Three Days in Romania Part One: Waterslides, Myth-Making, & Silly Goose-ry

PROLOGUE

“Am I going to be okay?” I croak from the hospital bed.

The doctor asks Robin to hand him my passport while the technician removes the electrodes from my chest. I’m aware that, to my right, the ECG machine on the doctor’s desk has produced a long, pink slip of paper with a wave graph. I’m very interested in the story told by its crests and troughs. Among other things, I know that these crests and troughs hold the answer to whether I’ll be flying home in a few short hours.

72 HOURS EARLIER

“Fuck did I do?”

An old cleaning lady is on the warpath at Otopeni. She chases me from the men’s room like a hen rooting a mischievous fox from a chicken coop. A moment later, I watch as another unsuspecting man enters the toilets—and no sooner does he disappear across the threshold than he comes stumbling back against a torrent of angry Romanian.

After a while, the old bag shuffles out into the corridor, muttering darkly to herself, and crosses over to the women’s restroom. My eyes widen. Oh shit, Robin’s in there. All I can do is wait for the carnage to unfold. Sure enough, Robin emerges a moment later brushing her blonde locks either side of her face and wearing a somewhat bewildered expression.

“Good lord.”

“You too, huh?”

It isn’t lost on either of us that this is our first Romanian interaction since arriving in the country. We’re here for three days and three nights. The whole thing came together with remarkable ease. Both Robin and I had separately had our eyes on Bucharest for a while, and after discovering that we shared an interest in this place, I suggested we go there to celebrate Robin’s 29^th birthday in August.

Running afoul of the cleaning lady at Otopeni, I’m still high on that feeling of seeing an idea become a material reality. It might be the most satisfying part of traveling. That sense of: we did it. Theory becoming practice. Robin works as a nurse, so she doesn’t know what her shift pattern will look like until the next month’s rota is sent out. However, the good thing is that there’s always a decent chance she’ll have a string of days free, due to the way the shifts typically come in blocks. All we had to do is sit tight, wait for the August rota to arrive, and remain flexible.

When it did, we acted fast. Robin texted me—with several accompanying side-eye emojis—that her August schedule had capacity for Bucharest, and I swear I pounced on that message like a poised, tightly coiled caracal springing from the tall grass and snatching a bird from the air mid-flight. Oh yes! Don’t let anyone say that we’re a pair of starry-eyed dreamers that can’t make anything happen.

Romania. A land of storytelling. The wild, mythical frontier of Europe where brown bears freely roam vast stretches of untamed, thickly forested wilderness. A place of dramatic, picturesque scenery and a history of violence. Vampires and boyars and communist dictators and haunted forests and medieval castles and treacherous mountain passes. We were following in the footsteps of brilliant military leaders like Vlad Tepes, Mihai the Brave, and Stephen the Great. A capital city whose skyline contrasts baroque, neoclassical facades with brutalist Soviet-era tenement blocks, where Art Deco hotels sit alongside the trilobed arches of Byzantine churches. A writer’s paradise.

We don’t stay up late on the first night. We’ve already lost two hours due to the time difference, which means that 11pm feels like 9pm to our bodies. If we stay up too late, we’re bound to sleep through the following morning and miss out on valuable adventure time. My thinking ahead of the trip was that this wouldn’t be a problem because we’d be tired from a day of traveling by the time we got to our apartment in Bucharest. As it happens, I’m full of energy when we arrive. The whole journey couldn’t have gone smoother, and with the last of the logistical hurdles out of the way, we start to feed off one another’s growing excitement.

“We really are roommates now,” Robin says.

I’m sitting on the floor between our two beds while Robin lays belly-down on hers. We spend about two hours like this, researching places to go in the Old Town and chatting about all the things we wanna do. After we get back from Romania in three day’s time, it strikes me how special moments like this are. It’s something that just doesn’t happen when solo traveling. I’ve had great fun exploring places like Budapest and New Orleans by myself, but my fondest memories of those places are limited to specific sights or activities—going to Roman ruins, eating alligator po’boys, et cetera. But when you travel with friends, the most vivid highlights include things beyond touristy stuff. Innocuous, inbetween-y moments take on significance. Moments of transition or rest become rich with feeling in a way they simply wouldn’t if you were traveling alone.

