Well, I'm certainly feeling better. I was a bit off kilter when I first showed up here. This was because I knew nothing about the city, didn't recognize anything about the language, was hot, was hungry, was thirsty, and misplaced a decimal when withdrawing money from the ATM. I've since rectified most of that.
I changed most of the money I withdrew back to euros, since you can never have too many of those. From now on too I'll very carefully red the exchange rates myself instead of listening to someone else.
I got tonight's ticket taken care of too, so I'll be waking up in Beograd tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get some new passport stamps on the way. From there it's onwards to Zagreb, then maybe Dubrovnik to spend the night, and to take a much needed shower. So anyway, back to my coping.
For the first hour or so I spent wandering around the city, I was convinced it was just one big slum. That was before I wandered across the Arcul de Triumphe, a couple big parks, and some cathedrals.
So I wandered around the city for another hour and a half or so. If there is an old town, I didn't find it. Also no vampires, just a single branch of the Bank de Transilvania. I was reassured though that the city's not all one big slum. It's definitely not a shopping or eating out oriented city either. Or anywhere a sane person would want to drive, or walk across the street for that matter. Next time I'll definitely use the public transportation, which runs above and below the streets.
So eventually I headed back to the main station, and only got a little bit lost. I got some pilaf for a first supper, and as I was eating I figured out the language. Apart from a few letters it's not slavic at all, like I first thought. It's a romance language, with strong ties to Spanish and probably Italian too. Knowing that made the whole place feel very inviting. In fact, I want to come back sometime and spend at least a few weeks here. Maybe not in the city of Bucureşti, but definitely in Romania. I also need to find out how far reaching Food Lion is, since I'm pretty sure I've been seeing their symbol on grocery stores of all kinds of different names in different countries. It's curious.
I also realized I never mentioned Budapest last night, so here goes. Budapest was wet, dirty, and crowded. I lost my Nalgene bottle there, I think when getting off the train that took me there. I didn't manage to find any local restaurants outside the train station, so I ate cheese, bread, and salami with chocolate milk for supper, and finished it all for brunch this morning. It was actually pretty good.
The best part of that stop was the nail clippers I bought. I paid about $2 for them, but it was worth it since I hadn't cut my nails in weeks and they were driving me nuts. I ended up sitting on the ground outside the Tesco Hipermarket trimming my nails, eating supper, and watching the rain. it was good.
I also managed to get ahold of a pair of clip-on sunglasses, which I'll need for ice climbing. I spent a couple of hours online in the station too while I was waiting for my train. I didn't get anywhere near everything done, but I did accomplish quite a bit, including getting talked into probably stopping in Stockholm for a bit. But enough of that for now. I'm gonna go get a sandwich.
Wow, mineral water goes crazy when it hits toothpaste. Exciting.
