Feedback about holidays in Romania

Written: 12 august 2008
Travel time: 12 — 19 july 2008
Who does the author recommend the hotel to?: For a relaxing holiday
Your rating of this hotel:
6.0
from 10
Hotel ratings by criteria:
Rooms: 8.0
Service: 4.0
Cleanliness: 3.0
Food: 7.0
Amenities: 7.0
We rested in this hotel in the first half of July 2008. The travel agency recommended this hotel as the best in all of Euphoria Nord. Here's what actually happened.
Mostly hotels in Euphoria Nord are 2-3 stars, without any "services" and other bells and whistles, because. are designed for their unpretentious Romanian public, and not for foreign tourists. The Europe hotel has its own swimming pool. It would seem, how can a resort hotel be without a pool? How else can! At least the other hotels that we saw in this resort did not have a pool anywhere, but they are all located on busy streets, where day and night there is no crowding from a wild amount of people. Therefore, if you want to relax with relative comfort, it is better to settle in Europe. Judging by the solid foreign cars, wealthy Romanians stop here. In addition, the hotel hosts all sorts of international seminars, conferences, etc. , which, in general, also emphasizes the special status of Europe among other "five-story buildings". Europe also, unlike other hotels, has at least its own fenced off area, where outsiders do not go, with flower beds. A security guard roams the area. A trifle, but still nice.
For the ladies who are confused by the beauty, there is a SPA center here. Prices for procedures are astronomical. Locals and Europeans do not go to this center. Money is spent only by our fools. For example, 30 lei (1 lei is about 10 rubles) is taken for 2 hours of a pool with thermal water. Water is hauled into the pool from a nearby lake. Therefore, if you walk for 5 minutes, you can swim all day in the same water for 7 lei and for the same money you can smear yourself all day in the same therapeutic mud, which is smeared on the back with a thin layer in the SPA for some money. Nimble Romanians come to the lake for the whole day, swim, smear themselves in the mud, sunbathe naked. And economical Europeans do the same for nothing outside the baths. I must say that the water in the lake is much better than in the sea. Swimming is very pleasant. The lake is clean, there are no ice cream wrappers, plastic glasses, algae and orphan children floating around you.

The sea was cold, swimming was rare. Walk five minutes to the sea. The beach is urban, and therefore people come here from all over Romania. Especially crowded on weekends. On the territory of the beach there is a dedicated fenced area especially for residents of Europe. Here, upon presentation of a hotel guest card, you can get a free mattress.
One of the advantages of the hotel is that all the windows overlook the sea. The sea and the surroundings are clearly visible. The higher the floor, the better the view.
Now about the cons of the hotel. There are no animations, evening programs and entertainment, except for live music during dinner. Songs are sung from evening to evening the same. At the pool, the same disc was spun ten times during the day. Multiply this by 14 days of rest. It's funny that another disc was played on the beach, but also ten times a day, and all this, it seems, from the beginning of the swimming season. On the beach there are rides and other entertainment. Music from the beach rumbles until one in the morning. If you close the balcony door, it is stuffy. The air conditioner works poorly. If you open the door, then you need to arm yourself with a newspaper and fight off mosquitoes.
The food in the restaurant is poor. Potatoes in all variants (baked, fried, boiled... ) were fed all 2 weeks. They gave rice on separate days. Moreover, the side dish is completely tasteless. The same soup was eaten for 2-3 days. The same goes for baking. Twice a week sour cream was added to the soup. Almost all salads are not seasoned with anything, just chopped vegetables. By the way, there was nothing to dilute the salads to taste, there was no tomato paste, no sunflower oil, nothing else. Kiwis, oranges, apples were laid out from fruits every two days. If it's late to come for dinner, then there's nothing left to do. By the way, fruit is sold outside the hotel at prices comparable to those in Moscow. We had lunch once. So, lunch is twice as good as dinner. It seems that for dinner they finish what they did not eat at lunch.

