On Our Own in Bucharest

This is Part 3 of a three-part series on our Danube river cruise. Start with Part 1: Our Race to the Danube and Part 2: Down the Danube if you missed them.

We disembarked and took a car about an hour and a quarter to Bucharest, and I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel at the end of a wonderful cruise: relief. As much as I loved the ship, there’s a particular joy in being handed back the controls, in deciding for ourselves where to go and what to eat and how to spend a whole open day. Skye and I are a good team, and we were both ready to be one again.

The drive in was not pretty. There was garbage strewn across the green fields and highway medians, and in some stretches it looked like people simply threw their trash out the window. Then you arrive in the Old Town and it flips, and you’re dropped into a lively grid of walking streets, our hotel right in the middle of it. The neighborhood leans hard into nightlife, more than we expected, so we made it our morning-and-afternoon base and let the evenings belong to other people.

Grand parks and grander buildings

Bucharest’s parks turned out to be the best part of the city for us. We walked to Cismigiu Gardens and found some of the best playgrounds we’ve ever seen anywhere, with winding paths, little ponds, and bridges, and half the city out enjoying the first real warmth of spring. We also made the pilgrimage to the Palace of the Parliament, which we’d read is the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon. It is genuinely huge, but there wasn’t much for us to do there, and no playground in sight, so we admired it and moved on. On another day, chasing a park that a certain AI assistant swore had a zip line, we got dropped at Bucharest’s own Arc de Triumph, which looks startlingly like the one in Paris. We never found the zip line, but we did find a beautiful, wild, slightly overgrown Romanian park, full of thoughtful art and architecture and just as much graffiti.

Playground diplomacy

The best travel days with Skye almost always come down to a playground, because she makes friends everywhere, no shared language required. At one park a young boy pointed back and forth between the two of them and asked, hopefully, “friend?” That was all it took. Soon Skye had him and another girl doing handstands, then handstands into forward rolls, then cartwheels, the whole escalating gymnastics routine, and a ten-year-old girl with pretty good English attached herself to Skye for the afternoon. I could watch that particular magic all day, a bunch of kids from different countries needing about four words to become a crew.

The little things I’ll remember

Some of my favorite memories from Bucharest are the small, funny ones. We sat down at a sushi place with a lake view and then left because people were smoking inside, which led to a great little comedy of errors when the server, trying to be helpful, assured me that yes, I was welcome to smoke in here. No, sir, that is exactly the problem. We ate an outrageous amount of Asian food, as we do, including ramen at a spot that could have been lifted straight out of Tokyo, so good we went back twice, and when their card machine broke on the second visit I paid in dollars and accidentally left an enormous tip.

And then there was the haunted playground. We found a set of bright plastic slides and climbers wrapped in caution tape, weathered and empty and eerie, that looked like it had sat abandoned since the 1960s until I read the little manufacturer’s label and realized it was built in 2010. Not a single child anywhere, no toddlers, no caregivers, when every other park in the city was packed. So Skye and I did what we do and invented a whole backstory, about a Romanian boy named Rudolpho who lives inside the broken slide, which is of course the real reason no one will play there. We still bring him up.

Going home

One small note for anyone flying out of a smaller European airport with a checked bag: mind the weight limits carefully, because they enforce them, and build in time for security, where Skye got routed through the larger scanner and slowed us down. A fitting bookend, honestly, to a trip that began with a lost suitcase.

I thought a lot, on the flight home, about how much land time this cruise gave us, and how much of the world it let us actually touch. Eight countries I’d mostly never considered visiting, each one now a real place in my mind with real people in it, most of whom, from the smallest shop in Bulgaria to the children walking to school in Croatia, met us in English and met us with warmth. I came home tired, grateful, and proud of Skye and me for how well we navigate the world together. And I came home to Cody and our half-built house in its giant dirt pile, which, after two weeks on the Danube, looked like the most beautiful sight of the whole trip.