Welcome and thanks for visiting this diary of my trip to Romania! For this trip I was thankfully accompanied by my wife and we travelled during October half term.
Bucharest is the largest city in Romania, with 2 million of the approximate 16 million total calling the capital home. To be honest the country has never been really high on my list, but as my wife wanted to see ‘Dracula’s Castle’ and we could fly from a nearby airport, then why not?
It’s a bit crap that, personally, I wanted to visit in 2025 to tick Romania off my list, only to ‘have’ to visit again eight months later. But as I hope you’ll agree it’s a pleasant place to visit over a weekend.
THE JUNE 2026 BLOG IS NOW AVAILABLE [LINK] and features some other cool stuff not included here.
Romania is bordered by five other countries. Ukraine to the north, then clockwise Moldova, Ukraine again, a shoreline along the Black sea, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. I’ll cover a bit of the more recent history in the itinerary, but certainly not all, as it’s pretty extensive including the Ottoman Empire and Vlad the Impaler… plus world wars, communism and the democratic republic it is today! The blog is likely to contain about 5x Christory lessons more than usual but I’ll try and keep it to the point with some fun facts thrown in.
Costs
Our flights from Bristol cost £266 (£133 each) and advertised a flight time of 3h20m, yet outward took just 2h40m. Bonus! We did add a paid cabin bag (£35) for Mikayla, but chose to play ‘check in chicken’ for the first time… Only checking in 6 hours before our flight, hoping that a lot of people would have already checked in for free, been given the crap seats and we may get a good’un. This actually worked BOTH ways!
One of us either had extra legroom or a premium front seat (row 6 but still), which would’ve added £62 on to the flight extras! Cheers Ryanair! I guess the only worry is if they oversell the bloody flight!
Instead of a hotel, our accommodation was an apartment about a 30 minute walk from the Old Town. It was called Uni88 Apart Hotel (link) and cost £116 for three nights. On the whole it was good, borderline excellent for the price. The rooms were spacious and it had everything we needed it, albeit a little outdated. Our toaster would not have passed a PAT test. I didn’t notice a piece of furniture that wasn’t from IKEA but I don’t have a problem with that. Interestingly, you open the front door and room using an app; although a code was also provided, which I kept forgetting.
A cafe serving breakfast was attached to our building, however we made use of our kitchen facilities. Usually I try and stay by a supermarket, but in lieu of this we made a “Glovo” order (grocery and fast food etc. app) and for £20 we had ample bread, rolls, ham, butter, apples, oranges, juice, snacks, 5 litres of water and even wrapping foil for our day trip sandwiches!
As for eating out. It really depends what you fancy. The sit down places in the Old Town seemed to be say £12-15 for a main. However, Romania loves a bakery selling a wide variety of pastries pizzas and their take on the sausage roll and for these items you could easily have lunch for £2-3. Fast food was somewhere in the middle. I’m proud to say I only had one KFC during the whole trip!
Snacks and drinks even from minimarts etc were similar to UK prices i.e. not that cheap. If you can, and are staying an an apartment, stock up at a Lidl or Carrefour.
I have detailed transport costs below. For the museums and stuff to see, these tended to range from £5-15. If your asking for a total all in, my guess would be £750 for 2 people.
Getting around.
Whilst there is a Metro, along with buses and trolleybuses scattered over the city, we ended up taking more Ubers than we would’ve liked. The Metro was small enough to easily understand, although the central area is easily walkable so we didn’t take as many trips as anticipated. A 72 hour pass that covers the public options above was a pleasant £6 or so.
From the airport for just £1(!!), you can train it for 30 minutes to the main Bucharest Nord train/metro station. Buy a ticket on board off the steward. We took an Uber on the way home with prices fluctuating between £11-17 for a 45 minute drive in traffic.
A problem we faced, especially with the trams, was the synchronisation with Google. The tram times were never accurate and it took two days to find out the non existent #17 from apartment into town was actually #36 and travelled marginally quicker than walking pace.
Ubers were great and plentiful. Most trips cost around £4. One ride from the north west of the city to the east during 50 minutes of rush hour traffic cost just £9.
If you want to avoid the mega long day trip we did, you can get a train to Brasov and go from there, perhaps have an overnight there.
Itinerary – Day One
We departed the plane just after midday, so it was probably around 2pm by the time we picked up our luggage, caught the train (again, £1 each!!) to Bucharest Nord and walked to the area housing our apartment.
