Bucharest had, throughout its history, a remarkable habit: naming its streets exactly after what they looked like or what happened on them. No euphemisms, no diplomatic urban planning, no nomenclature committees weighing up sensitivities. If houses burned down on an alley, it was called The Fire. If... Read more
Train travel is gaining ground again among Romanians, especially on short and medium routes where road traffic has become a weekly ordeal. The new 2025–2026 Train Timetable, which came into force in December 2025, brought a 10% ticket price increase, but also some genuine time improvements on certai... Read more
Summer arrives, the air thickens, and on the platforms of STB stations people gather with a resignation that substitutes for routine. Bucharest's trams are, during the warm months of the year, a test of character — a combination of hot metal, sticky shoulders and patience negotiated by force. But no... Read more
May brings a kind of breathing room that other months don't quite manage: good light until 8:30 PM, warmth without the summer heat, and afternoons worth lingering in. Your child walks out of kindergarten at 5:00 PM and you still have three hours before dark — enough time for something real, not just... Read more
There is a brief window every year when Bucharest shows itself at its best. December arrives with its artificial lights, August with its characteristic emptiness and exhaustion, and May brings something else entirely — balanced temperatures and terraces that fill up naturally, without the strain of... Read more
On Calea Victoriei, the queue for ice cream is 170 years old. Around 1850, the street still went by the name Podul Mogoșoaiei, and the most sought-after spot in the city was a confectionery run by an Italian — Giovanni Flore, with his shop on the ground floor of the Hugues Hotel, in Piața Teatrului,... Read more
Bucharest in 1925 is a city that wants to forget the First World War as quickly as possible and become something greater than it has been — the streets are starting to look European, the cafés along Calea Victoriei fill with good society, and Greater Romania, freshly constituted in 1918, adds thousa... Read more
On May 1, 1886, around 90,000 people took to the streets of Chicago. It wasn't a parade — it was a strike. They were demanding a reduction of the working day from ten or sixteen hours to eight, and the mood was angry rather than festive. The days that followed brought deaths, arrests, and a trial th... Read more
Infertility affects between 10 and 15% of couples of reproductive age in Romania — a figure that puts the real scale of the problem into perspective. And while an IVF procedure was until recently considered a financial luxury accessible only to some, 2026 brings a different picture: three distinct f... Read more
Radu Ionescu had left Bucharest to study business in London. Seven years later, he came back a chef. The decision didn't take shape in a business plan, and it didn't arrive as some classic culinary epiphany — it came on a plane somewhere over Europe, on his way back to London after Christmas at home... Read more