Ir’s a beautiful morning in Bucharest, with a spectacular view from our balcony.

Today we have the morning to ourselves, because we are skipping the Bucharest City tour. Been there, done that, and they aren’t even going into the Parliament building.  So, we are striking out on our own to go visit the Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum, covering almost 35 acres with 360 monuments, 272 farms and buildings depicting the traditional life of Romanians from villages and times past. We’re excited to explore the park and spend our morning outside in the crisp autumn weather.  Exiting the Intercontinental (which we will explain more about below), we end up taking a taxi instead of an Uber, because there is a taxi rank right outside the hotel.  Probably not the best move we’ve ever made, because there is this whole sliding scale of taxi costs – the fees are painted on the doors but we weren’t familiar with the scheme, so we didn’t choose all that wisely from a cost perspective. While our cabbie is totally personable, and fun, showing us all these videos of his vacations and dancing at all inclusive resorts, he’s also totally expensive and much more than an Uber would have charged.  Sigh.  This is why we’ve never considered applying for Amazing Race people!

But, we do make it to the museum easily, with tons of time to spare before they open.  As we exit the cab though, the museum people see us coming and actually open early which is so sweet, and we have the whole place to ourselves for hours.  Nice!

So, off we go.  I could bore you with all the details, but, honestly? You probably don’t care about the house that belonged to a wealthy family in 1927 that shows how construction moved from the rural to the urban, or the buildings from as early as the 1700’s that provide an excellent view into how peasants and farm owners lived in that era.  There were half-buried houses, churches with amazing frescoes, Inns, windmills, oil presses, larder cellars, farms buildings, log cabins where you could see how the logs criss-crossed to make the trusses for the walls, doors with intricate patterns fitted together by individual pieces of wood, moss growing on thatched roofs, Swiss alpine type chalet houses and houses from the 18th, 19th and 20th century that depicted how people lived in different regions of Romania.  Suffice it to say, all these buildings were incredible specimens of history.  Plus, as an added bonus, there was a flock of sheep we followed just wandering free around the grounds. Too amazing. And far too many pictures here for the short little overview! Needless to say, you can tell from the photos – we were enamored.

As we work our way through the hundreds of buildings here, the park begins to fill with people and tours.  We’re so glad we got here early, because the magic of being alone, walking through all these historic buildings (and the flock of sheep) was very powerful, and the addition of all these tons of people on tours meandering around takes away from the atmosphere.  Which means it’s a great time to leave!  And we have to be back for our monastery tour at 1 – so out we go, grabbing an Uber (which is way cheaper than the taxis!!!), snapping great pix along the way of the Free Press Building (with the Vlad Casino signs!) and one of the churches that was moved back from the avenue and then surrounded with Communist Apartment buildings.

We make it back to the hotel in no time, then walk across the street for an incredibly great (and huge) Gyro sandwich for lunch at this storefront window shop, then freshening up for our afternoon monastery tour.

But, before the tour, the Bucharest Intercontinental story:  Construction of this hotel was started in 1967, completed in 1971, and was built by Ceausescu solely because President Nixon visited Bucharest and made comments about how poor the accommodations were. Ceausescu couldn’t have that, so he ordered the Intercontinental to be built to be the best of the best hotels.  It is an impressive building, with 22 floors and incredible panoramic views over the city.  All the diplomats and government visitors stayed here, and rumor has it (and it is probably more than rumor) that all the rooms were bugged for “intelligence” purposes.  Wouldn’t surprise us in the least!  but hey, from our perspective? It’s a great hotel, and our room is fantastic, so please, bug away!