Bucharest

Climate

Bucharest, like most of Romania, has a temperate-continental climate with hot summers and cold winters. This region of Romania gets all four seasons, although spring is brief and falls mainly in April. The average high daily temperature in summer is about 29ºC and in winter about 2ºC. It can get really hot and dry during the summer 40ºC and really cold during the winter -20ºC, even though temperatures below -12ºC are extremely rare. Best time to visit is April through June, September through October and early December.

Language

The official language is Romanian, a Romance language which claims to be the closest currently-spoken relative to Ancient Latin, but contains around 20% of loan words from Slavonic languages. Most younger educated people will speak English reasonably well and will likely be proficient in one or more second Romance languages; most educated people born before about 1970 will speak French, Spanish or Italian reasonably well. The Roma people speak their native Romany, as well as Romanian, and sometimes English as well. Beyond that, as in any major city, there will be a smattering of other languages like Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Hungarian.

Time

Bucharest is in the Eastern European time zone UTC+2, with a DST of UTC+3 from April to October.