Bishkek to Bucharest: February 21st - February 24th, 2024
Not a pair of cities I ever thought I'd link together in my life. But here we were in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, with a day for touristy activities before making our way back west to Europe, flying into the Romanian capital of Bucharest.
The night we arrived in Bishkek, preparing dinner was a bit awkward since the woman who seemed to run the small set of basement rooms (and also might have been living out of a storage closet) stood guard by the electrical kettle and microwave all evening, but after some gesturing and random bits of Russian she happily heated some water for our ramen, let us pop our doner meat into the micro, and grabbed us some dishes and utensils to eat with.
As is inevitable, our day in Bishkek started with a hunt for a cafe. Of course, our hunt started far too early (at maybe 9:30 AM?) and it took a little searching to find an open one. Unlike Almaty, Bishkek does not have two quaint coffee shops lining each side of every downtown city block, but after a bit of walking in the sunny, crisp morning we turned into an empty but open cafe where several waiters stood ready to intercept and redirect us to a table. And also unlike Almaty, not all of the baristas are very skilled - when our drinks came out Susan had a proper coffee while I had a mug of basically brown water. One man had made Susan's before a different guy took over to make mine, and I think he forgot to put new coffee in the machine.
Fearful of an impending caffeine withdrawal, I complained and asked for a new cup, a waitstaff interaction that terrifies me in my first language, let alone in broken Russian and English. But Susan helped, the first man came back out and brewed my cup, and all was well with the rest of our breakfast.
We took a Yandex to the Osh bazaar on the other side of town, one of Bishkek's largest. Being a cold winter weekday this one didn't have quite the crush of people that we'd seen at some other markets, but it still hummed with merchants and shoppers and thankfully lacked anyone hustling us to come buy their specific wares. Inside a warehouse building numerous vendors sold all variety of spices, nuts, noodles, flours, dried fruits, lentils, beans, and impressive rows of decorated lepeshka bread, disc-shaped loaves adorned with seeds and incisions that colored the bread in geometric radiating patterns.
Wandering through the aisles we passed a woman frying piroshki and I got the crispy, soft, warm, potato-filled bread I'd been after since having one with ashlan fu in Karakol. We meandered through the hardware section and then another warehouse filled with all manner of bathroom sink fixtures and heaps of plumbing accessories before ending up back at the entrance. Entertained but still hoping for a keepsake or two, we dove back in for another round and found a small shop selling felted goods. Felting is very important to the Kyrgyz culture; in their nomadic and pastoral tradition, they prepare the wool from their sheep and goat herds into many decorative and useful items. Susan picked up a really cool purse and some souvenirs for her nieces while I went away with yet another hat - mission success.
For the rest of the day we wandered around Ala Too square and the surrounding parks in central Bishkek, appreciating the marble-clad governmental buildings and many monuments to national heroes. The appearances of wealth here contrasted with the ad-hoc jumble of modest stalls and well-worn rooms that made up the Osh bazaar, but the government really did do a fine job crafting an impressive public space. We dipped inside their State History Museum, which proved to be a bit better than the one in Almaty, although curiously their history didn't seem to start until roughly the 1400's. Their reconstructed yurt and a few other exhibits showed off more exquisite Kyrgyz felting skills and we wondered if the psychedelic hippy movement in the US had actually taken all their cues from Kyrgyz nomads.
Dinner consisted of pizza and milkshakes that didn't quite match up with American expectations but still hit the spot. Afterwards we struggled to find a money changer who would sell us euros - I quickly went from looking for the best price to just looking for any exchange at all - but we finally managed to offload the last of our Kyrgyz som. Back at the hotel we packed up all the bags and tried our best to sleep ahead of our early flight the next day, excited to move on to a new phase of the trip (and the last one before taking a reset in the USA).
Getting checked in at the Bishkek airport went smoothly and we boarded one more Turkish Airlines flight, first for about 6 hours to Istanbul. Transferring there proved really confusing, and we nervously followed signs that pointed us through another round of security checks, wondering if we'd accidentally wind up outside of the airport and having to pay another $100 for Turkish visas. But it was just to get to the next section of the airport, which made sense when we realized Kyrgyzstan probably doesn't have any direct flights to European airspace and that our security screening in Bishkek had been... relaxed.
