May 28 – June 4, 2022 (Spring)
We barely spent a week in Bucharest to line up a flight, but returning after so many years felt like catching up with an old friend. Or maybe an acquaintance? We’re not the first ones to say that the best sides of Romania lie in its smaller cities, but even so, its sprawling capital is thoroughly underrated. We made sure to make the most of our short stay.
This post is about our 2022 visit to Bucharest. Read about the original 2016 stay here.
Our first stop was the famous Cărturești Carusel bookstore. This stunning building, with its bright white interior and spiral staircases✨, may lack the intimacy of Porto’s Livraria Lello, but serves more genuine readers and fewer people just doing it for the ‘gram.
Wandering through the city, whether meandering the streets of the revitalized Old Town or cutting through interesting passages like the Pasajul Macca-Vilacrosse✨, we always managed to find interesting things to see.
The diverse architectural styles are united only by their grandiosity. Few would call the city objectively beautiful, but beauty can be found nonetheless. From the elegant curves of Art Nouveau facades to the stark lines of brutalist structures, the city is a living gallery.
Bucharest’s numerous parks and fountains offer refreshing breaks from the concrete-heavy urban landscape. Piața Unirii is an impressive example, though we wish the area was pedestrianized rather than boxed in by the city’s notorious traffic.
The city can feel overwhelming at times, with its bustling streets and crowded intersections✨. However, this density also contributes to its character✨. We stayed in the heart of the city: an older building✨ that was nevertheless homey on the inside.
Old Town Bucharest feels much more polished and lively than our first visit, its maze of narrow cobblestone streets, historic buildings✨, and hopping bars and restaurants seamlessly blending history and modernity.
One of our more unique experiences was visiting Văcărești Nature Park. The park has a fascinating backstory: Ceaușescu once envisioned a reservoir to be filled from the Argeș River, leading to the destruction of a local neighborhood in favor of a concrete retaining wall✨. But the project was abandoned when communism fell, and nature gradually reclaimed the space. Today, the biodiversity✨ within the park is reminiscent of a small river delta, and in 2014 the area was declared a protected nature reserve.
No visit to Bucharest is complete without seeing the Palace of the Parliament. It’s one of the largest buildings in the world and a stark reminder of the city’s complex history. We toured the interior on our first visit, but this time simply saw it from a distance.
As we left, we reflected on how much the city had changed since our last visit, and how much we had. It’s impossible to say we’ve outgrown a city of such bombastic proportions, but if we return we expect it will be as a stepping stone to or from Brasov, or jumping-off point for exploring even more of what the rest of Romania has to offer.
