Sept. 19-20: Biking the Banat back to Belgrade

[EK]:

Our view in Timisoara: a perfect little church with foliage growing from a gutter.

We biked two days across the Banat, a flat agricultural region once under the Austria-Hungarians but now divided between Romania, Serbia, and a bit of Hungary. Leaving Timisoara, we gleefully followed a bike path for many miles. The path goes clear to the border with Serbia, but we knew to get off the path before the border because we needed to get to an actual border crossing. The path follows the channelized Bega river and is used near Timisoara by bike and water taxi commuters and further out by farmers and recreational cyclists.

Bike path #1: Timisoara.

Bike path #2: Timisoara...

Taking photos while on a bike is not recommended.

Bike path #3: south of Timisoara along the banks of the Bega River. A little highway for bicycles. We heard about this on random blogs but you wouldn't know it existed otherwise... such is the mystery of riding in Romania. We found our way through a combination of google maps, a German app called Brouter.de, and witchcraft. 

Once off the path, we turned inland to ride to Foeni, near the border with Romania, and followed quiet, relentlessly flat roads to the border. We crossed the quiet border, leaving Romania on one side, then riding about a quarter mile, then entering Serbia on the other side. Whose side is the middle part?

We then biked some more flat road on the Serbian side. We remarked on the differences we saw: little towns in Serbia seem to have more stores and kiosks and parks - they are less like villages. Cars in Serbia are older and include a lot of old communist models.

The last few miles into Zrenjanin were on a separated bike path and we celebrated our day of bike paths. Zrenjanin is a small city with a pedestrian area and a restaurant with amazing traditional food where I ate until my stomach hurt. Our hosts at the hotel were a sweet couple who talked with us about the tourist options in Zrenjanin, including the hopes for a completed bike path from Timisoara. I think the region is amazing and the architecture is beautiful: lots of secession and neo-baroque and other Austrian Hapsburg-looking buildings, but with years of neglect. I think a tourism industry is possible but it will be niche.

Entering the city: Zrenjanin in all the languages...

Bike path #4: riding into Zrenjanin.

Zrenjanin was surprisingly pretty. Just a little gem of a town.

We left Zrenjanin on the 20th for our final big ride. To sum up: flat, flat, windy, and flat. Riding over curbs and railroad tracks became exciting as we passed industrial agriculture and little towns arranged in perfect grids. It was meditative but grinding, our second 60-mile day across the plain. In a tiny town along the way, we stopped to get water and snacks and a young woman nearby asked us what we were doing... in perfect American English. We ended up talking with her for a bit; she had moved there with her family and lived in this little town for years.

The scenery was approximately like this for many miles.

Approaching a strange car/train bridge. 

We reached the industrial suburb to Belgrade called Panchevo, where we met up with the embankment that we had initially taken from Belgrade. I was thrilled to recognize the buildings and the signs and the bridges. We decided to ride across the "awful" Panchevo bridge, figuring it could not be that bad (and we had no intention of riding the extra 20 miles to get around the bridge) so we hopped onto the bridge sidewalk. We chose to go down the wrong side, facing traffic, because... I don't know why. It was easier to find the sidewalk on that side. Getting onto the bridge was a bit o a concrete spaghetti mess and I figured that it wasn't that bad as long as we could stay on the sidewalk. I continued to think it wasn't so bad right up to the moment that the sidewalk ended and we were faced with oncoming traffic going crazy fast and no shoulder.

But we were across the river and we could see a dirt road below, paralleling the bridge. We navigated our bikes down the embankment to the road and biked into the city. We rode inelegantly, “becoming pedestrians” and getting off our bikes whenever there was confusion and terrible intersections. Whoever was in front would say "let's be pedestrians" and get off their bike and start walking beside it.

That night, we went to dinner and to a music club with Draško and Igor, staying out too late and inhaling too much smoke, but thoroughly enjoying Draško’s enthusiastic jokes and anecdotes of Serbian life. It felt comfortable to be back in Belgrade and not needing a map to find the center. Approaching Belgrade I felt this accomplishment - it’s just a bike ride, but this has been a good hard bike ride. 812 miles altogether.