Nothing has been ticked off our list yet. All we’ve done is get off our plane and check into our apartment. And yet I already want time to slow down.

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DAY ONE

Before heading to the spa, we decide to search for a place to grab breakfast in our local neighborhood. Our apartment is about a 10-minute walk from Bucharest North train station, and according to Google Maps, there are cafes aplenty in our vicinity. We see one advertising giant croissants you can share with your friend and decide this would be a perfect way to start our trip.

It’s on what looks like a main road—Șoseaua Nicolae Titulescu. But something’s off. The streets are almost deserted. It’s 9am and a Sunday; maybe the city is just slow on Sunday mornings? It’s not a crazy thought—I’ve seen Sunday mornings in central London where museums, libraries, and shops are either closed or late to open. Still, there’s something faintly post-apocalyptic about how quiet it is—and how it’s just the two of us standing in this massive boulevard lined with enormous, sun-eclipsing Brutalist tower blocks.

Allegedly there are super-sized croissants here—you’d expect a lot more human traffic. But the only person we encounter since leaving our apartment is an old homeless woman that yells at us in a vague, half-hearted kind of way for a brief moment. We pass a deserted McDonald’s and reach where the café is meant to be, but there’s nothing there. Worse still, there are no other confused tourist types milling about and studying Google Maps. It’s like this mythical croissant came to me in a dream.

“What in the Twilight Zone is going on here?”

I check Google Maps and confirm that we’re in the right place. The café is meant to be right here. And it’s meant to be open. There are recent reviews. But in the offline world, it’s nowhere to be found. We try our best, tortured by the photos of friends posing either side of the giant croissant with open mouths, before deciding to move on.

We find ourselves in a little café across the road. It’s nice enough, but not very busy. I wonder if we’re in a part of the city where not many people live, or where there are few tourists. The only other patrons seem to be Romanians. We order a couple coffees and sit outside. We also decide to try some Romanian pastries, but I don’t really get on with mine. I order a plăcintă on the basis that it seems like a classic, but it turns out I’m not crazy about soft cheese. In retrospect, I should have ordered something sweet.

After finishing breakfast, we grab an Uber and it’s a 30-minute drive to our destination. The iconic Therme Buchareşti spa is the crown jewel of our trip—our number one priority and the first thing we booked after getting our flights sorted. I hadn’t heard of this place until Robin told me about it earlier this year. I had Bucharest on the list of places I most wanted to visit because of the Cărturești Carusel bookstore. But learning about the Therme Buchareşti spa catapulted the city to the top of the list. I love variety and the idea of nourishing different parts of myself across a short space of time. For example, when I go into central London, I like to combine different activities into my day: writing in a library, getting a massage, watching a play, doing some kind of sport, or getting dinner with a friend. The more of these I can fit into a single day, the more satisfied I feel. I guess I feel like a more complete person.

Romania promised a combination of three things: relaxation, history, and books. This meant that visiting the country wouldn’t just be themed around a single interest. Hitting different spots is deeply rewarding for my brain. And not only had I found a place where I could satisfy multiple impulses, but I had a travel companion that liked all the same things I did. Usually when other people are involved, there’s some level of compromise that takes place. You go to Thailand and one person wants to practice mindfulness at a Buddhist temple, another wants to go snorkeling, and of course there’s that one friend whose only interest is in seeing a ping pong ball fired merrily from a lady’s bearded gammon flaps. With Robin however, I found no such misalignment. I realized that if she were planning a trip to Bucharest by herself, it would be exactly the same as the one we had planned together. And conversely, if I had planned the trip for just myself, the itinerary would remain the same. Neither of us had to indulge in anything for the sake of the other. Robin loves spas, history, horror, storytelling, and literature just as much as I do; they’re passions intrinsic to who she is, rather than borrowed or fleeting interests.

And so we arrive at Therme Buchareşti in a state of extreme excitement. I can vividly remember stepping out of the Uber, looking up at the huge glass building, and thinking: I can’t believe we’re finally here. Even the foyer excites me, with its high ceiling, palm trees, and abundance of natural light. This is also the first time on our trip we’ve been among other tourists, so that feeling that we’re somewhere special is quite strong. Before we know it, we’re standing in our rented robes and taking in a vast pool lined with real palm trees.

