Got up early enough to check out this morning and headed out to the national history museum. It was actually tiny, despite looking huge from the outside. I think most of the building is off limits. There are 2 rooms - one is completely random scattered artifacts and the other is the cast of Trajan's Column. The cast is pretty cool but ultimately not as exciting as I'd hoped - it's a room full of many different sections of the column's face but all of the images are more or less the same couple blurry depictions of Dacians surrendering to Trajan. At least they only charged me a euro to get in. There were a few temporary exhibits too, but those weren't in English at all and my Romanian isn't what it used to be. Romanian actually is closer to being comprehensible than any other language I've seen in quite some time due to it being a romance language, which is very apparent. Lots of words sounds like strange variations of French or Italian and are obviously cognate. "Merci" seems to be the default way of saying thank you around here, though whether that's truly Romanian or simply a French loanword I don't know.

I got my stuff from the hostel and headed out to the bus stop. There were a long sequence of parking lots near where the pin took me, so I wandered around them for a few minutes. Some guy pointed me back the way I had came when I asked about a bus to Istanbul, but as I was walking there a bus claiming to run from Bucharest to Istanbul drove past. I ran after it but it stopped for just a couple seconds on the side of the road before driving off again, even though I was only a few feet away. I went across to the company's ticket booth to complain (it was still a few minutes before the scheduled departure time anyway), but the woman there seemed baffled that I even had a ticket for today. She spoke no English but was able to get a couple points across to me through Google Translate, most notably that she didn't even think there was a bus running until tomorrow the 5th. I guess the bus I saw go by wasn't the right one anyway. It's anyone's guess why I was allowed to buy a bus ticket for a date when the route isn't running, but that's the Balkans for you. I'm going to miss the jank in some ways... but mostly not. That lady made some calls and eventually told me that the best I could do was take the bus the next day, so I started looking into backup options. She made more calls and eventually showed me another message on her phone saying that I could "go with the navy". This was super exciting since I thought maybe she had some contact in the Romanian navy that would let me hitch a ride on one of their vessels as it made its way down to Turkey, but apparently "Marina" is the name of a bus company and also happens to be the Romanian word for "navy". Oh well. I thanked her for finding me a backup plan before heading out to this other company's office. It wasn't far away and I booked a cheaper ticket than the one I'd originally bought, was granted a refund on that one, and then got onboard the bus at 5 pm. I have no idea when it arrives in Istanbul but I think it's pretty direct, so hopefully I'm not stuck on this bus for 20 hours or something. Honestly, since that original bus was going to arrive at 3 AM and I suspect this one might arrive at more like 5 AM, the whole confusion regarding the ticket was probably for the best.

We're out of Romania now; I'm not going to miss it very much. It wasn't what I had feared it would be - dirty, dangerous, completely dysfunctional - In fact, it was quite clean, safe, and everything seemed to work as it should. Bucharest is a pretty modern city. But at the same time, everywhere I went was weird and unpleasant in a way that I can't fully articulate. I think communism really did a number on it, but it wasn't depressing in the more typical fashion like with Szczecin, Bratislava, or the outskirts of Sofia. There are parts of the country I suppose I would like to see someday, but a return trip to Bucharest isn't something I'm looking forward to.

We stopped at a tiny restaurant thing in the middle of the Bulgarian countryside that must be owned by a friend of the bus driver since it's pretty far off our route and I can't imagine there was really no better place to stop. At least it allowed me to spend the rest of my lev that I hadn't got to use before entering Romania. The guy told me I owed 18 lev, which seemed pretty steep given the extremely basic food they had on offer and our less than metropolitan location. I'm very confident he was telling other people a different price, but I couldn't challenge him since the prices weren't listed anywhere. I got a little bit of revenge by discovering that I didn't have 18 lev, so he had to settle for something like 15. There's only one woman on this bus who speaks any English at all, yet everyone still seems really intent on telling me things anyway despite it being obvious I have no idea what they're saying. While waiting in line at Turkish customs someone figured out I'm American and then everyone started asking me "Trump?!" They then had a long conversation where "Americano" came up a lot. I think my difficulty with finding this bus company means that almost no tourists ever come through this way and I'm something of an enigma. The bus driver beckoned me to follow him into the duty free store so I did. He started walking around collecting huge cases of cigarettes and handing them to me until we eventually went through checkout, and it has become clear by this point that I was to help him buy more cigarettes than he'd otherwise be allowed. He put money in front of me as I went through and collected the change, so it must have been incredibly obvious to the cashier that this was some sort of scheme to get out with an illegal amount of tobacco product, but nobody seemed to care.

We just got finished with an extremely long wait at the Turkish border. The border is by Edirne near the triple point with Bulgaria and Greece, and they have you go through security like it's the airport with an x-ray scanner and all. That was very easy and they didn't give me any trouble. Then, for reasons that escape me, it took them 3.5 hours to search the bus and we had to just sit there waiting the entire time. I had left my water in the bus but at least I had some oranges in my backpack. We got to the border around midnight Bulgarian time and now it's 4:30 Turkish time. (Even though they're really in the same time zone, Turkey doesn't do daylight savings so they're effectively an hour off.) It's another few hours to Istanbul from here and I'm going to try and get some sleep now.