My Favorite Part of Day 1

I love to hear different languages overlapping in the summer air. In Bucharest on Day One of this year’s Romania tour, the languages were varied and the air was nice and toasty, like it had just crossed the desert in a Silk Road saddlebag.

That thought was inevitable as we stood in the 300 year old Stavropoleos monastery, built with an inn to host exactly those legendary travelers. Park your camel and come in for a prayer. Busy Bucharest waited patiently outside while we sheltered under the murals of Byzantium, breathed the collective reverence of spiced incense, and felt the slow ache of a place that has hosted contested faith for multiple tumultuous centuries. I always enjoy looking for familiar Biblical stories among the unknown, and the attendant solved the mystery of one particular Orthodox image that had been confounding me for a year.

The chapel was exquisite, but my favorite part of the day was outside, nowhere in particular. Out there, on typical cobblestones and between any of the many historic buildings, an ecstatic tingle rose up through my shins, or maybe outward from my lungs. It wasn’t just that we were walking the historic streets of Bucharest’s Old Town, or the way that particular city wakes up the architecture enthusiast in me like nowhere else. It wasn’t even the aggregate excitement for everything that lay ahead, though that was enough to overflow the Black Sea. Something else was delighting and soothing my tour guide heart.

As we walked down the street…nobody noticed. It was wonderful. Tourism broke out of its Covid prison at a sprint that is not slowing and Bucharest gets its modest share, but we were not a tour blob to span the street and make photographers grimace. Nor were we solo travelers yearning for someone with whom to share the unexpected sights. The double handful of us were just friends enjoying a night out, participants of the place, unremarkable to passersby. And when we got to the restaurant, there was no need for “choose 1 of 3” limitations, we could order off the menu since our table was unremarkable in its size. With small group travel, in places not overwhelmed by tourism, you can still be part of the native flow, not juxtaposed against it.

I thought of those Silk Road travelers with their harsh conditions, suspicion from nervous hosts, and constant vulnerability to disaster without warning. Then I thought of the current hordes on the Beaten Paths of Europe, sweating on each other, trying to get the bill from exhausted hosts, and having pretty much the same experience as the other 25,000 people in the museum that day.

I feel lucky to have experienced some proximity to both of those stories, but as I sat back with a glass of fresh mint lemonade in a place with all the beauty but none of those problems, there was nowhere else on Earth I would have rather been. When your favorite part of Day One is going to continue for the entirety of the trip, you know you made a good choice.