There are three zones at Therme Buchareşti. The Galaxy Zone is a lively waterpark with numerous slides, open to visitors of all ages. The Palm Zone is a big thermal pool surrounded various spa treatment options, and has a more chill atmosphere (this one is for visitors aged fourteen and older). And the Elysium Zone, strictly adults only, is focused on saunas and wellness, and has a luxurious, exclusive feel to it.

Robin and I start with the Galaxy Zone, reasoning that it’s best to release our pent-up excitement and transition to something relaxing, rather than the opposite: repress our itch for excitement, lull ourselves into meditative repose, and then pursue a rush of adrenaline. As expected, the Galaxy Zone is an orgy of reckless splashing, wayward urine, and general misbehavior. A cacophony of screaming hits you as you walk in. Parents yell unheard after wild-eyed children with zero spatial awareness as they run with wet feet across the tiles, carrying inflatable donuts bigger than themselves. Cries of terror and ecstasy echo from the many slides that twist above us. One such slide has an open-flume, U-shaped section where you plunge downward at high speed in your donut, go immediately up the other side using the same momentum, and then drop almost vertically, going backwards the way you came before being carried off to the side as you return to the middle of the U.

Looking up at this slide in action, I’m suddenly reminded of the fact that there is, as it happens, a small misalignment between Robin and myself. A slight, almost imperceptible difference: I’m somewhat adverse to danger, whereas Robin fucking loves it. I’ve never felt comfortable with heights or being disorientated. Robin, on the other hand, will happily throw herself out of a plane, scale a climbing wall to a great height, or dive underwater to a great depth. Whatever that instinct is that makes us uncomfortable with being unsecured, off-balance, upside-down, spun around really fast, weightless, unable to see, crammed in, or launched at high speed, she simply doesn’t have it.

I watch as Robin’s whole face lights up at the sight of this particular slide. She turns toward me with wide eyes and I realize there’s now a high probability that I’ll be falling backward at a high speed before the day is over. We start by wading into the pool and talking about how great it is that we’re finally here. But within minutes Robin has this look in her eyes that’s saying: slide slide slide slide slide slide.

The slides in the Galaxy Zone are pretty good in my opinion. There’s some nice variety, but the queues are long. And some children will just straight-up cut in front of you. Robin and I do a couple of body slides before checking out the tube ones. The problem is, you don’t know how long it’ll take you to find a tube. There’s a small, finite number of inflatable donuts, and a lot of people are going straight back up after coming down a slide. Any tube that’s discarded is snatched up almost instantly.

Not wanting to waste valuable time waiting around for someone to give up their donut, we decide to check out the Galaxy Zone’s outdoor pool. You swim out through these half-submerged revolving doors and find yourself in a heated outdoor pool with a swim-up bar. We grab ourselves a couple cocktails and bask in the morning sunshine. This, I determine later, is my single favorite moment of the whole trip. I could not be any happier than I am at this moment.

We spend much of the rest of the day drifting between the Palm Zone and the Elysium Zone. I feel, by the end, that we do as much as we reasonably could. We get plenty of pool time. We try out the Palm Zone’s hydrotherapy massage beds and its jungle-themed steam room. We enjoy a delicious Thai lunch at the Elysium Zone’s Mango Tree Restaurant. We try nine different saunas and take part in an aufguss treatment. Each sauna has a distinct theme, and one of them—the Hollywood Sauna—doubles as a cinema. We watch a David Attenborough documentary about fish eating birds in watery caverns. The one thing we miss out on is a massage or facial scrub treatment, but unfortunately these get booked up extremely quickly.

Our tickets give us access to Therme Buchareşti for the whole day, but we have a plan to leave at 4:30pm and spend the evening rambling around the Old Town. So when it gets to 4pm, we have a little team huddle to decide what we want to prioritize for our final half hour.

Slide slide slide slide slide slide.

The die is cast. Just to be clear, I do really enjoy water slides. It’s just that some of them are quite high up. I know from experience that I always have a great time when I’m actually going down a slide. The uncomfortable part, for me, is climbing to the top beforehand. Something irrational happens to me. I can’t stand waiting around and thinking about it.

