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It’s ironic perhaps that the bustling and outright hectic city of Bucharest became the venue where we significantly slowed our pace down. We didn’t go on any day trips outside the city. We didn’t join any organized tours and we didn’t in earnest pursue a bucket list of sights while living here for just shy of a week. This wasn’t because Bucharest doesn’t have much to offer. To the contrary, it does. We just made a conscious decision in our travel to remember it’s a marathon and not a sprint and on occasion, coasting for a while is beneficial. As an unabashed city slicker, I found myself at peace while immersed in the dizzying cacophony that is daily life in Bucharest for some two million Romanians. For the first time in weeks, I found myself blissfully strolling down the wide boulevards as pedestrians with agendas and schedules infinitely more pressing than mine rush past like a fast-moving river around a boulder.

As a point of comparison, Bucharest is in my view more like Warsaw than Budapest in terms of the pace. The cadence of the intrinsic rhythm of the city alludes to an impatience I didn’t experience in Budapest. This busyness is only further exacerbated by the Romanians’ love for their cars. This affinity to cars, possibly coupled with a suspicion of public transit was already apparent in Brașov and made even more start in comparison to Budapest, who in my opinion just may have one of the best running public transit systems in the world. In Bucharest, however, it would seem a little bit of local knowledge will go a long way as bus stops are oftentimes not marked and at times even when they are, it is not apparent which buses will stop there (and certainly not when). As a result, we appreciated the central location of our AirBnB as most everything we were interested in seeing were within reasonable walking distance. This included the practical aspect of the largest Carrefour we’ve ever seen, spanning two full floor with a staggering assortment of all manners of goods one would expect to find in a grocery store, plus a whole bunch you might not.

We were more social in Brașov however and as a result learned much more about Romania than we did casually living and occasionally working while in Bucharest. Therefore, we may have to at some point to come back to Bucharest, stay a little longer and immerse ourselves more in the culture and history of this diverse and very interesting country. Next stop Varna by the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria.

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