We were in Bucharest a total of 3 hours. We got on the train in Sophia. It was a Russian train, very nice and air conditioned. The 3 of us were in a 4 bed couchette so we had plenty of room. Much nicer than the crowded, non-air conditioned train we had the night before.

The final destination of the train was Moscow with stops in Kiev and Minsk. All was fine but the air stopped working in the middle of the night. When we stopped for the border crossing it took almost an hour for everything to clear. We woke up early – thank goodness- because we were just outside Bucharest. The conductor was sound asleep and he had our Euro rail passes so we had to wake him up, we don’t know what would have happened if we didn’t get off in Bucharest because we need visas for the Ukraine and Russia. We got to Bucharest about 6am checked into our hotel to take showers and headed for the train station to catch a train to Petesti. In Petesti we had a 2 hour wait for the train to Curtea de Arges. We just went to McDonald’s across the street for a soda and to kill time. It was only 90 today, so not as hot as it has been. In Petesti no one spoke English and we needed to buy a ticket to Curtea de Arges. The ticket lady only spoke Romanian and Italian. A man came along and asked us if we spoke French. So with limited French we made ourselves understood to the man and he translated it all to Romanian. We bought the tickets and said “merci”. We laughed ourselves silly about how crazy this was.
We arrived in Curtea de Arges and were looking at a map when a policeman from the train station came over and gave us directions. Of course by the time we got to the pension we were dropping with sweat. But we are now in Transylvania.

Naturally we went on our restaurant search. Here is what we came up with.

We have to get up early for tomorrow. Just to let you know there is no direct train from Belgrade to Bucharest – we have not lost our minds yet.