In the hotel restaurant, the waiters communicate exclusively in Romanian, they simply do not understand other languages. No one speaks Russian in the hotel, even at the reception. But at the reception you can at least simply explain yourself in English or German. The other servants only mutter in Romanian. No one, of course, requires staff to know all European languages. But the hotel has no inscriptions even in international English, let alone Russian. All advertising materials are also in Romanian. So it is difficult to explain to any foreigner in the hotel. There are not many Russian tourists in the hotel, but there will be 10 people.
The swimming pool is too small for the number of hotel guests. Places must be occupied until 9-00, then there is nowhere to settle down. The pool closes at 18-00, about which people begin to drip on the brains in half an hour. The pool is deep enough, so almost everyone swims only on one side, where it is shallow. From this, the number of people per square meter exceeds reasonable limits. Sun loungers and towels are provided free of charge by the pool. There is a bar on the territory of the pool. The prices are unmeasured. Selling a hamburger for the price of a good lunch. Outside the hotel, you can take a three-course lunch for 12-15 lei (i. e. eat within 150 rubles per person). Lots of self service eateries. They are very popular. At lunchtime, it is difficult to find a free place. As such, there are practically no restaurants. But everywhere there are fast food enterprises, pastries, pizza, sausages, etc. The menu is everywhere only in Romanian. In other languages ​ ​ (including Russian) nowhere. Outside the hotel any foreign languages ​ ​ are not understood at all. If you want to buy something, you just need to poke your finger.
A special conversation about cleaning the room. For such cleaning, there was never a desire to leave a tip for the maid, even out of politeness. Judge for yourself. In our room, a cobweb hung over the wall sconces for 2 weeks. The same web was over the balcony door. We deliberately did not shake it off ourselves, in order to see for the sake of the experiment on what day it would be noticed. It seems that the web has been hanging since the beginning of the season. In fact, for catching mosquitoes and various insects, the web is an indispensable thing. So it looks like it's not being filmed on purpose. Some black beetles regularly strove to climb onto the balcony. They were crushed more than once. But interestingly, the corpses of parasites were never removed during harvesting. We thought it was just us. Nothing like this. Neighbors also waged a tough fight against insects, and the defeated beetles decorated the balcony tiles with dark smeared spots. The maids don't bother at all. The crumbs from the cookies under the table near the basket also lay for more than one day. So for a long time they did not visit our room with a vacuum cleaner. The glasses were never washed. But the maid nicely smoked on our balcony, and left the cigarette butts in our own uncleaned ashtray. On the third day, the ashtray was already full, and we carried it into the sink. And here the maid finally noticed how much she had smoked. Of course, one could complain to the reception, but there were clearly not enough English words to describe all this disgrace, and you can’t explain the essence of the complaint with a strong Russian obscenity. In addition, we noticed that in the lobby of the hotel, exactly the same careless cleaning. That is, no one rubs a rag with a rag to the holes and does not blow off grains of sand. Once we went to the lake in the morning, we saw a huge loaf lying in front of the main entrance. We return in the evening for dinner, and the bun is still lying around. Nobody cares about her. And here's another example. Come to dinner in the forefront, take a table, and see under the table the remnants of the food that was given for breakfast, fallen pieces, crumbs, forks, etc. In short, the restaurant is not swept between breakfast and dinner. In the corridor on our floor, plaster and whitish sand from the beach were finely scattered. Moreover, we noticed this on the day of arrival. On the day of departure, we sadly stated that the vacuum cleaner had not passed through here. So it is useless to make demands on the cleaning of a single room.
There are several shops in the hotel lobby in the evenings. However, the same rags could be bought outside the hotel three times cheaper. Turkish junk and rags - heaps. All this at ridiculous prices. There are no boutiques and other stylish establishments in the resort. The streets are filled with shops with consumer goods and cheap souvenirs. Eateries at every turn. Romanians have a simple rest: they walk the streets back and forth and just stare around. Euphoria is not the place where the refined public rests. Therefore, leave at home haute couture evening gowns and diamonds. Here it will not be appreciated and will not be understood. But in gypsy they will poke a finger. It has its own fashion: sundresses in multi-colored stripes “under the mattress” and dressing gowns with daisies. We can't find such people in Russia even in the general store. If you do not want to kill shoes on potholes, then do not take sandals and stilettos.

But in order to buy something, you must first change money. They take only Romanian lei, euros and other currencies are not accepted. So, in the hotel itself they do not deal with foreign exchange transactions and do not change money. We walked for an hour, ran around half the city before changing money. There are only 3 exchangers for the entire resort. The owner is apparently alone, because. the course is the same and it makes no sense to look for where it is better. We went to other hotels about the exchange of money. Currency is not changed in any hotel.
Being a foreign tourist in Romania is generally difficult. If in other countries of the world shops are littered with guidebooks, maps, postcards, then there is nothing of this in Euphoria. You will not find books about Romania and its beauty in any European language. In popular languages ​ ​ like English, there is only literature about the national hero Dracula.
Hotel Europe has been awarded 4 stars. Judge for yourself whether he pulls on the "four". But I want to note that if all representatives of the tourist industry unanimously say that this is the best hotel, then what is happening in other hotels of the resort is even scary to imagine. In my opinion, Europe is the only hotel in Euphoria where foreigners can still be accommodated. Other hotels operate on the principle of "there would be a roof over your head. " I'm not talking about other resort hotels at all. Looking for an exchange office, we went to several other neighboring hotels - it's just "put out the lights. " Overgrown with grass road to the building and a littered area with a building from the time of the socialist brotherhood.
In general, if you are a discerning tourist, accustomed to first-class service and who loves to build maids, then you better not go to Romania.
Translated automatically from Russian. View original
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