We were about as unprepared as two people could be for an international trip to a country we knew nothing about. We spent too long hanging around the office before heading to the metro, so by the time we finally stumbled off the metro and into the airport we had about 15 minutes before the flight was supposed to be boarding. We rushed frantically to check the boards, find the check-in gates, get our boarding passes, and drop off our backpacks at the “oversized baggage” conveyor belt. It was only after I watched my backpack disappear down the conveyor belt that I realized I had left an orange in one of the side pockets. Doh! Nevertheless, we made it onto the flight with minutes to spare and settled in for the trip east.
The whole flight over Bedlam and I were taking odds on whether the orange would have exploded and been splattered all over my bag by the time we land. The smart money was 80% in favor of the citrus explosion all over the packpack with 10% odds that an airline worker saw it and grabbed it and 10% that it would arrive intact. The luck of the Irish came through for us though, since when we arrived in Bucharest not only were our backpacks sitting at the baggage claim waiting for us but there was an undamaged orange in the side pocket of mine! Success!
With our goods reclaimed, the next order of business was to figure out how to get to the hostel. We made online reservations for the Butterfly Villa hostel but naturally we didn’t print out a map or directions or any instructions for how to get there. We navigated our way to the taxi line, asked to go to the Butterfly Villa hostel, and were met with a blank stare.
Romania has emerged from the technological dark ages though, since once I produced a scrap of paper where I had scribbled the address of the hostel, the taxi driver typed it into his GPS navigation system and off we went. We had a pretty cool taxi driver, he was from Moldova and spoke English decently well. He said he was a mechanical engineer but was having a hard time finding work as an engineer so he was driving a taxi in the meantime. On the ride over, he showed us pictures of his kids and he told us a long story that was either about how he served in the French foreign legion and became disillusioned early so he dropped out, or it might have been a story about how he really liked that Jean Claude Van Damme movie “Legionnaire”. We’re not really sure.
The ride over to the hostel went by pretty quickly, it took about 20 minutes from the airport but as we drove the neighborhoods looked progressively more and more sketchy. We started out in a modern looking metropolis near the airport and ended up in a ghetto full of communist-era concrete block buildings with angry looking youth hanging around out front. A lot of the stores that we did see right around the hostel had arabic writing all over the windows, so the guard went up.
We finally arrived at the hostel and went inside to check it out…