From the Botanical Garden it is time to use the subway extensively to get to our next destination. That involves changing lines, always fun when there are underground tunnels and you don’t have to pass new gates on the way. In the end we arrive at the Obor subway station and start on Calea Mosilor, a major road about which we have fond memories. We lived here for about one year before moving to the US to study and we are quite curious how much has changed in the intervening years.
And it is quite a lot, the roads are way more civilized and the high rises are renovated and look, modern almost? Quite different from when we lived here, you can actually see how much for the better the country changed.
We also recognize an old eatery where we were grabbing something to eat on the way home from the university. At that point it was to-go only but now it has also dine-in places. We decide for old times sake to try the food again, and yes it is still good! After that we return to our accomodation for the day to recuperate a bit as tomorrow in the late afternoon it is time to leave towards Cluj to meet another set of relatives.
We still have the morning to spend in Bucharest and we start with a walk to the cemetery where our recently deceased relative is buried. We take a slightly different route to see the oldest surviving mosque in Bucharest, we find it with some difficulty but it is closed due to renovations.
After paying our respect in the cemetery we wander around a bit finding the row that hosts the tombs of famous Romanian writers and poets. We know most of them even though we might not know their poems and works anymore….
We spend the last couple hours in the downtown area following the major boulevard and doing some shopping in the stores that line the street. There aren’t really that many open but the ones that are are quite reasonably priced and worth a look to us.
There are also a few older buildings in this stretch, especially the City Museum that we want to visit. But not today due to time limitations.
We end our exploration at the next subway station at the University. Here we have a shock as the University building is covered for renovations, just a week ago it was still clearly visible. Interesting, wonder how it will look the next time we visit.
Uber takes us to the airport and it is time to board our Tarom plane towards Cluj. There is no lounge in Bucharest so we look forward to leaving for the short one hour hop to Cluj. The service standard has decreased, previously there was food served but that is not really true anymore.
In Cluj as usual we are left on the tarmac, but more unusually likely because it was an internal flight we can walk to the terminal. Usually you would have to take a bus. This we hope gives us an advantage and we can exit earlier but no, the luggage takes so long to arrive that we likely spend more in the terminal than for international flights. And that is even though we can see the plane outside so it should be a short distance. However we get lucky, for some the luggage is broken, wonder what really happened? Our relative waits outside and then it is time to go to our accomodation to rest as tomorrow we have a busy day planned.
