5th August

We didn't fancy the early bus this morning so had a lay in and sorted out some bits like hiring a car for Romania. The lady at reception called the bus company for us to reserve tickets on the 1:30pm bus to Bucharest as it feels up pretty quick and not a lot of spaces. When we got to the bus station we realised that the bus was actually a man and his estate car.....good job we booked ahead. It was a short ride to the border crossing and were soon on the other side of the Danube crossing over the bridge to Romania. (Think that's a new one, entering a country via bridge).

We were dropped off in a random car park in the middle of Bucharest....we had no idea which way to go and no local currency so we did the only thing we could do....find the nearest KFC and have a tower meal!....and go to an ATM of course. Once that was done we decided to get a taxi to the hostel, however the driver was clearly trying to rip us off trying to charge 20lei for 2k when the price was clearly 1.39lei per k. so we opted for the train. We headed to the nearest metro and after a while managed to get 2 tickets. Two stops later and after wandering around for 10 minutes getting lost on every corner we found the hostel and they had beds....yay. We dropped our bags and printed off our car reservation before heading to the main train station to buy our tickets for Budapest....we didn't want to end up on the floor so made sure we had a cabin this time. We had the mistake of buying the tickets prior to asking the price. $140 later we think we had booked it correctly.

Back on the metro again we headed back into town for the free walking tour, it was meant to be 2 hours but it turned into 3....but so worth it. We saw a lot of cool sights and learned the history, the revolution square, the first hostel, a monastery and many monuments and it was nice to have more explanation of everything. When we eventually got back to the hostel we had missed the traditional dinner but the had saved us some, so we got to try pork mince wrapped in cabbage leaves and some kind of corn mash which I loved. Then we chilled and chatted with some people at the hostel over some beers before heading to bed.