Fivemack flees the country

[fivemack]

After procrastinating about this since roughly the fall of the Ceaucescus, I've finally decided to go to Romania, 29th June -> 7 July.

Booking holidays nowadays is almost absurdly easy; ten minutes on the Web and £200 on credit cards, and I have a flight from Bristol to Bucharest and back, travel insurance, and a bed in a dormitory at the Elvis Villa Hostel, the best-reputed youth hostel in all Bucharest.

Not sure exactly what I'll do in Romania - I'm tempted, if only to re-enact a scene cliched in spy thrillers, to take the sleeper across the mountains to Sofia and spend a few days there. The impression I get is that there are lots of quite attractive places in Romania, but none of them are Bucharest; it may be this will be a holiday substantially spent on East European trains.

Comments

[aldabra]

Sofia's not worth several days, or at least it seemed not to be; we allocated an afternoon and felt we'd done it by the end of that.

Beware the ceilings of loo compartments in East European trains; one of them spontaneously detached itself and tried to decapitate me at 2am one morning.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun ! That ease of booking lured rwrylsin and I into booking a weekend in Prague in a couple of weeks - whee !

(this "living in Europe" thing has its advantages)

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Damn, I need a holiday. First I need a passport, a job and some money.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I've been to Romania twice, though never outside Bucharest. Ceaucescu pretty much razed whatever old town parts of the city that had existed to rebuild the city into his idea of a neo-Roman civilization with broad plazas and boulevards, and palatial buildings. The end result is a bit sterile.

My favorite cities in Central Europe are Bratislava and Budapest, with Prague a close third. I'm also fond of many cities in Poland, though they will probably be too far north for you to get to.