Robin wants the big slide with the backwards drop. I can see it written all over her face. We hang around the bottom of one of the tube slides and, as luck would have it, someone discards their donut after coming down. I snatch it up and hand it to Robin, but she’s not smiling yet. My priority at this point is making sure the birthday girl gets to experience the slide she wants before we have to go. After all, she’s the one who discovered Therme Buchareşti and has wanted to come here for a while. I mention that we should join the queue as soon as possible so we don’t run out of time. Robin bites her lip and scans the area for another tube.

“But you don’t have one yet.”

I realize then that Robin wants me to go on the big slide as much as she wants to go on it herself.

“It’s okay—I’ll just go down one of the body slides. I’m happy with that.”

Robin frowns at me. She’s not having it. But I remind her of our dinner reservation at 6:30pm and she accepts that we can’t wait forever. We head up the stairs and I feel a mix of emotions. On the one hand, I’m relieved that I won’t be tested. I know that if I queue up for the big slide, something strange might happen. There’s a chance that this irrational, unexplainable panic might take hold of me. It’s happened before, when I was queueing up for the zip line on Brighton Beach. I become a different person, devoid of all sense. I don’t want Robin to see that. It would be embarrassing for her and me. By avoiding the big slide, I can prevent Robin from finding out my little secret. She’ll continue thinking I’m as fearless and devil-may-care as she is.

But then there’s a contrasting feeling. I can feel it tugging at me with each step toward the top. If I leave the spa without going down the big slide, I’ll regret it. You see, there’s this other side of me. One that’s in competition with the impulse I described in the previous paragraph. I can’t leave things undone and still be satisfied. I know people that have firm boundaries about things; they’re clear on what they won’t do, and it doesn’t bother them in the slightest not to do it. Part of me wishes I could be like that—so sure of what I do and don’t want, never looking back, never doubting myself. For me though, who I am as a person isn’t some fixed truth. I’ve always felt very fluid in my boundaries. I have this sense that I can be a certain kind of person, if I choose to lean into it. And so every time I’m faced with an opportunity to do something, it feels like a test. I feel like my personality is something that can stretch into new shapes. And if I choose to turn something down, I get overcome with this sense of bitter dissatisfaction. When I don’t stretch myself, it feels like a muscle that’s aching to be used.

We get to the top and I queue up for a body slide adjacent to the big one that Robin’s queueing up for. I’m so distracted by this debate in my head that I don’t notice Robin slip out of the queue. A moment later, she returns with a second donut and pushes it into my chest.

“Oh. Um. I mean, I’m actually happy to just do the body slide. I—”

Robin gives me a look and I clear my throat.

“Or I could just do the tube slide,” I say, accepting the donut.

OKAY I GUESS WE’RE REALLY DOING THIS NOW.

No turning back. Not after Robin went through the trouble of requisitioning a tube for me, presumably from the trembling hands of some bespectacled child with the face of one of life’s perpetual victims. It would be an utter disgrace to back out now. An insult, in fact.

As we get closer to the gaping maw of the big slide, I start psyching myself up. I will myself to listen to my logical side. Nothing’s going to happen. All you have to do is not let go of the handles on the tube. You can do that.

The fear is that somehow I’ll lose my grip of the handles, fall out of the donut, and break my neck. Or maybe it’s just the idea of falling backwards at high speed. I haven’t done that before, so it would be an unfamiliar sensation.

The good thing is, what happened in Brighton doesn’t repeat itself. I did eventually do the zip line in Brighton, and I even enjoyed it. But the queueing beforehand was torture. I went into an all-out panic at the top of that tower and had to be talked into doing it by my work colleagues. In the Galaxy Zone, no such panic takes hold of me. I’m a little nervous, for sure, but I’m still myself. It’s like I can feel the faint stir of that panic somewhere deep inside me, but it’s not strong enough to take control of my body. It doesn’t make my mouth start firing off expletives and it doesn’t make my legs bolt for the stairs. I step up to the slide’s dark mouth when it’s my turn and I repeat this fact to myself, over and over. Look, it hasn’t happened. You’re still you. Robin doesn’t think you’re someone that’s afraid of things in life. Everyone here assumes you’re something of a badass.