A stones throw away from our digs was a restaurant called “Garlic Pub”, where we chose to have some lunch. I’m very disappointed that I have no photo’s from here as the pork main and soup were enjoyed, with a warm welcome.
We had a couple of hours in our hotel whilst waiting for our grocery order, so by the time we headed out for our first evening, it was already dark at 6pm. With the walk from train station to apartment taking a lot longer than anticipated, we grabbed an Uber to take us to the south west of the city centre for, more than anything, a walk around rather than anything specific whilst we planned the rest of our days.
I’m not quite sure how but I bollocksed up our destination, to the tune of being a ten minute walk away from our first port of call, the National Cathedral of Romania. The building was a lot more magnificent that the photo suggests. As we approached the busy road separating us from the building we could see there were hundreds of people waiting to enjoy some form of event so didn’t bother having a closer look around – will probably do this next time as my mate is a big fan of baby Jesus and the gang (Update – I did visit again in June 2026 but it wasn’t open / finished.
In lieu of some nice photos, especially of the shiny golden roof, I’ll hit you with a very good introductory Fun Fact: The Catedrala Națională, is the tallest and largest Eastern Orthodox church building by volume and area in the world.
Now I don’t know how many Eastern Orthodox church buildings there are in the world, but being the largest and tallest is something to write home about. Had I known this at the time I absolutely would’ve put a bit more effort into a better look and much better pictures! Next time.
From the cathedral you can follow the perimeter of the Palace of Parliament which was our next stop.
Fun fact: Bucharest’s parliament is the heaviest, most expensive building and largest administrative CIVIC building in the world, weighing 4.1 million tonnes! The pentagon is the world’s largest MILITARY administrative building but not as heavy, probably due to the ridiculous amount of marble used inside.
A catastrophic earthquake hit the wider Bucharest region in 1977, killing 1,700 as far as neighbouring Bulgaria and Moldova. This inspired Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (we’ll hear a lot more about this bloke later) to order the construction, forcefully relocating 40,000 residents from the planned site. Potentially thousands of “volunteers” (yeah okay) died building it although official figures stated 27.
Building work continued during the 1980s, a period of crippling austerity measures. Whilst the building was operational for a number of years, it wasn’t officially completed until 1997, eight years after Ceaușescu was executed (spoiler, sorry).
A few additional Christory lessons about the Palace of Parliament will follow during our walking tour tomorrow, but I’ll get back to the itinerary.
The rest of that evening was basically a walk along the boulevard away from parliament seeking dinner. Mikayla had this ample hot-dog-in-pretzal thing for like £1 and I had a massive portion of fries. In between, we had a break outside the national bank and a walk through the Old Town area, which was firstly quiet before breaking out to a load of bars filled with loud tourists.
We waited about half an hour for a tram, just outside of the Old Town before sacking it off for an Uber.
Day Two
Prior to today I think I’ve only ever done one ‘free’ walking tour, in Ljubljana if you’re interested. I definitely need to do more following the morning we had. Unfortunately, finishing this off in September 2026, the link to our specific tour is inactive but there are loads on GuruWalk etcetera.
Whilst the tour was technically free, there is an expectation to make a ‘donation’. I think Mikayla and I gave around £25 but we did think it was really good and lasted approximately three hours.
We started off at Revolution Square to the north of the central area. We delved straight into the history at the start of communist Romania to Ceaușescu’s ultimate downfall on a balcony a few meters away from the statue the points high in the square. In 1989 he gave a speech on said balcony expecting the usual cheers, but finally people had enough and showed their distain. People power later, a matter of just four days, Ceaușescu failed to flee and was executed in the days after. Don’t be a dick.
Quite the informative start to the tour without moving far! But as we headed slowly south it was really interesting to hear about how communists even dressed a building in a thin facade that’s there today so it would look similar to their choice of architecture.
It was a separate matter but our guide also pointed at red signs on a few buildings, with the words loosely translated as “if there’s an earthquake, this building is probably fucked”. Ok, they’re old buildings, but what was mad was that most of such structures are flats with residents still occupying them! There’s even clear signs of the concrete finish crumbling away due to poor design, pointed out by an architect on the tour.
