How can a single city support so many cool bookstores in 2021? I visited this one a couple of years ago, it was a very pleasant place to spend an hour browsing. The English section is surprisingly large. I bought a Murakami that I had not read.

Despite looking beaten down, overcrowded, messy, Bucharest is a surprisingly rich city - it produces about a third of Romania's GDP and its GDP/capita is significantly above the EU average. Book prices however are still sort of anchored to the national average => Bucharesters can afford books. Sadly, this is the case mostly in Bucharest and a few other large cities - outside of those there's hardly a bookstore (theater, cinema etc.) in sight.