Day 19: Downtown again

Day 19:

You can't take cameras into the US Embassy, so I left mine at home. That means no photographs today. It was a day of errands and such in downtown Bucharest. At this point, I affected an attitude of blase world-weariness: yes, onto the 311 bus, I'm quite familiar with it; of course we go to Piata Unirii, haven't you ever been to downtown Bucharest before? No, you put your ticket in the machine like so, and then click it like this.

We walked around parts of downtown and found a climbing gym and a sporting-goods store for Em. Then we went to the embassy for me and Io -- I have some 401k documents that need her notarized signature, and this is the only place we could find in Bucharest with an American notary. The people at the embassy were surprisingly super-nice and quite efficient. We ran into another American / Romanian couple who were getting married, although in their case because the Romanian was just some regular dude off the street and not a Fulbright scholar they were allowed to just go right to America. Awesome.

We continued on and visited a Romanian bookstore that had some English-language books. It was pretty funny -- just an unlabeled corner in the back of the store ("How would you know this is the English section?" I asked Io. "Because the book titles are in English."). They had this crazy hodgepodge of books -- you'd go down the shelves and it's like Pet Sematary, The Seven Habits of Very Effective People, Pride & Prejudice, Twilight: New Dawn, 500 Crossword Puzzles, etc.

After that it was time for late lunch on the go. Io and Em were going into some grocery store to buy fruit, but I was having none of that. I swore that I wasn't going to eat any American food while I was here, but there was a McDonald's right there and nothing else really to eat, so what are you gonna do? Besides, the menu was all written in Romanian, so maybe that counts as Romanian food anyway.

It's funny, because we've been to several restaurants all around Romania, and in I would say 2/3 of them the menu is subtitled in another language, usually English or German. So I'm usually fine. Even a Romanian/German menu is okay because I read enough of each language to puzzle it out. McDonald's, amusingly, is entirely in Romanian, although many of the sandwiches have no real translation so are easy to spot. When I saw it was available, though, I had to get a Royale with Cheese.