It goes back to my belief in the pliable self. The idea that you can inhabit new identities. Put one foot in front of the other and you become someone that goes down crazy waterslides. Before you know it, you’re parking your fat ass in a donut and waiting for the light to turn green.

The light turns green.

At first, it’s not that bad. My hands feel secure on the handles of my donut and I’m traveling at quite a high speed through a twisting, covered tunnel. I know a sudden drop is coming though. I can feel that I’m still quite high up. My donut turns a corner and light floods the tunnel. At this point, it becomes an open-flume waterslide. You have a split second where you can see the whole Galaxy Zone below as you reach the crest of the U. From here, it’s a sheer drop. This, for me, is the scariest part of the ride. I clench the handles tight as my donut plummets vertically to the base of the U, and it’s like I can somehow feel the velocity of the drop in my chest.

The fear, however, dissipates as soon as I get to the bottom. The whole thing happens quickly, but in the moment, I seem to experience everything in slow motion. I’m actively thinking about how the fear has disappeared when my donut reaches the base of the U and my momentum fires me up the other side. It’s a light, blissful feeling. And a surprising one too. The part I was most scared about was the journey up (and subsequent descent down) the other side of the U, because you’re looking the wrong way at this point. But I’m conscious, as I go up the other side, that I’m not going to fall out, that nothing’s going to happen. It’s the kind of thing that looks worse than it is (and yeah, I know most things are worse than they look). It looks crazy fast when you watch other people doing it, but once you’re going up the other side of the U, you’re already losing speed. It’s like you’re coasting pleasantly. There’s no chance of you going so fast that you’ll tip backwards out of the donut, which is what I’d been imagining all day.

And so, even though I can’t see where I’m going, I’m not actually scared when my donut starts its descent backward down the U. At this point, you’re funneled off to the side and slide widens toward the exit. There’s a bump lined with upward-shooting water jets, and as you crash through them it’s like you’re passing through a wall of water. My donut comes to a gentle stop, and I shake my head like a shaggy dog with all but the least amount of fucks to give.

I mean, okay, it’s just a waterslide—but I’m seized with a rousing sense of triumph. It’s the satisfaction of knowing that I’ll be leaving the spa without any unfinished business. Robin splashes through the row of water jets a moment later, and we decide to squeeze in one more slide before we go. We race back up the stairs with our tubes, and I’m high on this hot, tingly, all-consuming rush of adrenaline. I feel the same way I felt last year after I delivered a presentation during an all-hands marketing strategy workshop with our CMO in attendance. Like I can do anything. It’s crazy how far my confidence can stretch in certain situations.

This is what snorting a line of coke must feel like.

That evening we get dinner in the Old Town. We make an effort to scrub up real nice following our day of fun at the spa and feel heads turning as we stroll through the city’s winding cobblestone streets. Admittedly, most of these heads belong to overzealous restaurant hosts trying to shove menus in our faces, but I like to think that my arse may have caused a minor traffic collision. For my part, I’m wearing cream-colored chinos with thin, subtle stripes and an olive-colored linen button-down from UNIQLO with short sleeves. As for Robin, she’s in a dark dress buttoned up at the front and patterned with a flurry of pale floral prints shaped like shredded bamboo leaves.

The venue? Only a little place they call Caru’ cu Bere. Yes, the very same. Robin found it during our manic research session the previous night, and we decided this was the most interesting restaurant of the lot. There were some very strong contenders, but since we’re only in Romania for a few days, we opted for a place that felt like an “experience” as much as a place that served good food.

Caru’ cu Bere is a protected historic monument and a symbol of Romanian culture. In short, it’s a neo-Gothic beerhouse whose grandiose interior is replete with high vaulted ceilings, rich wood carvings, stained glass windows, painted wall panels, and intricate mosaics. Apparently, the name means “The Beer Wagon” in Romanian; a reference to the horse-drawn carts that once delivered fresh beer to the site when it was founded as a brewery in 1879. Now it’s a famous restaurant as well as a brewery, serving hearty Romanian classics such as slow-roasted pork knuckle, stuffed cabbage rolls, and bean soup in a bread bowl. Best of all, it features traditional Romanian folk dancing.

