I'm conjoining these two days into a single post for reasons that will become obvious if you read it. I may do the same for the future posts too

Day 13 – 22nd August

We woke up late today, enjoying a more normal night of sleep after the sleeper train before. We didn't really have many plans for Bucharest, and were uncomfortably aware that it was really hot.

We managed to motivate ourselves to head into town by the promise of visiting Cereal Crunch, a Romanian breakfast cereal café, which is almost exactly what it says on the tin. It had a large variety of cereal, including a lot of imported stuff from America and, amusingly, the UK. You could also add toppings, and for maximum whimsy, dye to your milk. I paid about £5 for a bowl of Reese's Puffs topped with chocolate chip cookies and pink dyed milk (the woman at the counter seemed to laugh a little out of surprise when I asked for pink – not that I care about being "emasculated" so this isn't to sound defensive but it was a purely pragmatic decision to get a colour that nobody else had got yet). Kind of a waste of money but a fun gimmick and a good excuse to leave the house.

We then wandered around for a while, spotting a cool monastery and looking around the old town. Interestingly, it was very quiet for the main centre of a supposedly-large city. While it was perfectly nice, we honestly weren't too impressed overall – it felt like a quite generic European city centre without anything to really distinguish itself, aside from the aforementioned cool monastery. There were a few "touristic" restaurants, a few street cats, but all in all it felt quite weirdly desolate.

We walked around a little more and found a really pretty crescent-shaped alleyway mostly full of shisha lounges, before stopping outside the Cercul Militar National, some sort of grand military museum. To be clear, I think I'm being a little unfair to Bucharest here, as we were all a little burnt out from so much intense travelling, but again we found ourselves a little underwhelmed. The heat was also really intense, which made being out in the sun quite unpleasant. Eventually we stopped at a convenience store for some drinks and sat in a park full of hundreds of pigeons, before deciding it was probably best to just head home.

This wasn't a decision entirely motivated by boredom – some of us had a friend who happened to also be in Bucharest at the same time so we had invited her over to dinner. We wanted to try and make traditional Romanian cabbage rolls: usually a mixture of rice, fried vegetables, mushrooms, meat (or tofu in our case), and herbs, wrapped in a large sauerkraut leaf, and then simmered in a tomato-based sauce for a few hours. You typically serve them with polenta to bulk out the meal.

If you make these yourself, my top tip would be to skim off a little bit of the tomato sauce to cook into the polenta. I think polenta is usually only cooked with milk and seasonings, and while it mixes with the flavour of the rolls, it gets a much richer flavour by actually cooking it with some sauce. I mostly accidentally discovered this because we'd massively overfilled the pan of sauce but it was a happy accident :D

These were a lot of effort, but turned out absolutely delicious! They had a strong vinegary flavour from the sauerkraut that was countered by the rich sauce, with a very dense and tasty filling. We also served it with a homemade aubergine dip, and a Sandwich Sauce we found from Lidl (think a garlicky tartar mayo). A really tasty meal we'll definitely make again!

23rd August

Today we lowkey did nothing. We figured we could all use a rest day, so we mostly lounged around at home. We briefly investigated the pool that our hotel had listed as an amenity, just to find out it was a paid nearby pool that they'd incorrectly listed as included. We ate leftover cabbage rolls and watched the sun set from our terrace, and not much else. But it was a very needed break from an intense few weeks!