The Move - Bucharest Preparation (part 2)

My alarm went off at 7.45am, and we threw on some clothes to wear to breakfast.  45 minutes later we were hauling two of our four suitcases down to reception in order to get a taxi to get us to the house.  At about 9.03am, when we were no more than 500 metres from the house, I received a phone call from IKEA.  The delivery was on its way and would be with us in five minutes.  I jumped out of the taxi at the top of our road to flag down the van (because finding our house isn't very easy) and by 9.30am all our flat-pack furniture was inside.  The poor driver had reversed all the way down the single-track road, only to find a huge turning circle outside our house.  To add to his stress, we could initially only find 14 boxes of the 15 we were due to have delivered: the missing item turned out to be Leila's cot mattress that was in a different part of the van.

Considering we had been told the delivery would be 'some time ' between 9am and 4pm, the early delivery was perfect.  Mum and I spent a few hours in the morning building garden furniture, but realised we needed a hammer for one item that we consequently left to one side.  At lunchtime we therefore decided we needed to do something different for a bit, so we walked up to Tia Supermarket to get another water, and then took a cab back to the large retail park and headed into Baneasa Shopping City where we planned to buy big household items from the Carrefour Hypermarket.

After lots of to-ing and fro-ing we eventually found somewhere to eat (the next day we realised the food hall was in the one direction we didn't try) and had a great lunch of Romanian goulash and bread.  In Carrefour we bought a microwave, toaster, kettle, and various other household things that we didn't or couldn't get in IKEA the previous day.  We took another taxi back to the house, piled the Carrefour shopping in a corner, and got back to building flat-pack furniture.  With our newly-acquired hammer we were able to finish all the garden furniture, and also have a good go at the stuff inside.  By the end of the day we had only 2 more things to build, but we called it quits at 7pm and headed back to the hotel.

Feeling like we deserved a treat, we showered and changed before taking a taxi to Lipscani, the name of a road downtown but ultiamtely the general name given to the Old Town.  We took a short stroll around some of the pedestrianised cobbled streets, felt a huge sense of 'this is the right place', and managed to grab a table at Hanul lui Manuc, an iconic inn dating back to the early nineteenth century that seems to be on every tourist's list.  The food was good and reasonably priced, and we generally had a great evening to round off two incredibly hard yet productive days.  We still had Thursday to go, though, so it was back in a taxi to the hotel for our final night before decamping to the house.