#150 Bucharest, Romania

While looking up flights and potential places to visit, I came across Romania. I was curious, but also dubious. As a solo female traveller, I put it on the "maybe" list and moved on. A few months later, I was doing a similar thing, but with friends this time. It was difficult to pick a place that had relatively cheap flights, and somewhere the three of us hadn't already been - again Romania came up. Deciding to be adventurous, we went for it and booked our flights to Bucharest.

The good news is I absolutely loved Romania and would highly recommend it to anyone. It is spectacular in terms of value for money, and it was (surprisingly) clean, modern and safe. Book your flights now!!!

Planning Your Trip to Romania

It's quite hard to find information about Romania that is up to date. TripAdvisor isn't hugely populated with that many reviews, and a lot of blogs or forum posts I found were a few years old, and things can change very fast. So, I found planning our trip took a lot more research and time than it usually would with more popular and mainstream destinations.

Hopefully the information in this blog will be useful, and then after that it's just taking the time and trying to find the newest information as it's the most reliable. We visited early June 2018, which is apparently one of the best times to go because it's good weather but not too hot or crowded like July and August.

Bucharest to Transylvania

There isn't a huge amount to do in Bucharest, and I've read a lot of blogs and instances were people have attempted to visit some of the castles (Dracula!) in Transylvania during a day trip from Bucharest. I have an adjoining post with my experience of Transylvania where you can get more detail - but I would definitely recommend planning a longer trip in Romania (we spent 5 full days) and staying overnight in Transylvania than trying to rush it in a day.

Bucharest Old Town

Bucharest old town (Lipscani) is wonderful, and wandering through the streets can make you feel more like you're in Paris than in Romania. We stayed at two AirBnBs which were located just a few minutes walk and it's a great area to base yourself. It is mostly comprised of bars, cafés and restaurants, and is a hive of activity in the evenings. Even being a tourist trap prices are incredibly reasonable, with a beer costing on average 10lei/€2 and meals usually around 25lei/€5.

The old town is a short walk to the impressive Palace of the Parliament, and a short Uber ride to the wonderful Outdoor Village Museum (Dimitrie Gusti). We didn't get a tour of the Parliament as we felt it may not be time well spent, and were happy to just look at it from the outside. The outdoor museum features very old buildings taken from around Romania and is lovely to walk around. It's priced very cheaply at 15lei/€3 and I think is best enjoyed in the morning before it gets too busy or too hot. 

From the village museum we walked out to the Arcul De Triomf, and from there down a pleasant avenue lined with embassy's to get the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. After a lot of confused wandering around we eventually discovered that the museum has closed, despite all indications online saying it's still open. A little disappointed, we went into the nearby Natural History Museum instead. While it was enjoyable to get inside out of the heat, it wasn't anything special and I wouldn't recommend it. There was again an extra cost to take photos, which we didn't avail of and there was no one around to check we had paid the extra cost either, so it appears to be a money-racket.

Getting Around Bucharest

You have two main travel options of metro or bus which are usually less than 50c a trip, but we ended up using Uber as prices ended up being on average less than €2 per trip, and divided between three of us was very cheap. The great things about Uber is the price is already agreed before you take the journey so there's no nasty surprises at the end, and you can pay online using your card which eliminates the need for carrying around cash. I had never used it before this trip, but would recommend it as the best way to get around cities in Romania.

Also, we noticed there were very few other tourists around. A few seemed to be Eastern European, and most were part of large coach tours. This meant you could see no other tourists on the bus or at the train stations and assume it's not busy, but once you arrived at the attraction in question there could be ten buses parked outside and hundreds of tourists in large groups inside. In general, it's best to try go places first thing in the morning before most of the bus tours arrive.

Therme Spa

I loved this place so much I gave it it's own blog post. It is Europe's largest wellness spa, a huge facility located on the outskirts of the city close to the airport. Entry cost us around €30 for 4.5hours, which included access to all three areas and to whatever treatments were scheduled during our time there (we had a scrub and a beauty treatment called "liquid gold"). It has something for everyone, including an amazing childrens area with an array of slides, and is well worth a visit if you have some spare time.