It's official, we are in Romania! The trip here was pretty crazy to start off this little adventure. We left the Salt Lake Airport at 12:15pm about 45 minutes later than it was supposed to. We were pretty nervous about making our connection to Frankfort, Germany which was supposed to leave San Francisco at 1:48pm and sure enough when we got to San Francisco our flight had already disconnected from the dock!! We spent about 1.5 hours trying to get a new flight and finally decided that we would leave that evening at 7:30pm and fly to London and then grab another connection to Bucharest which would land at 11:55pm on December 31st!! (what a silly time for a flight..just my opinion though=) When we went back through security (we had to "leave" the airport to retrieve our bags) I was lucky enough to be chosen to go through the special security. It was actually kind of fun because we weren't in a hurry and the guy who checked me was pretty funny. I had to get inside this crazy chamber where they shot blasts of air all over my body!! It was crazy! Then he had to take this strange pad like thing and run it all over my stuff...when I asked him was it was for he said it was searching for bomb residue! All in all it wasn't that bad, mostly because we were not in a hurry and there was no one in line because the flight didn't leave for another 4 hours! As we boarded the plane I couldn't help thinking about how we would be returning to the states for 4 months and that I had no idea what I was doing! We arrived in London at 1:25pm, which was about 4:25am your time, exhausted, but excited nonetheless. We then boarded our plane to Bucharest at 18:20 (everthing is military time in Europe as far as any public transit goes).
We arrived in Romania at 11:40pm and headed through to customs. I was a little confused because usually they give you a card to fill out on the plane that lists all the things that you have to declare, but they didn't give us one, but I just figured they would later. We went through the place where they stamp your passports and there were these scary mafia looking men who were telling people what line to stand in and how to do it..yikes! They were pretty pushy, but were nice. (our flight was the only flight coming in at that hour) We got our bags and headed for customs, but no one was there so we just walked on by and headed out the door!! We had things to declare, but no one seemed to care at that time so we simply walked by. There was a taxi driver inside the airport asking people if they needed rides, but we've been told not to pay attention to those guis because they try to scam you so we ignored him. Then we headed outside and realized there were NO taxi's there! (the buses stop running around 11pm..i think and we were about 20km from the city. The taxi driver followed us outside and showed us his ID and he was with a legit company, but told us that it would be 50 euro for him to take us to town! (Thats about $70 USD and 30 euro too much!) We told him no way! but he was literally the only one there so we talked him down to 40 euro (still 20 euro too much) and hoped in the taxi! We arrived at the Butterfly Villa (the hostel) that we're staying at around 12:30am and headed straight for bed.
We woke up the next day around noon..whoa almost 12 hours of sleep! We headed down stairs to eat breakfast and we had some cornflakes? not really sure, but they definitely looked like cornflakes, but tasted a little different? We headed out on the town for about 2 hours just walking around. We didn't really find much because we were mostly lost and nervous the whole time, but it was okay. On our attempt back to the hostel we did find the largest park in Bucharest and the Arcul de Triumf (this concrete arch thing, that it really famous). So far thats all we've done today. We were too nervous about being able to find our hostel again that we didn't want to go too far...maybe tomorrow.
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