In May, flying in the face of what the rest of the civilised world is up to, Romania actually softened its existing anti-smoking rules. In fact, to all intents and purposes, there will soon be no more anti-smoking rules in Romania. This Bucharest Life post – written in jest last year – could well become sound advice for the Romanian Ministry of Tourism.

This really is the Smoking Section of Europe.

So what exactly happened in May?

Simple. The parliamentary committee tasked with finalising the wording of tough new anti-smoking legislation threw the law out of the window and came up with something completely different. Kind of.

You see, while smoking will – as planned – now be theoretically outlawed in all public spaces (that’s the bit of the law which they will send to the EU), the owners of those public spaces will now be able to override the law and decide for themselves if a place is to be designated smoking or non-smoking.

If a place decides to designate itself as a smoking venue (and let’s face it, they all will) under the new law it will not even have to have a non-smoking section.

In our listings, we have used non-smoking symbols carefully. Basically, unless a venue has designated itself as totally non-smoking, then you should consider it a smoking venue. That does not mean there will not be a non-smoking section, but you should expect separation of the two areas to be rudimentary at best.