No Rest In Bucharest

Time for some more travel! With work. I wrote a bit between the flights...

I'm sitting in Bucharest today.

No wait, my bad - it's Warsaw, Poland. We landed about half an hour ago and are now chilling at the food court, eating an early lunch before the next phase of our flight.

I ordered a chicken salad by mistake, with bread crumbs (gluten), so I've eaten just the salad part and a few breadcrumbs by mistake and am still plenty hungry. Does Caesar Salad usually have chicken? When I asked the lady behind the counter if it wasn't vegetarian (as soon as I noticed this) she actually laughed. "No" she said. I claimed that it usually is, but I guess things are different in Poland. Or Sweden. Whichever is your home base for comparison. Either way I wasn't allowed to change my choice without paying again. Reading up on this later: real Caesar Salad does not have chicken! It's supposed to be eggs.

Need to start reading the menu more carefully though... which means I really need to use my glasses when I need them. And sometimes I really do. Text is small and far away sometimes. I'm pondering a monocle, just so it's easy to see only when you need to. Would be a spectacle ey!

We had fish burgers from McDonalds after that though... but they didn't have gluten-free bread, so I got just the burger and fries. An early, strange, wasteful but fulfilling lunch after all.

The time difference between Poland and Romania is an hour, which means our two and a half hour flight actually only.takes one and a half hour, but the way back is longer. So far all's good.

I hitched a ride to take a shortcut to a stop for the bus to the first airport around 5:55, and tomorrow we'll be up around 4:55 for the shuttle to the airport there, just minutes from the hotel... which is 3:55 Swedish time. Ugh. It's better than last time though. Two hours more to sleep... if I manage to fall asleep.

...

The trip went well, and we arrived in a sunny - yet with traces of snow, Bucharest, around 14:50. We drove through town, had a five hour meeting, tried some Moldavian chocolates, fruit tea made with actual fruit (also from Moldavia), Santal blood orange juice (it's the same brand I recently found back home!), rejuvenating coffee, and eventually had dinner at Taverna La Zavat. Fantastic place! You can check out a virtual tour on their badly translated website here.

I had the File de Salau la Gratar (Perch filet grilled), with with some Legume la Gratar (grilled vegetables - and mushrooms apparently), after some Crochete cu Branza Feta (goat cheese croquettes) for starters and Tsatziki, and some Limonada cu Surop Green Mint... maybe you can understand that last one without translation. :) And ice cream! Nuts.

The food was amazing, the social game was good, and we arrived at the hotel somewhere around ten. Cheaper hotel this time. The room smelled of smoke, the knobs in the shower were broken, there was no minibar in the room, no air conditioning, and no hook to keep the window open without it banging against the window frame... but fortunately there was a thin opening under the door, so it seemed I at least wouldn't suffocate.

I aired out the smell, showered, jumped in bed and... couldn't fall asleep as easily as last time. Probably something about the water not being drinkable (they had a big sign about it in the bathroom), having just a liiittle left in a bottle after the day, and starting to feel kinda thirsty, and like the room was pretty warm, and like there isn't any drinkable water anywhere near if I might actually need it... paranoia sets in. Sleep comes hard.

I woke up fine the next morning though. My boss almost overslept. I knocked on his door just in time for us to catch the bus - he had set the alarm at the right time, but not changed the clock to Romanian time, so thought it was the wrong alarm. I mentioned how water is in such sparse supply during travel later, and he said it just tasted a bit weird. Hmm? I mentioned the room water wasn't drinkable... turns out he'd drank some of that water! Oh shit. Suddenly he wasn't feeling so well during the flight...

Wizz Air was hell. For starters we hadn't written out our boarding passes in advance, so checking in cost just as much as our tickets did. Then: uncomfortable seats. I kept falling into slumber, but snapping back up because I fell forward, because you couldn't lean backward, and yet I couldn't just sit there without closing my eyes so it became a vicious cycle... finally we arrived, and the bus from the Skavsta was much better. Comfortable seats.

We made it to Central OK and I'm now on the train home in a wonderful winter sunlight... before lunch. Eight hours of travel, and maybe a serial stretch of power-naps, because I'm no longer so tired I can't keep my eyes open.

Turned into a tiresome but fun little trip... especially since it's work-related, so those surplus travel expenses are on the company. Though I doubt I'll ever go with Wiz Air voluntarily myself, there's just nothing like visiting new places! Trying new foods, meeting people (even if they were people we'd already met), usurping new cultures... and getting a brand new room for yourself to spend the night! The flight there was much better too. LOT. Much recommended.

Good trip.