Goodbye to beautiful Bucharest!

This is of dubious historical interest, but the sociologists out there will be happy to know that there was a baptism celebration at our hotel yesterday and, as we watched them set it up, it seemed like a little bit more…party…than any party I’ve personally been to.

As we went down to breakfast, we noticed that there were thousands of pink flowers being delivered and a massive floral mural was being laid out onto the marble lobby floor:

And then, when we came back from our touring day, some seriously moneyed Romanians had taken over the hotel. The soirée was an Alice in Wonderland theme. Here’s some of the greeters:

We did a little bit of sleuthing (helpful Instagram location tag!) and determined that this was a baptism party for the infant daughter of a Romanian billionaire, although each time I call him a billionaire, I am corrected because he merely has 970 million to his name.

It’s clearly the most impressive hotel that Bucharest has to offer. Johnny Depp and Alice Cooper will arrive in Bucharest for a concert when we circle back through to catch our flight home and we’re feeling confident that they’ll be staying with us at the Intercontinental. The Intercontinental staff worked really hard at keeping us out of the billionaire baptism but we’ll do our best to find Johnny Depp and report back to you.

We had a mostly unscheduled day in Bucharest. Almost all of the museums and sites were closed due to Orthodox Pentecost and so we got to focus on some other important travel rituals: strolling, looking for open bathrooms, and eating ice cream.

I absolutely love Bucharest…the wide streets, leafy passageways, and huge parks. The currency – the lei – really stresses me out though. We went out for pizza last night and the bill came to 112 Lei and my mind just processes it like US dollars until I get my bank’s transaction outside of the US travel notification and I see that the dollar cost is $24. Likewise, my 20 Lei ice cream purchases are actually $4.

The streets are packed with ice cream stores: Vice Cream, Sweetology, La Romana del 1947. I have not had a bad cone yet – they make extraordinary gelato. Here’s my best combo: salted caramel and stracciatella from La Romana del 1947:

For every ice cream I purchase, I will go into an additional four or five gelato stores, just to check out their flavors. As I do my investigation, we see a lot of other (non-gelato) stores and buildings:

I liked the juxtaposition of these two buildings:

And I was glad to see this beautiful one is being rehabilitated:

See what I mean about the Parisian feel? Bucharest is trying so hard that they even have an Arc de Triomphe:

The one place that was open on Pentecost was the Village Museum – a collection of old houses from around Romania in varying architectural styles. There are 272 farm sites and homes there, with architecture from the 15th to 19th centuries. The museum was started in 1936 by a Romanian sociologist. In the WWII years, things were so dire that war refugees were randomly housed in the assorted buildings, and then the Communists let the place fall into total disrepair. Like much of Bucharest, it’s just a marvel to see it all be revived and rehabilitated.

Our favorite architectural style “houses” at the park were these:

A terrifying Ferris wheel from 1934 and a picture of the wheel with actual people riding on it, in case you doubted that it really functioned.

And this little hedgehog we saw running around:

The one other place I was able to pop into was the Athenaeum music hall right outside our hotel, pictured in a previous post, but here it is again (pic not mine):

Built in 1886 and designed by a (no surprise) French architect. Here’s the interior:

We’re all packed up and headed north to Transylvania – Dracula’s land! `