People thronged throughout Istanbul airport, clustering and clotting around most all of the seating, but a table in an upstairs food court afforded us some space to kill the time during our 5-and-a-half hour layover. Sadly the fancy chairs in the balcony behind McDonald's were all taken up, but now we know for next time... When they finally announced our gate we migrated over to a much quieter area with nice views of the evening sky through large curved windows, but by then we didn't have much more to wait.
A pretty short hop took us into Bucharest, immigration control let us through with very little questioning, and we got a nice, non-Schengen entry stamp for Romania. I gritted my teeth and ate the airport currency exchange rate to get some lei; but as Susan pointed out, it would probably take cash to get to the city and we couldn't do much without doing that first. We struggled to figure out the taxi system, though - with no wifi to be found at the arrivals terminal, we wandered around at the mercy of the local drivers. Some research by Susan indicated that there would be kiosks where we could request a taxi that would then pull up through the taxi lane and take us into town, which would keep us from getting ripped off by quasi-legitimate (or fully legitimate) drivers, so we found one, got a little paper receipt, and wandered up and down the drive looking for a cab whose numbers matched any of the 5 different alphanumeric strings printed in various spots on the receipt.
But after about 10 minutes of wandering without any luck (maybe that one that passed 8 minutes ago was ours?), the 50 lb duffle bag on my back making me crankier and crankier, Susan started asking some other drivers queued up in a different area what was up with the kiosk-orders. They seemed to deliberately ignore our slip of paper and just offer us rides instead, which at that point we were willing to take, until one guy quoted us a price... jokes on you, we don't have that much Romanian cash! Unamused, he pointed to where the kiosk-ordered taxis picked up, across the drive, so we went back for another little receipt, waddled to the other side of the road, and found a car with some matching numbers - bingo!
Every time we first arrive in a new country, I find myself excitedly attempting to absorb as much as I can through the vehicle windows, reading every sign, inspecting every billboard, as if maybe assembling enough scraps of poorly-understood and marginally-relevant information will give me firmer footing in a brand-new place. So I had my head on a swivel as the taxi cruised toward Bucharest's center - one of our calmer rides, actually - but absorbed very little since we hadn't even bothered practicing any Romanian. When we finally arrived at the hostel our older driver struggled to work the card reader, but luckily the cost was about a third of what the other taxi driver at the airport told us, so I handed over cash and everybody won.
At the hostel we were disappointed to see that since we'd booked a private room, we were in a different building that lacked a kitchen, but since we'd already spent $50 on sad hamburgers in Istanbul's airport (one of the most expensive I've ever traveled through) luckily we didn't need dinner that night. We'd barely caught the reception desk before they closed for the night, so it was certainly bedtime, and after a shower to rinse off the day of travel quickly drifted to sleep.
We had our new country errands dialed - SIM card, cash, groceries - but first, breakfast! Susan had scoped out a restaurant, "Brutal Pancakes", that looked amazing and promised to scratch our itch for an overly-sweet western breakfast of fluffy pan-fried bread. They had some wild combinations (Susan had pomegranate seeds and bananas while mine came with chocolate chip cookies!), and together with a good cup of coffee it started our day off right.
After breakfast we wandered around Bucharest in the general direction of the National Museum of Art, ticking items off our to-do list as we went, and definitely giving in to a second coffee at one of the numerous cute cafes we passed, gawking at the fancy state buildings in neoclassical architecture interspersed among communist-era blocks and the occasional staid church of indecipherable vintage. The National Museum of Art had several really interesting exhibits, ranging from orthodox icons and 16th century frescoes conserved from at-risk monasteries to works by 18th and 19th century Romanian romantics and impressionists. My favorite was a whole exhibit dedicated specifically to Victor Brauner, a Romanian surrealist who I'd never heard of before but whose paintings I enjoyed as much as those by the more famous surrealists, like Dali, Magritte, and Miro, that he worked with.