When we arrived in Timisoara we were greeted by Igor and Drasko and went out to a club. For this photo, we told Drasko to make a scary face.

Sept. 18: Timişoara might be our favorite Romanian city

[ES]
We woke up happy to have another day to explore Timişoara by foot. The expanse of pedestrian area in Timişoara is just amazing - far greater than any other city (including Amsterdam, Ljubljana and Padua. People are just walking, biking, and pushing strollers everywhere contentedly through the three linked squares and many side streets. There is also a bike share system that appears to get good use. Timişoara is dynamic and beautiful and also crumbling. It will be the European Capital of Culture in 2021 and the city appears to be investing in renovations throughout the center. While renovations are certainly in progress I like that part of the city’s charm includes its imperfection and opportunity (kind of like Eureka).

Synagogue in Timisoara.

Next to the synagogue: a four-lane pedestrian/cycling setup!

Stately, beautiful Timisoara.

Erin's favorite place.

We started out our morning walking to the Fresh Market where we picked up vegetables for our evening salad meal, corn and walnuts. We have arrived just at the cusp of walnut season as even though we have seen people along the road side collecting walnuts these are the first we have seen for sale. There are also more bookstores here, including ones with a good collection of Euro board games.

In our several weeks in Europe we had not once been in an art museum - so fortunately we had occasion to visit Timişoara’s. There was a modern art guest exhibit featuring several dozen female artists. We enjoyed seeing some really cool and weird art intermixed with Romanian gothic art and European baroque. The museum did a good job utilizing there old building with little alcoves different places and the old cellar.

Inside the art museum.

A building being repaired.

Pedestrian infrastructure.

Power lines, semi-secured.

Side note: I keep forgetting to mention but we have seen labeled driving school cars everywhere in every Romanian town of a certain size. Romanian youth must be getting good driving education. Let’s just hope they don’t turn into the bad Audi drivers.

Timisoara had some good bicycling infrastructure, and the occasional mis-step.

We have been trying to find small local breweries here in Romania whenever we can. In Sibiu we tried a couple craft beers from Sibiu and Bucharest, a couple of which were deliciously hoppy. There are plenty of large scale lagers made in Romania, but all are now owned by Heineken or Miller-Coors. At least they are still brewed here. An establishment will have one of these brands on tap and then have bottles German beer. We had a lovely long walk further out from the center to try to find the Beer Clinic Brewery but we got to the spot and they had moved - google maps did not have that updated;) Fortunately Erin looked up the best place to get local beers and found Vinolteca. It is like Dead Reckoning in Arcata with a vinyl music shop plus delicious beers - but in bottles. The owner was super great and indulged our questions about Romanian music, played us records, and talked with us about beer. His son (whom we met as we were leaving) runs one of the local breweries, Bereta, which we thought had the best New England-style IPA. From our conversations we gleaned that Timişoara’s history as a regional capital during the Habsburg Empire and a place where many different people have lived together has influenced it’s cosmopolitan and revolutionary nature.

Sept. 16-17: Out of the mountains and onto the Banat

Leaving our lovely guest house was a process of goodbyes and farewells.

Me and the puppy. I didn't take this photo, which you can tell because there is some post-processing going on. 

[EK]:

Yesterday (Sept. 16) we rode from Breb up and up to the top of the hills, to a resort town called Cavnic, complete with ski areas. The air was chill and the back side of the hills were shaded by trees. Since it was a Sunday, and probably not the height of tourist season, the traffic was light and once we crested the 9-mile climb, we coasted down for miles to the little town of Surdesti.

In Surdesti, we visited a Greco-Catholic church with a young woman inside collecting the entrance fee. Usually the people at the churches have been older and have spoken no English but she was gracious and patient with our questions. She explained that the Greco-Catholics in Romania shared most beliefs with Roman Catholics, but made the sign of the cross like Orthodox (right shoulder then left shoulder). She also said that most the churches in Maramures were Greco-Catholic before communism (before World War II) but that they had been forced to switch to Orthodoxy. Some had switched back but many remained Orthodox after the fall of communism, in her view because the two were similar enough that the parishioners did not really care or mind. As we left, she went out with us to a walnut tree and explained that the very fresh nuts (that had fallen within the day) had a different taste if you peeled away the skin under the shell. She was right. They were sweeter than other walnuts!