Luckily Romania doesn’t have major earthquakes right? Yeah, scroll back up to day one…
We passed a park with a boating lake (Cișmigiu Garden) and onwards over the Dâmbovița river with stops to discuss Romania’s history of shoddy car manufacturing and contemplating the positives of communism, being that everyone had a job, a roof over their head, encouragement to grow their family, enough money (contentious perhaps) and the chance to go on holiday, even to neighbouring countries. Today some older folk preferred communist rules for those reasons, but one should remember that at the start of communist rule a lot of the existing house supply were ‘stolen’ from the owners.
A fascinating stop was the Michael the Voivode Church “Mănăstirea Mihai Vodă”. A pretty building but easy to bypass in the narrow streets between the old town and parliament. The reason for the visit though, was that this church was saved by demolition (to make way for parliament) by being unfathomably placed on rollers and rails and moved hundreds of meters. You kinda’ sensed Romanians were getting rather pissed off at this stage.
We ended the tour at the Palace of Parliament, which I may have exhausted you with fun facts already. I’m sure the tour guide gave us an interesting Michael Jackson story, but apart from him waving from the balcony before the first leg of his “Dangerous” tour in 1996, I don’t think it was that meaty of a story.
After lunch, which I think was KFC for the cultural experience… we wished to make use of our metro passes and equally a long sit down.
Luckily, a visit to “Dimitrie Gusti” National Village Museum provided opportunity for both. Alighting the metro near the Arc de Triumph (a smaller version of Paris to commemorate the joining of the 3 regions in the 1910’s), it was a walk through another green space to reach our destination.
Dimitrie Gusti would remind you of St Fagans if you live in Wales. There are over 200 structures demonstrating traditional Romanian houses through history. It was very cheap entry but I felt a bit lost without a tour guide.
Worrying that if we headed back to the apartment we’d give up the rest of the day, another bloody long public transport usage dropped us off at Romania’s national sports stadium. Holding 60,000, this hosted a few games in COVID hit Euro 2020 (played in 2021) but as for my visit I couldn’t do much more than walk around the outside. Luckily 8 months later when Wales played in the city, I was quick to realise the game was NOT here but instead the home of Steaua Bucharest at the opposite end of the city. Hopefully I helped a few people avoid an epic error.
One last chore before apartment and bed was dinner. The restaurant “Excalibur” was recommended to us by a colleague in work and located 30 seconds away from Revolution Square where we started the day. It did not disappoint. A huge meat platter with trimmings was too much for two of us to see off and ended up taking a good share of the £30 outlay home to make sandwiches for tomorrow.
I’ve just remembered that we actually walked back to the apartment after this for like 45 minutes. No fucking iota of a clue as to how I was up for, or agreed, to that.
Day Three
With leftover pork chop rolls lovingly prepared, this morning was time for our long day trip to Peles Castle, the city of Brasov and Bran castle, otherwise known as Dracula’s Castle. Kay had always wanted to come here for Halloween and I deserve a lot of credit for making it happen even if I was 3 days out.
The trip took all day, like 7am to 10pm, and cost a very reasonable £22 each without tickets to Bran Castle. LINK HERE. Looking in July 2026 it appears the price has doubled(!) to £44 each. Still worth it in my opinion. It was 2 hours on a comfortable coach through the sluggish Bucharest roads and 141km to Peles castle.
Thrown in as a bit of an extra, I thought this was the most impressive of the 2 castles albeit it was a hilly 15 minute walk from our bus drop off.
Unfortunately the inside of the castle was closed apart from a small external courtyard as they had some more important bloke like the president holding a gig later in the day, but the history was interesting.
Peles castle was completed in 1914 for King Carol I who was the bloke on the horse statue outside the university building yesterday. Construction cost was approximately 120m US$ which at the time was astronomical. I note King Carol also died in 1914 so it’s a bit gutting he didn’t have long to enjoy the finished article!
From the castle it was a shorter journey to the city of Brasov. At the time I think the TV show Wednesday (Addams Family) was about to release it’s second series, so found it strange that the driver not making a hoo-haa about a castle we drove near was a major filming location for the show, especially as it was in the middle of nowhere, in Romania!
Once we got dropped off in Brasov, we were guided to the main square and given around 90 minutes to explore.
I don’t know how much notice I had of free time, if any, so we couldn’t investigate things to see too much, yet a quick internet search was very helpful. It was quite obvious that the funicular you can see in the photo above was too far away, but there was a massive Church visible in one corner of the square.
We went into the Church, without remembering much about it or the entrance fee (it wasn’t free, but also not that expensive as I would not have bothered).
