The arrival of my friends - Having the first dinner in Bucharest

Friends cannot stay apart for longer 

Once I have told you that Erasmus is about the people ( find the link to that article by clicking the blue writing ) and after my mobility in Saarbrucken was over that belief got stronger and stronger within me because I kept communicating with most of my fellows and also making plans of meeting each other in the future. Thus, I have invited two of my friends that I met in Germany ( Saarbrucken ) to come in Romania for the Christmas Holidays and they happily said “yes” to my invitation.

Starting badly with a shitty accommodation 

On 19th December my friends arrive at the International Airport “Henri Coandă”, Bucharest, Otopeni where they are expected by another friend of the Erasmus group who is helping them with the public transportation so that they can get to the booked accommodation inside the Romanian capital. When we were looking for a place to stay in Bucharest, the plan was to find an accommodation that would be very close to my actual location so regarding meeting and transportation things would have get easier that way.

On one hand, this seemed like a good and practical plan, but the accommodation we choose proved to be one of the worst! Hotel Stars, situated on Occidentului street, is certainly not recommended by my two friends who have spent two nights in one of its rooms. They say that the room is too cold during the night, the running water has an orange-red color, the smell is nasty and they also notice a cockroach on the floor. The only good part, so to speak, is maybe the low price and the location of it – near the Victory Square and Gara de Nord, but Hotel Stars is still not worth it as decent accommodation for a travel in Bucharest.

Meeting each other in person after 5 months

Let’s speak about the good parts now. I am so nervous to meet my friends after almost 5 months of not seeing each other and I cannot believe that the time to give ourselves a big hug has finally come. We meet in front of that shitty hotel and get extremely excited and emotional because it is such a good and affectionate feeling to be together again. At first, I am thinking like, God, I am in a dream or in a time travel machine and I really cannot consider what is happening in the moment. After lots of hugs, the group which is formed by old Romanian friends and new Korean friends decides to go to a restaurant that also serves traditional Romanian food so we can celebrate our reunion by having a good dinner in a nice place, more exactly at “La Placinte”.

Going to "La Placinte"

Since the restaurant is kind of close to our location, we start walking from the Occidentului street, get out on Calea Victoriei street, stroll a bit more through Piata Amzei and very soon we are in Piata Romana where one of the "La Placinte" restaurant is located. As far as I understand, La Placinte is a restaurant coming from The Republic of Moldova but the cuisine they serve has many dishes which are very similar or exactly the same with the traditional Romanian ones. Anyway, we enter the location and the place is pretty crowded, but we still find a table for 7 persons. The menu has many things to offer and we are helping and explaining our guests the dishes that they are about to order.

Trying out the romanian dishes. A brief aspect of the prices the restaurant has

Everybody gets something different starting with the most traditional Romanian dish called “sarmale” ( costs 30 lei – 6 euros ), continuing with “mici” (costs 28 lei – 6 euros ) and “fasole cu afumatura” (costs 35 lei – 7 euros )  and finishing up with the so known pies from which the restaurant gets its name. We also order together mulled wine ( costs 12 lei per glass - 2,5 euros ) which proves to be one of the best everybody has had lately.

I serve a cabbage pie ( that costs 15 lei – meaning 3 euros ), one of the vegan dishes people can have here and I split it with a friend who gets me half of its pumpkin pie ( costs 19 lei - 4 euros ).Actually, we are all sharing the food with each other so in this way each of us can get a small taste from a variety of flavors. I come to the conclusion that I like the pumpkin pie the most and I recommend it to the people who want to give this restaurant a try. Generally, we are all pleased and satisfied with the food that we eat. My foreign friends are now introduced in the Romanian cuisine and maybe they know more what to expect when it comes to the Romanian food.

During our dinner we have many conversations which I don’t remember quite well maybe due to the mulled wine, but I think we start to tell funny memories from our good time in Saarbrucken. Although our plan for tonight was to get to the Christmas market after the dinner, we realize that is too late for going there because the location of the place is a bit far from ours and the market closes also at 22.00 PM. Plus, who can practically walk after the dinner that we’ve just had? So, we decide to reschedule the visit to the Christmas market for tomorrow night and we get instead to the student dorm where we continue our night by chilling with a hot chocolate and friendly conversations.

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