Our first experiences in Romania were the smartly dressed guards wrapping on our cabin door at 10.30 pm asking for our passports and telling us ‘welcome to Romania’ in a flat emotionless voice, still it was nice to be welcomed. The train took 13 hours of average speed, slow and stop with some inexplicable reverses of direction through the night. I will tell you about the mysterious carrier bag containing two packets of biscuits and bottles of Liptons tea another time.

Getting out at Brasov was a rude awakening trying to buy bus tickets to get to the old part of town from an old woman in a kiosk with a serving hatch about 4 inches wide who just refused to answer any questions plus the gang of fat old women in headscarfs who deliberately but mysteriously blocked our way onto the bus. But after that Brasov life seemed unremarkable but with a clear focus on tourism as the main means of making a crust.  Everyone in Brasov was either a tourist or making a living from them, stockiness and some degree of poverty seemed to be the norm among the latter. This afternoon we got a guided trip out to Bran castle, a surprisingly interesting site, more for its history of the rise and fall and rise of the Romanian royals than for its spurious Dracula associations. Apparently the Duke who currently owns it has put it on the market for £14M.

The castle also housed a museum of torture which at times made your eyes water. Here’s a mask devised for humiliation rather than torture, designed for 17th century women who have behaved in various unacceptable ways.

The train ride from Brasov to Bucharest gradually emptied out of the poor families with children as it got nearer to the capital. 

Warned by the In your pocket guide book that we’d be approached by unsavoury characters in the station we made our easy and unimpeded way down onto the metro and to the hotel Rembrandt to a thankfully quiet room at the back.


People in Bucharest are tall. And nicely dressed. And even without the communist history weighing down on their shoulders. We had some drinks and a thankfully cheap but enjoyable dinner in the cafe on the street outside the hotel watching the Bucharestians go by on this May 1st holiday. But the surrounding streets seem a swarm of open air drinking places, clashing loud music and a few young guys being sick, a real concentration of hedonistic venues crammed into a small amount of space in the old town with the odd street still dark derelict and covered with graffiti .  Stange and not entirely comfortable.

The morning was civilised. Once we were up, our breakfast was served to us: nice coffee but some disgusting packs of sandwiches which we did not even think of opening. We drank the coffee gratefully but with some supermarket fruit tarts we had picked up at Munich station along with a huge bottle of very welcome water.
Our first views of Hungary, from the train, were of a rather flat country with lots of dilapidation and much industrial building. The station has an air of adventure to it with the names of distant cities up on the departure board, unlike the UK of course.

It was raining outside so we explored the tourists guidance and metro station downstairs, all reassuringly efficient, helpful and very recently built. The office sells 24hour passes for the whole transport system including trams and riverboats, so we jumped on a metro to the town centre, then on the number 2 tram down by the river and finally a riverboat back up to a stop not very far from our hotel, the Lanchid Design hotel, just down from the Lanchid bridge and on the Buda side of the river. (Links to all these to follow).
Even though we arrived at the hotel about 10.30am, our room was ready, which was such welcome news. The hotel was just right, modern, welcoming and helpful and our room had the premium view of the river and the historic bridge with a whole wall of window. I remember lying on the bed and starting to eat some raisins thrown in my bag from Tesco a few days ago and falling asleep while chewing them.
Here’s the view from our room:

One nice thing about Budapest is the simplicity of the city’s public transport where a one-day ticket allows you to travel on busses, metro, trams and riverboat. We spent a lot of time buzzing around.
the guide book suggested two things to investigate in our couple of days there: the Jewish museum and synagogue and ‘ruin pubs’. The former turned out the more authentic of the two. The ruin pubs seemed, at least the one we visited a rather tired parody but the guides around the Jewish sites were committed to explaining jewish life, firstly a young man explaining the synagogue building to us and how it was deliberately built to have the familiarity of a Christian church, and the seventy-something year old showing us around the museum exhibits. He explained that he was five when Hungarian jews were being taken off to concentration camps.
We went to a ruin pub for something to eat. The setting was amazing, a covered in courtyard between two buildings with a gravel floor and high high ceiling. However the food that promised a middle eastern fusion was really disappointing.