Pause and Wander

Dates: June 30-July 3, 2026

Place: Bucharest, Romania

Every country gets a first day, and Romania’s did everything in its power to make us regret coming. Then it handed us a birthday, a knockout win, a walking tour, and a history lesson we’ll never forget, and all was forgiven. But let’s take it in order, because the first day really was something.

It began at 3:30 in the morning in Tbilisi, with an alarm that we had spent most of the night dreading instead of sleeping. Coffee, a rousing of the troops, and out the door before 4:00am for a 6:45am flight. Everything at the airport went suspiciously smoothly: bags checked, security painless, and a comfortable airport lounge in which to wait out the last hour. At 6:10 the departure screen said boarding had begun, so we gathered ourselves without hurry, and at 6:14 the screen flipped to Final Call. Final call? Four minutes after boarding opened? We snapped into a full family scramble, snatched up bags and children and bolted for the gate, arriving among the very last passengers onto the plane, hearts pounding, only to sit parked at the gate until the normally scheduled pushback time anyway. A false alarm that had spiked everyone’s stress for nothing. Or so we thought. That little sprint would end up costing us something after all, and we wouldn’t discover what until midnight in another country.

The rest of the journey behaved itself: an easy hop to Istanbul, a five-hour layover in another comfortable lounge, and a one-hour flight into Bucharest, where the bags all appeared and passport control waved us through. Then came the Bolt ride into the city, and the day’s second act of friction. Forty minutes in, just short of our destination, the driver announced he would not be turning left onto our street, offered no reason, and told us we could walk the last 300 meters. Fine, if not exactly warm. The mess came at the curb. Arya and Finlee were in the far back seat, and freeing them required folding the middle row forward. The driver, who had spent the entire ride on his phone, stayed on it, offering neither help nor instruction. Shaina spotted a small red strap on the seat, the exact kind of pull-strap that releases the seat fold in plenty of vehicles, and gave it a reasonable tug. It was not a release. It was a loose strap on the seat cover, and it came away in her hand. An honest mistake, minor and cheap to fix, and one that would never have happened had the driver spent ten seconds helping his passengers out of his own car. He responded by filing a formal claim against us with Bolt for abusive behavior and damages.

So we trudged our final 300 meters into Romania hauling all our luggage, stewing about the claim. And then we opened the apartment door, and the day changed shape. Finlee’s tenth birthday was the following day, and Shaina had quietly called ahead to ask our Airbnb host whether they might put up a decoration or two and grab a cake. The host had gone miles beyond the request. Balloons everywhere, birthday signs, streamers, and a plate of fresh cherries and an adorable raspberry cake waiting on the counter. We stood in the doorway, road-weary and grumpy, looking at a room that had been lovingly decorated for our daughter by a total stranger, and sang happy birthday to a delighted almost-ten-year-old. Romania’s first impression, it turned out, had just been running a little late. Even the Bolt saga deflated quickly: Max submitted his side of the story, and within 45 minutes the company wrote back to say all claims were dropped. The $200 phantom charge his imagination had been busily constructing never materialized.

Dinner that night came with a dramatic show. We walked a whopping 250 meters to a Japanese izakaya, chosen by proximity and its stellar reviews, and ate grilled meats and potstickers alongside two accidental standouts. We enjoyed the best kimchi either of us has ever had, pungent and deep but missing the heavy funk that usually turns Shaina away from kimchi entirely, and a bowl of steamed rice tossed with butter and furikake that had no business being that good. While we ate, the sky staged a coup. Bucharest had been sitting at 102 degrees Fahrenheit, the leading edge of a heat wave that had rolled east from France, and the storm that broke it arrived like a special effect. First, fat drops smacked the hot pavement, then rain fell in fully horizontal sheets, then wind screamed down the street hard enough to send signs, cardboard and garbage flying past the window beside our table. The faces of the servers made clear this was not a normal Romanian evening. We waited out the worst of it, then used the first quasi-lull to cover those 250 meters home at the fastest collective pace this family has ever achieved.

