Escape Room Mania

While planning this holiday, Rachael really wanted to go somewhere with snow, obviously that is rarely a cast-iron guarantee, so originally we were going to look for somewhere mountainous, we were even seconds away from booking a trip to Finland until we realised that our flights didn't get there until midnight and the only accommodation was an airbnb, meaning we have to meet the owners before we could go inside and we would need to make our own way there (when public transport has stopped and transfer companies are a bit funny about taking you to non hotels).

On our return to the drawing board (please imagine us standing over a large map covered in pins and post-it notes possibly some pieces of string held between the pins to signify possible routes) we realised that for the days we wanted if we were going to be able to book anything (by this point it was only a couple of weeks away... I have never claimed that we were organised) we would have to drop the snow requirement.

This opened up the map significantly, though not so secretly, I had my own agenda. I have a scratch map on my wall at home where I can scratch off the countries I have visited, it is great, except that it makes you want to visit quite large places to make any obvious change to the map. It was a source of great disappointment how last year we went on the greatest holiday of our lives to Costa Rica which was like a different world, yet when I came to scratch it off the map it barely made a dent, I have a tiny barely noticeable purple mark surrounded by masses of unscratched golden lands, why could we not have visited Brazil instead?

The other recent holidays haven't helped much either, we had Madeira (a tiny speck in the ocean), Ireland (already scratched off) and Corfu (looks like it could have been scratched off by accident), the biggest dent we have made in the map was Denmark, the smallest Scandinavian country we could have chosen. Sure, they own Greenland, but that isn't attached, I can't scratch off that massive landmass because we haven't been there!

Well luckily for me, there was a pair of flights that suited our timetable to Bucharest, Romania is a decent sized country that I had yet to visit, sure I had passed through there in 2008 and been woken up by border guards with massive guns, but I think that unless you actually get off the train and visit the place, it doesn't count, so yes, this holiday I got to scratch off Romania! (also go there, which I suppose is just as important. Maybe next holiday we should go to Antarctica, then I can scratch off the bottom half of the map)

So aside from the important business of scratch maps we had a holiday in there somewhere too.

Bucharest like many places has a pedestrianised old town where we were staying, it wasn't huge, but it took a little bit of getting used to navigating it. Luckily for us, judging by the people that we met, Romanians are incredibly nice, ridiculously so. When we arrived, looking a bit lost, an old man asked us where we were going and offered to show us the way, just because he was out for a walk anyway so he didn't mind where he walked and he walked with us all the way until we found the hotel. He didn't even try to rob us, which I thought was nice of him.

Speaking of the pedestrianised area, I feel it is worth pointing out how much they made up for it in the surrounding roads with this road with (count them) 9 lanes of traffic in 1 direction!


Imagine approaching this and realising that you're in the wrong lane. I saw someone run across this road without waiting for the green man, I thought that man was crazy.

Now I suppose I should probably get onto the activities, I think I already gave that away in the title of the post, because as well as containing a clever homophone of Romania, it also contains 'Escape Room' which makes it even cleverer. Since we did 4 of them (over only 3 full days), you could also say that we were swept up with Escape Room Mania. I know how much people love to have things explained to them in great detail as though they were a child, but had I not, there was always a risk that it would be missed and you would never know just how clever I was being.

We love escape rooms, I couldn't even tell you how many we had done (I could probably work it out, but it sounds like a lot of effort), but we try and find them whenever we are on holiday now as well as one every year on my birthday and any others that we think look good or there is a decent Groupon offer for. I'm not saying that we're any good at them still, but we're always getting better and they're a lot of fun.

In Bucharest, the most expensive one we did was 120 Grandads (That's not what the currency is called, but that is what we called it. I will explain this no further. Also there are about 5 Grandads to a pound so that is about £24) total which is cheap for escape rooms. The cheapest was half that price, so we thought best to take advantage of it. There was a Dracula themed one (of course), one where you're trapped backstage at a rock show, a scientist themed one where you're trying to save the world from a deadly virus and a really bizarre one that was like being in a really strange dream.
We won them all, so hooray for us.

Before we came we had a look online to see what there was to do in Bucharest (aside from escape rooms) and came upon the Opera House. We don't particularly have an interest in the opera, though we did go to a show in Riga's opera house called Igudesman and Joo, though that was more of a comedy music show. It turned out that there was an opera on while we were there, Verdi's Don Carlos and when we looked at the tickets, we assumed it was some sort of mistake when we found that it would only cost £5. Total! For that price, it didn't matter whether we enjoyed it or not, it cost £5 for a night out.
The main thing I learned while watching the show that I didn't know before was that the Opera is subtitled! (actually they are called supertitles) so that it's possible to follow the plot by reading the words. I never knew that (probably because I couldn't go to the Opera for £5 here, since the opera is primarily the reserve of rich snobs here). It's a shame that I don't understand Romanian either, but it was nice to know.

And finally, I avoided pointing it out at the top as It seemed like a nice way to end it to point out that we got our snow anyway, here I am at the outdoor village museum that we visited. On the coldest day when we were there. I felt as though the ticket lady was looking at us like we were crazy for wanting to visit when it was so cold, but there were at least 2 other groups of people visiting that day.