We finished the evening by swinging through the Communist Museum of Bucharest, an apartment done up in the style of a well-off family during the later years of Romania's communist regime. They had a ton of information plastered on the walls detailing Romania's history with communism, from its occupation by Russia after WWII, through the terror of the persecutions of their first dictator, to the rise and fall of the second dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu (turns out that extreme food rations are a quick way to piss off your population). My favorite part, though, was that they had a very knowledgeable guide wandering the small space. He happily answered our questions and gave some interesting perspective on how different people in modern Romania view the communist era (feelings are mixed), and was fun to talk with overall. Hong Yen might have bought him a drink to plumb for info about the state of Romanian youth.
Going out for dinner took a few tries - we didn't really want to spend the money, but not having a kitchen (or even a kettle) we didn't have much choice. So first was a counter-serve pizza place with some good-looking pies, but the music was blaring and everyone was shouting and by the time we got to the counter we couldn't figure out how to order a portion, and with a line 5 deep behind us while the cook yelled Romanian that I'm not sure even a native speaker would know we ran away to try somewhere else. But the little Chinese stand across the street only had a few mostly empty trays of suspiciously aged entrees - that's what we get for wanting dinner at 5:30 PM like a couple boring midwesterners. So finally we settled in an overpriced fast-noodles place and found out that they really seemed to enjoy chicken fries here. The final stop that night was a gear store, to get a couple climbing supplies, a map, and some toe-bails to replace the part of my crampons that had snapped. The guy at the shop, intrigued by the foreigners who needed ice climbing gear, asked what we were up to, and then repeatedly assured us that there was no ice climbing to be found this year because it was just too warm. He even called down his climbing buddy, who looked at us, shook his head, and suggested we try some dry-tooling instead. Not the most promising outlook for our winter sport aspirations...
The next morning we took the chance to start with another very different breakfast - a cereal cafe. Apparently these are a thing now, and on our first visit to one I had a classy mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honey Bunches of Oats, while Susan pretty much just found the most chocolatey options and then asked for Snickers bars on top. After breakfast we wandered more, and on the skyline a building appeared at a scale I usually associate with cliffs or rock domes in the mountains. Here sat the Romanian Palatul Parlamentului (Palace of Parliament), by some estimates the heaviest office building in the world, a massive and mostly-empty neo-classical behemoth meant to symbolize Romania's might but now seen by many as a testament to Ceausescu's megalomaniacal disregard for the well-being of the country's citizens.
We toured the national history museum that day as well, where we saw some of Romania's national treasures (a lot of gold but they didn't steal stuff from everyone else so it was a slightly smaller exhibit) and learned that they *really* like to play up their Roman ancestry; the museum had a ton of artifacts dating to the Roman and Byzantine times, and even a life-size replica of the humongous Trajan's Column from Italy (except split into a few pieces because they couldn't fit the whole thing inside). Also, they don't like the Ottomans, i.e. the Turks, and went through a period where they had to ask all the "Great Powers" (Ottomans, Russians, Hungarians, French, the UK...) for permission before conducting internal affairs. The world is dumb sometimes.
Our final stop in Bucharest was a traveling Salvador Dali exhibition in an art space in an old part of town. Not sure what to expect, I was surprised when most of the exhibit consisted of sculptures; Susan enjoyed it because she had been to the Dali museum in Spain and this was a chance to see a really different side of his work. I enjoyed seeing some his common motifs, like soft watches and snails, manifested into 3 dimensional, absurd, surreal sculptures. It also spurred some interesting artsy conversations because most of the pieces were just mocked up or modeled by Dali first, then executed by "master casters" in various workshops. Some we saw were even manufactured after Dali's death. So who's the artist there?
But enough of this time shuffling around cities! I don't think Susan and I had the mental capacity to absorb any more museum signage nor the podiatral capacity to walk slowly through any more exhibits of anything. We looked forward to waking up the next day and continuing our apparently very questionable pursuit of winter sports in Romania. If nothing else, we had a really really nice place to stay in our next stop, a relief after several nights in less-than-ideal city hotels.
Um that cereal is WILD. The architecture looks cool! And I agree with your thoughts on the steel crown.
ReplyDeleteSomeday perhaps I can have a crown made of cereal
Delete