And it was there, unpacking at the end of this very long day, that the real gut-punch landed. Max’s water bottle carrier was gone. That probably sounds like a small thing, so let us explain what that object was. He bought it in China in 2007, and for nearly twenty years it went everywhere he went, through every country of his and Shaina’s travels, through both daughters’ childhoods, through every leg of this entire year. Just a few months ago, in Taiwan, with Shaina’s mom Missi along, we’d had it lovingly repaired with a new maroon strap and a double-reinforced bottom, good as new for its third decade. And now it had simply vanished, almost certainly left behind in that frantic false-alarm sprint out of the Tbilisi lounge. The final call that turned out to mean nothing had taken something after all. Max was genuinely upset, mostly at himself for rushing without taking stock, and there was nothing to be done about it. Somewhere in a Tbilisi airport lounge sits a twenty-year-old woven bottle carrier with a story nobody around it knows. He hopes whoever finds it thinks it’s as cool as he did. He suspects they won’t. He can always imagine.

Morning brought the apocalypse’s receipts and a much better day. The storm had raged all night, our phones erupting with deafening flood and hail warnings every couple hours, and the city woke to real damage—big trees toppled across roads and parks, limbs torn off, a few unlucky cars crushed. But inside our apartment it was officially Finlee’s tenth birthday, double digits at last. The day’s main event was a place called Therme, about an hour north of the city: one of the coolest water parks any of us has ever set foot in, and an argument, as far as we are concerned, for the wholesale redesign of the entire industry. The whole complex is indoors, fully climate-controlled, with a dozen slides, a wave pool, steam rooms, actual living tropical foliage and palm trees, and not a single drop of sunscreen required. We’re not sure we can ever be persuaded to attend an outdoor water park again. The best part, though, wasn’t the slides. The girls fell in with two other kids, a Spanish girl and an American girl, both living in Romania for their parents’ work, strangers to each other until our daughters, who between them speak Spanish and English, stitched the group together and spent the afternoon bouncing between languages. Watching them assemble an international friend group in twenty minutes flat is one of the quiet payoffs of this whole year.

The birthday’s crowning moment came that evening, and it had been nearly a month in the making. Finlee’s favorite thing in the entire world is a rose, which she’ll proudly tell anyone who will listen that it’s her middle name and she’s named after her late Grandma Dana Rose. Back in Dilijan, Armenia, weeks ago, in a little shop full of crafts and minerals, Shaina had spotted a pair of silver rose earrings.  Max improvised a distraction on the spot: an elaborate game in which he and the girls had to pick favorite minerals from the glass display cases, complete with increasingly arbitrary rules about which cases were in play. It worked completely. When Finlee opened the earrings and the whole scheme was revealed, her eyes went wide and she blurted out, “I just thought you wanted to have really crazy rules about which sparkly rocks we were allowed to choose!” Silly dad games for the win. Nana rounded out the celebration from Reno: when Shaina had mentioned a nearby patisserie selling tiny, exquisite little cakes, her mom insisted on buying them as her gift, since she couldn’t be here herself. So while on FaceTime with her, we opened the box of four cakes, most of which were works of art unto themselves. Finlee predictably and correctly favored the chocolate, while the adults reached unanimous agreement that the yuzu meringue was transcendent.

The days that followed settled us into the city’s rhythm, and into its heaviest history. Our morning run/walk through Cișmigiu Garden, the oldest public park in Bucharest, wound through the storm’s wreckage, enormous old trees uprooted and thrown across the paths. Alongside the devastation, we also found something quietly encouraging: neighbors who had simply turned out, unasked, with clippers and small chainsaws, dragging limbs aside and readying the debris for the city crews. Everyone else jogged and strolled to work as though a small apocalypse hadn’t just blown through.

That same morning delivered the sporting highlight of the whole trip so far: the United States beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0 in the World Cup round of 32, the team’s first knockout-round win in years, surviving a controversial red card and a half hour a man down before a gorgeous 82nd-minute free kick sealed it. The girls squealed wildly through the apartment. They have, we’ve noticed, an unshakable childhood certainty that America simply wins, a faith that has survived a full year of world travel intact, and we quietly dread the match that eventually breaks it. But not this week.

That evening we ate at Hanu’ lui Manuc, a beautifully preserved inn built around 1808 by a wealthy Romanian merchant. It’s the oldest operating hotel building in Bucharest, its restaurant nestled in a wooden-galleried courtyard that feels lifted from another century. There we finally tried mici, the beloved Romanian grilled sausages, skinless little logs of seasoned pork and beef served with mustard, which our taxi driver to the water park had spent a full hour evangelizing. He was right.

