Eastern Danube, Day 1: To Bucharest

As I have often done in the past, I am blogging the journal from our latest vacation trip. I will be posting daily installments over the next week and a half, offset by five weeks from our trip. The trip includes a river cruise on the eastern Danube River on the AMAWaterways ship AmaVerde, visiting various cities along the way.

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Our next adventure, a cruise on the eastern Danube from Bucharest to Budapest, is starting in Vienna rather than at home in California. I have been participating in an IETF standards meeting in Vienna this past week and this trip is an add-on to attending the meeting.

We got up early at our hotel, the Hilton Vienna Park, had breakfast and took the CAT train from the station across the street directly to Vienna Airport. We checked our bags at the Austrian Airlines counter, and quickly encountered a very long line to go through airport security. It appeared that there was some construction taking place because the line markings didn’t quite match reality. We made it through the line and to the gate, although with not much time to spare. As we have frequently encountered in Europe, the gate wasn’t a jetway but rather a passage to a bus that we had to ride to reach the airplane. So we waited a little while for the bus to fill up before making our way to the plane. If we’re transferring to the plane via a bus, why do they have boarding groups?

The Bucharest airport was very much like any other, except that the signs were now in Romanian and English rather than German and English. After collecting our bags, we made our way to Bus 100, which Google had indicated was the correct bus to take us into town. We were able to use Apple Pay as we entered the bus. By the time we left, the bus was rather crowded, and became a bit more so at the first couple of stops. After about 6 stops, we got off across the street from our hotel.

Our hotel, the Grand Hotel Bucharest, is a large high-rise near the center of the city, adjacent to the Old Town, which is the main tourist area. Our room was clean and comfortable, but compared with the many other hotels we had stayed in recently, seemed a little dated. Nevertheless, it was more than adequate for our needs and had a great view.

After dropping our luggage, we set out on foot for the Old Town. Bucharest’s Old Town is diagonally across a large traffic circle from the hotel, but there was a convenient underground hall that allowed us to walk directly across. Not having had lunch, we stopped at a street-side shop for a take-away meal of a hot dog, a meat-filled pastry, and sodas.

Entering Old Town, we encountered many cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating, many of which invited us in (but we had just eaten). As a tourist area, there were the requisite souvenir shops as well. We also encountered the first examples of Romanian architecture: large, imposing, ornately decorated bank buildings. We continued out of Old Town and walked past the Communist-era Parliament Building, said to be the second-largest building in the world. We followed Bulevardul Unirii, which extends out from the front of the building and features a line of synchronized fountains in the median.

After returning to our hotel to rest for a bit, we returned to Old Town and stopped at one of the outdoor restaurants featuring traditional Romanian food. Our dinner was excellent and Kenna had a particularly enjoyable red wine.