Day Three and a Half: Buttered Up

Still loving Bucharest!  Thomas (from Maine), Feng (from Singapore), Dalma (from Hungary), and Mujgan (the only non-Princeton student, from Turkey) went to dinner at a place that, based on the menu, looked pretty good and pretty cheap.  It turned out to be a very nice traditional Romanian place-so I guess Romanian food is a thing-but the prices were still low.  We all had a great meal.  Thomas and Feng tried to split a plate of meat and learned that it was much more than they had bargained for.  I didn't try it, of course, but they both said it was extremely dense, and they ended up eating less than half of it between them.  In Thomas' defense, he had just eaten a large soup-like-thing in a bread bowl (without using cutlery, he would want me to point out) and in Feng's defense, he got zero help from Thomas.  Dalma was about to try some but, upon smelling it, she quickly withdrew in disgust from what was apparently tripe.  I enjoyed my boiled potatoes and polenta, and I was proud of myself for getting some great, authentic local food for eight lei.  My drink, an authentic local (I'm assuming) Romanian beer, was also surprisingly good and only eight lei.  The bread and butter were decent, as was the live entertainment, a five-piece band playing traditional Romanian music, so overall I though the evening was a success.  Then the check came.  We all handed Thomas our money because he's a math major and therefore the only one we could trust to make sure it all added up.  We kept coming up short even though we all thought we had paid for everything we ordered, but then somebody noticed there were two items on the bill for which nobody had paid.  We were stumped until Dalma and Mujgan realized that one of the words was similar to another language's word for butter, and that's when it hit us.  The butter I had asked for had cost eight and a half lei, more than the rest of my food combined.  Well, not exactly-turns out the bread was the other mystery item on the bill.  That cost five lei.  We hadn't even asked for the bread, and I had assumed the butter was complimentary as well, but that just shows how much I know.  I disliked the idea of paying for bread and butter, but I disliked the idea of arguing with a Romanian wait staff even more, so I decided to throw in the extra ten lei or so and tell myself I was paying for the concert.
It was funny at the time, I swear.  We laughed about it half the way back to the hotel, then we laughed about how we're supposed to get on the bus at 7 tomorrow for our trip to Constanta.