And then, after dinner, we walked to the Palace of the Parliament, and Romania’s darkest chapter opened up in front of us. The building is the 2nd largest administrative building on earth (after the Pentagon), and by most measures, the heaviest building in the world—roughly four billion pounds of steel, concrete, marble, and crystal, comprising over a thousand rooms. And the story in its foundations is grim. It was built in the 1980s on the orders of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s communist dictator. He bulldozed a vast historic swath of central Bucharest, demolishing churches and homes and displacing tens of thousands of people, to raise a monument to himself while ordinary Romanians queued under brutal rationing. He never finished it. In December 1989 the revolution came—Ceaușescu and his wife Elena tried to flee, were captured, and after a trial that lasted about an hour were executed on Christmas Day. The building still stands, staggering and beautiful and deeply uncomfortable, a monument to one man’s vanity paid for in an entire country’s suffering. We explained all of it to the girls while standing at the foot of the thing, craning up at its impossible scale, and it landed the way history lands best: not as a lecture, but as a story attached to something you can see.

Our last full day tied the whole Romanian history thread into a bow, thanks to a guide named Cristina and a bit of morning homework that paid off spectacularly. Before our 2.5-hour walking tour of central Bucharest, Max had given the girls a short synopsis of Romanian history and quizzed them on it over breakfast. So when Cristina, partway through the tour, began quizzing the group about her country’s past, two small hands shot instantly into the air. The girls knew the answers, including the big one, that modern Romania was assembled from three historical principalities: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. Cristina was visibly delighted, and not just to have tour guests who knew her country’s history, but to have those guests be children, which she made clear was a first. From that moment she and the girls were a unit, chatting back and forth for the entire remaining tour, past the Royal Palace and the Revolution Square, through the gorgeous covered Macca-Vilacrosse Passage, into the tiny jewel-box Stavropoleos Monastery church. The highlight of the tour for us all was the Romanian Athenaeum, the city’s grand concert hall. The auditorium is ringed by a single enormous 70-meter mural depicting the entire sweep of Romanian history. The tour finished near the Memorial of Rebirth, the divisive monument to the victims of the 1989 revolution that locals derisively call “the potato on a stick,” a resemblance we cannot in good conscience deny. Cristina genuinely loves the memorial, and her affection was infectious. And standing in that square closed the loop that the Palace of the Parliament had opened the night before: the dictator, the revolution that ended him, and the ordinary people it cost.

We ate our farewell dinner at Caru’ cu Bere, a historic landmark beer hall of dark carved wood and stained glass, touristy and a bit pricey and completely worth it for the setting alone. After filling our bellies we wandered to and through one of Bucharest’s most beautiful and famous bookstores: Cärturești Carusel. The kids eyes grew wide as they surveyed a large open interior, containing several floors connected by majestic staircases, rows and stacks of colorful books and eclectic literary-adjacent gifts, all sprinkled with modern art. They perused and eventually each found a book before settling into a window nook to read. They nearly finished their books before we pried them away to split up for two final and separate missions. Shaina took Finlee for a birthday haircut, from which she emerged with an adorable A-line bob and the unmistakable glow of a kid who has just had an outing that was entirely about her, while Max and Arya ran errands and capped them with a phenomenal lemon-lime sorbet, logging some quiet one-on-one time of their own.

So how did Bucharest treat us? Genuinely well. We ate wonderfully, we watched our soccer team make history, we celebrated a tenth birthday in style, and the city kept handing us interesting corners and kind people, including a host who decorated an apartment for a child she had never met. If we’re honest, big cities don’t tend to stir the deepest parts of this trip for us. City life is frictionless by design, everything you want a short walk away, and that very ease means it asks less of you and leaves a lighter mark. Three days is also nowhere near enough to truly take a city’s measure, so we hold the verdict loosely. But as we packed for the train north, the pull we felt wasn’t backward toward the boulevards. It was forward, toward the mountains of Transylvania, toward Brașov and a long walking trail called the Via Transilvanica, and toward whatever version of Romania is waiting out there to leave its deeper mark.

Lights out, Bucharest. Thanks for the landing, rough start and all.