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.