My mornings start with an alarm that rings too early and that small slice of silence between apartment blocks, just before traffic wakes up. I take the stairs with my laptop in my backpack, pass the sign on the landing—“please don’t leave bikes in the hallway”—and remind myself (again) to fix the light on my saddle. Bucharest teaches you fast that the minutes between two stations are a kind of currency: you trade them for sleep, grades, friends, or a four-hour shift.

I lived first in Regie, in that room that smelled like fresh paint in early October and like stuffed cabbage after exams. It did its job: close to classes, close to friends, close to a river of cheap coffee. Then I moved “into a rental,” two stops away, a studio with furniture from three eras but a metro at the corner. It’s a strange upgrade: more quiet, more responsibility, more bills. Teach me, Bucharest, how to read HOA printouts, call the building manager, note the meter readings, and not forget to renew my integrated transit pass.

Classes swing between creaky-seat lecture halls and labs you only catch if you move quickly. Libraries are the city’s lungs: at BCU you can always find a spot if you arrive before 10, and at the National Library you discover the light that makes studying easy—plus the need for an extra sweater. Between lectures, the faculty steps become a meeting point for project plans, stories, and quick negotiations about who brings the cables and who shows up with the power strip.

My daily routes have changed a few times. When I catch M2 at Victoriei, it feels like I’ve joined a navigable river. When I end up on M4, I change at Jiului and accept the five minutes that vanish without drama: headphones out, check the seminar group chat, take a breath. On rainy days I take a tram just because the city looks like film through the window—41 if I’m lucky, otherwise whatever comes first, to somewhere near where I need to be.

Food writes its own chapter. You quickly learn where a decent soup is served at lunch, which corner sells pretzels still warm, and what a “menu of the day” looks like when it actually holds you till evening. Sometimes you shop at 10 p.m. with a list that says: pasta, sauce, oats, paper. Other times you cook for three friends in the big pot of the apartment while a lab project sits open on the table next to a dried-out marker.

Money is an ongoing negotiation between “want” and “have.” Rent, transport, the coffee without which the paper won’t get done, a theater ticket now and then, a film festival, books that don’t exist as PDFs. Many of us work a few hours a day: call centers, content, event gigs, tutoring. The schedule isn’t always kind, but the city has enough shortcuts to tie things together. Catching the last metro at 23:00 becomes a ritual—miss it once and you’ll set a phone reminder forever.

Friendships grow from small things: a shared outlet in a seminar, a last-minute PDF, a taxi split after an evening class, two hours in an empty room rehearsing a presentation. Bucharest isn’t “a city of contrasts”—that cliché says nothing now. It’s more like a Venn diagram of overlapping lives: Lit students who discover a good study room at Politehnica, Automation folks drinking coffee in the Architecture courtyard, someone from Medicine coming to an engineering lab for a sensor. And all of it, somehow, converges at a small table that fits four people and one laptop.

In autumn, the city fills with festivals, projectors, markets. You won’t tick them all off—and you don’t have to. One good outdoor movie, an indie show in a room that’s too small, a concert in a basement that smells of damp wood—those are the ones that stick. In winter you’ll learn the shortest path from the metro to your building, on the side with better light and less ice. Spring brings that end-of-year sprint: projects, portfolios, exams. In summer the city thins out, and if you stay, you’ll feel it breathe differently.

I’ve had bad days. A broken elevator, a neighbor angry about bikes, a router that restarts in the middle of an online seminar, a professor who moves the class two minutes before it starts and you’re on the wrong metro line. And I’ve had days when everything lines up: the project works, you snagged a seat at the library, your teammates are on the same page, and you catch both the perfect tram and an orange sunset on the river.

If I had to give three tips to a younger me just arriving in Bucharest:

— Make your own map, not a tourist one. Note the grocery store open late, the café where outlets actually work, the quiet terrace where you can rewrite a chapter.
 — Keep close the people who reply on time. And be the person who replies—respect for someone else’s time is gold in this city.
 — Don’t try to grab everything. Pick two things you want to do well this semester and stick to them. The rest will come once you learn to say “no” without guilt.

Being a student in Bucharest in 2025 means always moving, but not for the sake of running. It means sketching your own city between one station and the next, choosing the people worth sharing an extension cord and a bowl of pasta with, learning to keep your balance in a crowded carriage. It’s not perfect and there’s no point mythologizing it. But on a good day—when you’ve found your spot in the library, your desktop is in order, and someone calls to say “looks like the project will fly”—Bucharest gives you that rare feeling that you’re exactly where you should be.