Robin and I are seated in the Bacchus Balcony—named for the Roman god of getting shitfaced—and enjoy a perfect view of the dancers below. The atmosphere here is top notch, and the food’s not bad either. I get the pork knuckle, and Robin opts for a cheeky eggplant. Life feels pretty good. Caru’ cu Bere is even better than I expected.

After dinner we commence rambling. Our only plan is to explore the Old Town at our own pace, following our noses, and taking in the atmosphere. Robin and I are both drawn to unusual, unique, or authentic things. Wherever we go together—whether it’s somewhere far away or our native London—we make it our business to seek out these things. Things that look different or striking in some way. We like to photograph them, discuss them, write about them, or simply experience them. I guess it’s like stepping outside of yourself for a moment. Vibes are very important here—and often the key drivers of our decision-making.

In the Old Town, there is no shortage of things that capture our interest. The first thing we notice is all the old churches tucked away between the lively bars, hotels, and restaurants. They have this architectural style known as Brâncovenesc, which combines Byzantine, Ottoman, and Renaissance characteristics. As soon as we leave Caru’ cu Bere, we stop to admire Stavropoleos Monastery and its intricately carved stone columns. Stavropoleos is an active nunnery, and the nuns here perform rare pieces of Byzantine music with their choir. Despite its active status, it looks (in the evening, at least) like it’s abandoned. Like the other churches we see around the Old Town, it’s silent and bathed in shadow, sandwiched between larger, louder, and busier places. It feels like I’m looking at a historical relic that’s gone unnoticed for centuries and remained exactly the same against the stride of modernity.

Naturally, we head to Cărturești Carusel. I’ve wanted to visit this bookstore since 2021, and I’d actually say it’s the bookstore in Europe I’ve been most excited to see. I’ve seen some bangers in my time—Daunt Books in London, City Lights in San Francisco, Topping & Company in Edinburgh, Richard Booth’s in Hay-on-Wye, Írók Boltja in Budapest, Faulkner House Books in New Orleans, and Brazos Bookstore in Houston, to name a few—and Cărturești Carusel is up there with the best of them. While it is just as beautiful as I’d seen in the pictures, I am surprised by how much smaller it is in real life. This is not to say that it’s small. I think it’s more to do with the specific geometry of Cărturești Carusel; I think the white color scheme, minimalist design, and the open atrium with its high ceiling make the place look bigger than it is in photos. If you take a picture at the right angle, it looks like it’s on the scale of Winchester Cathedral. And I think that’s possible because of its unique design. It’s a beautiful place—and don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to see. I’d actually say it’s taller than I expected, but not quite as long or wide. There are plenty of books in the English language here, including translations of Romanian classics.

Whenever I go somewhere new, I get really curious about the kind of stories they like to tell—and the kind they like to consume. I only know Romania through a foreign lens; from what I can tell, its association with vampires and horror comes from Western European storytelling. But are Romanians themselves interested in horror? Obviously, stories about vampires are amazing for the country’s tourism industry, and you’ll see plenty of bars, museums, and city tours that are catered toward the way foreigners associate Romania with horror. I like to think that Romanians are amused by this association. As for what Romanians like to read and write themselves, my research tells me that the country has a long history of lyrical poetry. In fact, poetry held a dominant position over prose until the 20^th century, which is when the Romanian novel really started to flourish. When it comes to prose, I’ve been told that Romanian writers are particularly interested in national identity, social change, peasant life, and folk stories. They seem particularly interested in memory and unreliability, and this is likely the product of a 20^th century that saw an incredible amount of change for the Romanian people. They went from monarchy to fascism, WW2 to communism, Ceaușescu to the 1989 revolution, and post-communist transformation to the present, where the Kremlin casts a shadowy hand over Bucharest like Count Orlok over Wisborg. This has led the country’s great writers to explore what happens to individual lives when history changes around them. In terms of tone, I’ve heard that Romanian literature can be unsentimental, existential, and dark, with a deep focus on psychological torment. As for what Romanians think about foreign stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Jules Verne’s The Carpathian Castle, I’m still waiting to find out! After all, it’s not like Western European writers plucked these macabre associations out of thin air. I’ve read that these stories about vampires, gothic castles, and spooky Transylvanian villages are rooted in Romanian folktales about troubled, undead souls called strigoi. So there could have been a native appetite for spooky stories in Romania that visiting Western European writers became intrigued by and then reinterpreted in their own way. I like to think it’s a symbiotic storytelling relationship. There’s the place as it exists for its inhabitants and the place as it exists for its visitors, and perspective is a critical factor in how a story is told.