I sometimes wonder how much other ‘stuff’ I go out of my way to do because of this blog, and a fine example of this is when we walked ten minutes out of the way simply to visit what is regarded the narrow-est street in Romania, which, at some points is as thin as 111cm wide.
I thought it plausible at the time but looking back I’m not sure who really cares? Nevertheless, the extra miles I go to for content is always worthwhile.
Back full circle at the square, we succumbed to a tourist trap for some traditional food.
I have tried a few times to find both the location and the menu item to no avail. The dish was very tasty, although if it had any less meat supplied it would be classified vegetarian.
I think that by the time we walked back to the bus and were on our way to the final stop, it was already becoming a long day. We arrived at Bran Castle and joined the long queue just as the sun was starting to fall.
The queue was very long considering it was October I thought, and it was similarly busy inside, not aided by some very narrow stairwells as can be seen!
The castle itself was, in my opinion, a massive disappointment. I felt that there was hardly any information, no farfetched stories of Dracula and his home. I was actually disgusted that they decided to dress some rooms up with hallowe’en decorations… IT’S DRACULA’S CASTLE FOR FUCK SAKE.
We had a walk through a few rooms all of which didn’t have much about them, agreeing that the £20 ticket price was undeserving. Bar a few nice views outside I will conclude by saying that the day as a whole is just about worth it if you have long enough in Bucharest, but don’t be too upset if you miss/missed the opportunity.
Day Four
Apart from my absolute lunatic of a wife going for a run at 6am, we didn’t leave the room and check out until 1030am, which gave us a final five hours to roam around.
Obor market, a 20 minute walk away was first on the list. People love a market don’t they? But to be honest if I’m not hungry or shopping, I need to stop doing this pointless activity. It’s not as though my photos are brilliant which is 90% the reason you go, let’s face it… especially when you walk through the fish and meat section of the market. Live fish seeing there mates getting chopped up before it’s their turn… Pig heads looking over from the other side of the aisle… It’s not for early mornings!
Using our first metro since day two, minutes before the 72 hours expired, we travelled to the Old Town and, after a people-watching coffee, made a mini plan for the remaining time. Around the corner was another visit to the Church of Stavropoleos, not much more than a tick box exercise.
Via the compulsory purchase of a Christmas tree decoration, I had a little treat for Mikayla. In amongst the many bars in the Old Town is a lovely book shop spanning five floors! It is called Cartuersti Carusel and they have English sections. A nice way to waste 10 minutes, or two hours if in the mood!
We were toying between museums next. Either a History of Communism choice or a football museum. We agreed to do both but the Communism one first, costing £7pp. The exhibit is basically two staircases and the third floor, but I thought that through the topics and text on the walls, it did engage the audience and made it easy to follow. Of course, it helped for us that we did the walking tour on Tuesday but after yesterday’s tour guide briefly bigging up the ‘Commies’ it was a good reminded that there’s always an absolute fucking nut case in charge.
One final stroll around the Old Town followed, with lunch amongst the main tourist trap area of bars and restaurants.
The traidiotnal Mici dish was pleasant as it was something different, but was oozing with grease or fat.
After lunch we still had to make it back to our hotel to collect our bags, before lazily booking a final Uber to the airport in good time before our trip home.
Thanks for reading! I would say that I’ll be seeing Bucharest in eight months time, but the truth is both this post and the June 2026 post were both published on the same day, in September 2026!
What we didn’t do…
We could have easily spent plenty more time in the parks.
You can tour the Parliament Palace but tour guides and the website stated you need to call up (no email or web) ONE day (not 2, not 7 days) before to book a ticket. You also need ID.
A friend suggested a salt mine that I didn’t really consider to be honest, due to only having a single full day in the city. A previous salt mine we visited in Krakow was very cool, so it may be worth a visit. I went here in June 2026.
The outskirts of Bucharest hosts a natural thermal spa called Therme which is massive, with loads of different areas including treatments, swimming pools and slides! We did consider this one evening but it is as far away from the city as the airport. Thus, we didn’t check transport options. I also went here in June 2026.
For football fans there is a football museum in the old town with surprisingly rave reviews and the Steaua Bucharest stadium is towards the west of the city (Wales will be playing here in June 2026). … thus I went both too in June 2026.
Conclusion
The trip was a little slow to get starting due to a lack of my usual preparation, but we left feeling satisfied and enjoyed the country. We found 2 full days plus 2 half days to be perfect. Thanks for reading!
How Not 2 Life 