Hexagonal Bed

You may think a hexagonal bed refers to a bed of lovely flowers. Or perhaps a garden full of herbs and fruits and vegetable (obviously in beds.) But what if I told you the hexagonal bed mentioned in the title is the most everyday usage of the word bed?

Alrica and I are in Bucharest, Romania. There is some unbelievable architecture here. Some of the buildings are ornate in the extreme. I've been awed by churches, universities, and banks.

The CEC Bank Palace (built to house a bank on the site of a former monastery)

But I've also been confused by the lack of sense to some places. For example, Alrica and I visited a mall and found ourselves in a long, twisting hallway with no shops and no obvious way to get to where the shops might be. Plus there are a variety of shops on the ground floor of the mall which don't have entrances into the mall. You can only get to them from the street.

Biserica Zlătari

We did head to Therme Bucuresti. This is a huge water park which includes a gigantic botanical garden. You are literally wading through the pools under the canopy of the trees. The "Therme" in the name refers to the fact that the water is heated by geothermal energy. But what's weird is that the water isn't very hot. It is heated, it isn't cold. But it is cooler than bathwater. Even in the separated tubs in which bubbles sometimes blow, ones that look like they would be hot tubs, the temperature isn't any higher than the big pools.

Main Entrance of Therme Bucuresti

Therme has three parts, Galaxy, Palms, and Elysium. The Galaxy is the base ticket. This area has pools, water slides, saunas, water massage beds, kiddie playground areas, and places you can buy food and drinks. Palms is more pools with separated tubs (I would say hot tubs, but they aren't hot) and a lazy river. There are more pool bars to buy drinks here. This is the section under the botanical garden. If you have a ticket to Palms, you may also use Galaxy. The most expensive ticket is for Elysium which includes spa treatments and massages. Again, if you buy a ticket for Elysium, you may also use Palms and Galaxy. We did the morning special for Palms. You must arrive before 11:30 and you can stay for up to 3.5 hours.

It was okay. If you are very into water parks, you might love it more than I did. Palms was calm, I suppose, but I found it dull. Galaxy was more fun, and it has some really cool water slides. I think Alrica enjoyed Palms more than I did and I enjoyed Galaxy more than she did. I guess that demonstrates who the inner child (and outer child) is in our marriage.

Pork stew (red), polenta (yellow), fried egg (egg looking), and cow's milk cheese (white)

We have eaten a lot of fantastic food in Bucharest. One traditional food is polenta (which is like super finely chopped grits.) They are also huge on pork here. We went to a traditional Romanian restaurant last night where Alrica had pork stew with sausage and polenta. I had a chicken and mushroom dish with polenta. Both of them were exceptional. The night before we had pizza. You know how most pizza places have similar toppings, but then there are the few and far between where the toppings are things you never dreamed of? Well, we went to one of those. We ordered the M&M (which does not have M&Ms on it.) It is called that because two of the toppings are mustard and mozzarella. It comes with a sauce, and ours was a honey mustard sauce. What was particularly notable was the crust, which was heavy. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but it is a heavy, moist, full of humidity crust. For a beverage, I had a lemonade called PinPop Lemonade. One of the ingredients is popcorn syrup. Don't ask me what popcorn syrup is. I don't know. But it was delicious. There was a flavor of popcorn that mixed wonderfully with the sourness of the lemon and the simple syrup.

Bucharest is an interesting city. In some ways, it is very American, quite a big focus on cars and roads. Though it does have buses, cable cars, and a metro, so there is some public transportation. You can't get everywhere on it, but a lot of places. We were able to take a bus to a bus to the Therme. But it was over an hour to get there.

In other ways, Bucharest is very European. It treasures its old and ornate architecture. There is a lot of English spoken, especially in restaurants and other tourist friendly industries. But they very much hold on to Romanian. And Romanian is an interesting exceptional language in the region. It is a romance language in a part of Europe that is isolated from other romance languages. When I look at the signs, I can see so much familiarity with words I know from French or Spanish. Of course, I still don't know what people are saying.

I couldn't get a picture of Alrica and I playing on this seesaw, but we did play!

Bucharest is also very much its own place. One thing that is exceptionally popular here are walk up windows. You know how in the States we have drive thru windows at many restaurants. Here, they have some similar for pedestrians. You stand on the sidewalk and order and pay and then get your goods. In some such restaurants, there is nowhere inside to eat. In fact, you can't even get inside some of them. You find somewhere nearby to sit, and you eat your food alfresco. (Or you take it home.)

Now, after all that, I hear you asking about the bed. What is with the hexagonal bed?

The place that Alrica and I are staying is small. It's not a hotel, but like a "one bedroom" place on one of the major streets. But it isn't really one bedroom. It's more like studio with nook. And its small. By small, I don't just mean it lacks square footage (which is true) but that it seems designed for smaller people.

The floor level of the apartment is half a level down from the street. As I sit writing this, my chin is at about the level of the sidewalk outside. To get in, you enter a door that requires that you duck. Neither Alrica nor I could fit through that door if we stood up straight. You come down five steps and enter an itty bitty living room with a kitchen off of the far end. Turning a corner at the kitchen, you find the bathroom, which has the only other door in the apartment. There is no dining room, nor any table on which to eat. There is a very low, small couch in the living room. You go to sit and you are amazed that your butt is still going down for as long as it is. You expect to hit a cushion before you do. There is also a desk in the living room. The desk is regular height. But the desk chair, well, it is another one of those you-think-you-will-be-seated-before-you-are-seated experiences. Short chair and regular sized desk makes things a bit awkward.

But wait. I didn't mention sleep. Where does one sleep? Just beyond the kitchen, there is an opening in the wall (but no door) with a curtain over it. This leads to an alcove. The alcove is pentagonal in shape. And in it, taking up almost all of the space, is the mattress. The mattress is not pentagonal, it is hexagonal. But it is not a regular hexagon. For non-mathematicians, a regular hexagon is one in which all sides are the same length and all angles are the same measure. Like a honeycomb. But this is no honeycomb.

Imagine a rectangular bed where you would sleep with your head to the north and your feet to the south. Now imagine that the northeast corner and the southeast corner were both cut off. (They have to be, because the walls come together.) So if you are of average height and sleeping on the west end of the bed, it's no issues. Here it is the length of a bed. But if you are the average height person assigned to the east end of the bed, well, it's not the length of you.

You have a few options. You could sleep with your knees bent and legs tucked up under you. You could sleep in a sitting position (though that would be tricky for a variety of reasons.) Or you can sleep diagonally. You can't just sleep north to south.

I will let you guess which of the two, Alrica or I, got the regular western part of the bed, and which of the two got the potentially less desirable eastern part of the bed. We will just say, that lucky duck who gets to experience the east side is sleeping with his head (don't read too much into that pronoun, even though it is written in bold print) very close to the western sider's head, and his feet (you can read as much as you want to into that pronoun) much further away from the western sider's feet. The two bodies are definitively not parallel. From experience, (though I'm not saying whose experience,) it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to find just the right angle at which no feet are slapping walls and no heads are slapping walls. But it can be done. (Now add the challenge of sharing one blanket and the experience is fully described.)

Part of travel is flexibility. I meant that more in being willing to make adjustments. Roll with it. Though I suppose in the case of the hexagonal bed, you need the other kind, the body contorting form of flexibility too.