2023 Buda to Bucha Day 10 Disembarkment

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Friday the 13th, October

Today we get up early and put our bags out. They are collected while we go to breakfast. We even are able to snag the front seat in the bus again! Today it is a 3 hour bus ride to Bucharest. It was supposed to have been an hour and a half but because the ship cannot navigate the shallow waters, we cannot make it to the port of choice.

So off we go along regular roads. There appears to be no highways to aid us in our travels today. With one ‘comfort stop’ at a gas station (some comfort!) we finally arrive in Bucharest. The tour guide today has a very loud voice and his bus microphone seems to be turned up to the maximum. He is very chatty and compares and contrasts the pros and cons of communism versus democracy for hours. Trying to nap is a useless endeavor. I also have to snap a photo of a smiling Brazilian photographer that I met on the ship!

He then takes us to the Palace for a tour even though it is already past noon and we are getting hungry. The Palace tour takes an hour and a half and is conducted by a Gestapo type lady tour guide that is very gruff. Interesting info though as she takes us through many rooms of the Palace and describes the life and times of the communist rulers. It is mentioned many times how the concept of communism makes everyone equal. But the ruling class is a bit ‘more equal’ than everyone else, if you get my drift.

But now many of us are becoming Hangry for it is now well past 2 PM and our tummies are screaming for relief! We are finally taken to a restaurant area and it is after 3 PM when we get seated and served. We do find a Romanian dish called, “Mici” (pronounced mee-chi) that is a sausage dish and is excellent! A couple bottles of water to quench our thirst and a couple glasses of wine and we are good to go!

Back on the bus, we are taken to our hotel, the Radisson Blu, and we check in. We discovered earlier that Elee accidentally left her camera batteries and charger on the ship. Bummer. But we find a big camera store and hire a taxi to take us there. Unfortunately, her batteries were not in stock. So it looks like she will be relegated to her cell phone camera for the remainder of the trip. That makes 2 disabled cameras because the battery charger for my small camera quit working on day one. So I got about 2 days of batteries before they drained!

We make it back to the hotel in time to join the Welcome Cocktail Hour and we visit with shipmates and share where we are all going from here! Then we head off to the pool deck and have a bowl of chili and a salad before retiring to the room for the night.

See you all tomorrow!

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