Map of Bucharest - Where to find one and why you need one!

Are you looking for a map of Bucharest? The best place to find one for free is in the back of the what’s on guide, Bucharest in my pocket (in most ex-pat pubs, restaurants and hotels, as it is small and easy to carry around with you.

If you go to any metal booth selling bus tickets and abonoments (if they can be bothered - often they decide that foreigners take took long to explain to so lie glibly about not selling anything!), you can find a rather large, unwieldy map of Bucharest, which is very useful despite its size as it has all the bus and tram lines and numbers printed on it.

The place you most need a map of Bucharest is in the underground metro stations - a place famed for their complete absence! In London there are tube maps scattered all over the station so you can plan how to get from A to B.

In Romania, the first underground map you will see is on the modern trains. This means you have in theory navigated the almost nameless stations and worked out in which way you should now be traveling.

The good news is the modern trains have a map and changing sign on board and a clear intercom. The bad news comes if you need to go on a side line - the trains are old, covered in graffiti, the intercom is not clear and they have hard to use maps stuck on them.

If you jump onto a modern Bucharest bus, you will see it has a big screen showing your bus on a SAT Nav - which looks really cool and must have cost a fortune to install but is completely useless. The roads on it are tiny and as the computer is desperate to include as many side roads as possible, the name of the road keeps changing. I can't work out whom this is for - it is a crap system for tourists as it is not clear and the locals know where they are going already - or they use a taxi. To make a rubbish map system worse, every so often it switches over to showing you pictures of tropical islands and wonderful places in the sun - always with the label of the next stop on top of it!

I must admit to having got into finding and collecting maps of Bucharest - I found one from the turn of the century and shared it with my pupils. They have moved the river, and Bucharest continues to expand. To keep you on your toes and buying newer road maps, they keep adding and building more and more one-way systems. The theory being if you live on that street and drive up it the wrong way the police will not prosecute you - I hasten to add I am not convinced about this.

I once used my map to find an amazing and little used short cut between two major roads on the outskirts of town. My little car likes to think itself as a rugged 4 x 4, my wife, despite her bad back thinks she is a rally driver and I the generally confused navigator. I found a little road and the road just got worse and worse -it took us much longer to drive along this little white road on the map - locals looking in disbelief - than it would have to have kept on the major roads. So don't always believe there is a drivable road - even if you Romanian map tells you there is!

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