The relationship between the two—how these narratives can both differ and overlap in various ways—has always intrigued me. I’ve spent a lot of time in the USA, and therefore I’ve learned a lot about its myths and its underlying truths. But I also think that no matter how much time I spend there, my perspective as an outsider will always shape how I feel about it. It will always be what I need it to be, and I’ll never be able to fully dispense with the myths I carried with me when I first went there. The same will no doubt be true of Romania, where I’ll incorporate certain truths the more I interact with it, but still apply an imaginative lens to the place. Perhaps I will always see it as a mysterious, spooky, and mythical land.

After leaving Cărturești Carusel, we pass a venue that’s heavily leaning into these popular associations with horror: Rose’s Mystery House. It’s an immersive entertainment venue that includes both a greenhouse café and a couple escape rooms. It’s full of live actors and a woman standing outside dressed as a witch beckons us to enter. We continue around the corner and find ourselves at an equally kooky place: the Grand Café Van Goph. I’m not sure if Van Goph has any association with Bucharest, but the café was something we noticed during our research of the Old Town the previous night. It’s filled with Van Goph paintings, and the walls and ceiling of its winding staircase are painted to look like The Starry Night.

We continue wandering through the Old Town, browsing a large souvenir shop, photographing a replica statue of The Capitoline Wolf, and admiring an eccentric restaurant called The Pit where customers play with remote-controlled construction vehicles in a sandpit. Our night comes to an end at a nice rooftop bar called Linea – Closer to the Moon. This is another thing we discovered the previous night. What fascinates me about the place is that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a restaurant or bar with a subtitle before. They could have just called it “Linea Sky Bar” or something. But they decided to go with a storytelling angle. I’m not sure if “Linea” is a Romanian word, or if it’s a name, but it sounds classy. It could have worked on its own. But no, we have Linea – Closer to the Moon, which rolls off the tongue beautifully. I always lower my voice in a sultry manner when I say the “Closer to the Moon” part. I appreciate it as a piece of copywriting; it’s promising a kind of voyage for the bar’s customers.

The rooftop is lined with strings of bulbs that give it an intimate feel—you can just about see what you’re doing. A mural on the right depicts an astronaut floating in outer space, and another one shows futuristic domed cities on the Moon’s surface. This earns the place big points with me and Robin. We order a couple cocktails, sit back, and enjoy the panoramic view of Romania’s eclectic capital city. Beside us is a massive, abandoned skyscraper that reminds me of The Last of Us. Robin and I quickly become fascinated by this derelict building and start to do a little storytelling of our own. We’re not sure whether the building is actually abandoned or whether it’s one that’s under construction, but we come up with this idea that it’s hiding something. There’s something about the scale of this place—it’s a gargantuan concrete tower block—that seems to invite a belief it’s keeping secrets. For some reason—and I have no idea why—I imagine that Bucharest is a place where people with mohawks or black lipstick go to raves in desolate industrial environments. Apparently, this is actually more of a thing in Germany. But for whatever reason, I picture a crime thriller set in Bucharest where a private investigator is looking for this punk, tattooed girl with “black cat energy”, and they have to look for her in some illegal warehouse rave full of unsavory characters. Looking at this abandoned building, I imagine that such a rave is taking place on the top floor, and the only way to reach it is via a mysterious construction elevator that only a select few guests know about. Obviously, it would be an absolute health and safety nightmare, but I don’t think that necessarily makes our story unrealistic.

After taking some photos, enjoying our drinks, and telling some stories, we call it a night and head back to our apartment, exhausted but happy. The Uber driver gets out of the car after he drops us off and screams at us for a while before heading off into the night. It’s been a long day. Tomorrow, we head for Brasov—so stay tuned for part two!