A week or so late, here is Bucharest Life’s Review of the Year that was 2009.
January
A new government, led by Traian Basescu and Little Emil Boc, installed following parliamentary elections at the end of 2008, introduces, amongst other moves of sheer political genius, a compulsory profit tax for small companies (even those that lose money) [...]
Posts Tagged ‘CFR’
Bucharest Life 2009
While its trains continue to go backwards, Romanian railways (CFR) takes a giant leap forwards
A while ago we reported how we had thought we must be stupid, for we could not find the ‘buy tickets online now’ button on the website of Romanian railways, CFR. As it turned out, there wasn’t one.
Now, however, news reaches us that you can indeed buy Romanian train tickets online.
Oh yes. Right here, in [...]
Romania goes off the rails
Monday’s railway accident in south-western Romania, in which an acelerat train derailed while travelling at 100km, injuring 15 people but miraculoulsy causing no fatalities, has quickly become the country’s most discussed story, with many people – political commentators and ordinary citizens alike – seeing it as the embodiment of all that has gone wrong in [...]
Number crunching with Romanian railways
The Bucharest Life kids are off to the countryside this week for their annual peasant experience. We went to get their train tickets this morning, one each for them and one for Bucharest Life’s mother-in-law.
Not for the first time this month, we turned up at the CFR agency on Strada Brezoianu and were left gobsmacked. [...]
Romanian trains are slow and useless
We’d not been on a Romanian train for well over a year before last Friday, when we headed off to Brasov for a research trip ahead of the imminent publication of a Brasov In Your Pocket Mini-Guide. In that time Romanian railways (CFR) appears to have gone backwards.
First the good.
The trains themselves are unquestionably far [...]