I visited a friend in Bucharest recently. Here are some of the foods and drinks I liked:
- Pretzels with fillings (cherry jam, chocolate, hot dog with spiced red cabbage) from streetside bakeries
- Soup from a dedicated soup cafe
- ROM bar (rum flavoured sponge and chocolate bar)
- Vișinată (cherry liquor, kind of like if Sourz was made using plants)
- Olympus herbal tea (apparently the base herb is called ‘Greek mountain tea’), mint flavour
- Iceberg lettuce and wakame salad from a ramen restaurant
- Banana flavoured ice cream with a peelable gummy outside and a firm ice cream inside
There was also one food I really didn’t like, an extremely strong garlic sauce (mujdei) which makes me understand why some Romanians complain that they hate garlic.
I didn’t take around my camera every day because it’s heavy and I was doing a lot of walking, but I tried to stay in the photo taking mindset even with my smartphone. These are my favourite smartphone photos; I’ll show the camera photos from the trip in a future post.
A house in Bușteni
At one point we took the cable car from the village of Bușteni up into the Bucegi Mountains for a hike. I’m very pleased and somewhat surprised that I was physically able to complete a 4h hike, even if it was a gentle one and everyone kindly slowed down and let me take breaks to rest.
Something about the public transport in Bucharest is extra aesthetically pleasing to me. Just after we landed it was the dead of night and we got to watch a tram silently rounding a corner in the grass at Unirii Plaza, which was definitely the most photogenic tram of them all. I didn’t catch a good picture of that, nor of the metro stations with their red hexagonal grilles. I did manage to get a shot of this trolleybus.
camera gear rambling
I said in my last post that I would be fine keeping an effective 75mm lens on my camera because I would be able to use my smartphone for wide angle shots. The reality is I mostly zoomed in when using my smartphone too. When I clicked 3x zoom on my Samsung S22 (as I normally did for photos on this trip), the phone chose between 2 out of the 3 available lenses to take the picture with depending on how far away the subject was, with effective focal lengths of 23mm or 69mm. Most of the pictures I liked ended up being taken at 69mm. (The third lens is the really wide angle one which gets used when I click on the .6x zoom option.)
I had three more photos of central Bucharest that I probably would’ve shared if they hadn’t been taken on my phone–I like the compositions but the blurry and ultra-processed picture quality was too dissatisfying for me. Carrying the camera is always a tradeoff between photos and being physically comfortable and mobile.
My current camera and lens are fairly light for mirrored APS-C (my Canon 200D is 453g, the world’s lightest is the 100D at 407g) so I was considering branching out to a micro four thirds camera. But when I pick up my camera I don’t find it super heavy. I think it’s less about the weight and more about the awareness that something is swinging from my neck/shoulder. Maybe I can improve my camera strap instead?