged food on a shelf (or the intrigue and behemoth of the middle aisle).
It’s always fascinating seeing what strange and wonderful things can be found in shops in foreign countries. This time I am totally enamoured by the huge big watermelons. Photos don’t do their size justice but in the flesh they are at least twice as big as the melons back home.
There’s also another variety of melon in a box that looks more like a potato and is a lot narrower but still pretty big.
Anyway, putting melons to one side, it’s straight to the cheese aisle. It’s a pretty standard Lidl cheese selection tbh, but I did grab some local looking stuff. Will try it later!
Once we’ve completed our shop, it’s about 5:30pm and the sun is low in the sky. We’re feeling quite hungry and opt to return to a traditional looking restaurant we’d passed on the roadside on the way to Lidl. Yeh something traditionally Romanian for the first night would be just perfect.
Slightly concerningly there isn’t much activity, but we venture on in regardless. It’s only then we discover that it’s actually a butchers, but you can see why we were fooled! Fortunately there’s another restaurant next door – Ricy’s Fast Food.
There’s a slightly awkward moment as we stand passively for several minutes waiting to be shown to a table. There are some older men smoking and drinking at one table in the outdoor area – they look at us as if to say what on earth are you doing. Clearly it’s not that kind of a restaurant, so we’ll just grab a table ourselves.
There are some laminated menus on the table, but we’re struggling to work out what some stuff is. There are pizzas and burgers, but the traditional stuff isn’t translated and I’m faced with a tough choice – take a punt on something random without knowing what it is, or just go with the safe option of a burger. Burger it is.
Still no sign of any member of staff to take our order, so Dad and I put on our big boy pants and go into the restaurant. There’s just one member of staff – presumably Ricy behind the counter. It’s a one man band kind of a place – take the order, cook the meal, serve it. Ricy doesn’t speak any English, so there’s a totally blank look on his face as we ask him to explain what the grill items are. Who knows what Dad’s gonna end up with!
Half an hour later and the anticipation (and hunger) is palpable as food arrives at the table: a ham and mushroom pizza for mum, a burger for me, and for dad a big curly sausage with mustard and chips. Not bad either! Ricy might not have the fastest fast food in the industry, but it’s tasty enough!
Back at base (and with the benefit of internet at long last) I hit up Google to find out exactly who Henri Coandă was, and why his name seems so familiar. It harks back to my engineering days studying thermodynamics. Coandă was a Romanian inventor and one of the world’s first aerodynamicists. He lends his name to the Coanda effect – a phenomenon that he had discovered whereby fluid (gas or liquid) will cling to a curved surface. So basically if you put a spoon under a tap, the water bends. Of course I had to give this a go!
That reminds me as well, one of my party tricks is that I can make a heart shape with a spoon under a tap of water. It turns out this only works with certain shapes of spoons and a certain pressure of water. Didn’t quite work with what I have here, but you get the idea.
It’s been a very long day and with all this talk of bending water, I think I’m starting to go a bit doolally. I’m off to bed and will see you in the morning!
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