Surdesti's Greco-Roman Church, whose walnut trees were very good.

Inside the church, the vibrant, amazing frescos told vivid but unfamiliar stories.

It seems a bit rude to play your angel horn so close to some dude's ear.

We pedaled on to Baia Mare, where we bought train tickets for the 00:45 overnight train, arriving in Timisoara the next morning. In the meantime, we got a hotel room for the shower and headed into town... like Craiova and Bistrita before it, Baia Mare was a wonderful surprise. It was full of old buildings in various states of disrepair, and people were out walking and talking and sitting in cafes. There was a Hungarian festival happening in the center, with kids in costume singing, Hungarian street food, and booths with folk art.

The Hungarian minority is vibrantly represented in many places in Romania, and there are reminders of Germans (in multi-lingual town name signs and interpretive materials) and memorials and old synagogues for the Jewish population. But one minority group that has been conspicuously absent in terms of cultural or material representation is the Roma (still called “gypsies” here). We have seen distinctively Roma people, generally darker-skinned and wearing traditional clothing (especially the women). I think we are seeing only a fraction of the population as many are undoubtedly integrated with the broader Romanian population. But the Roma we can recognize have been incredibly poor, and when we ask other Romanians about them, many have been openly biased. We have heard them called “thieves” and described as “having 10 or 12 children that they cannot feed.” We haven’t been able to speak with any identifiable Roma, and their lack of representation in any museum, interpretive sign, or memorial, is striking. I would like to read more about them - even the Romanian history I’ve been reading barely mentions them except to say they were killed in concentration camps during WWII.

Our midnight to 7 am train ride to Timisoara was happily uneventful; per usual there was no place for bicycles and also typical of our train rides here, the train consisted of only two cars. But we arrived in Timisoara and were able to check in at 8 am, and we immediately went about doing laundry and passing out on the couch for an hour.

On the train: this arrangement worked most of the night, though in the morning people started filling up the seats and our bikes were moved by a group of chattering men and a train employee, over by an entryway. People on the trains were mostly kind but confused by us.  

Timisoara is a lovely university city with bike lanes and a huge pedestrian center that covers block after block and makes the center feel quiet. We have been wandering the streets, admiring the many early 20th-c. art nouveau buildings that were designed by Austro-Hungarians and make the place feel like Western Europe. The 1989 revolution against Ceausescu started in Timisoara and it has the reputation of being forward thinking. In our time in Romania we have seen not a single portrait of Ceausescu until we went to a kitschy cafe/display of communism called the Communist Consumer museum. There, Ceausescu was displayed in a mocking way, situated behind piggy banks for donations to maintain the un-polished, almost mocking presentation of the absurdity of Romanian communism. In the history I’m reading, it is clear that Romanians showed very little support for communism, even among the peasant parties and left-wing intellectuals. We have seen little evidence that it is missed, other than one young man commenting that things were “better” under Ceausescu.

This bike rack/sculpture reflected Timisoara's generally pro-bicycle culture.

Dreamy art nouveau buildings along Victory Square.

The Romanian National Opera House also housed the German State Theater, a striking display of multiculturalism in Timisoara.

The barely-visible statue perched in front depicts Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf. A clear reference to the supposedly continuous lineage of Romanians from Romans.

Ceausescu, The Unadmired.

Random note: the roundabouts in Romania are crazy. All the rules we thought we knew have been upended; cars seem to suddenly stop in the roundabout to let in other cars, creating a jerky motion that I thought roundabouts were supposed to prevent. Another random note: we have decided that Audi drivers are the absolute worst. Rude and too fast and often just stupid. Any time we see a bad driver now one of us will shout out “Audi driver” and more often than not we are right!