Timisoara March 2017

It doesn’t feel quite right putting together any kind of review for a city in which I spent less than 24 hours but I thought I would try and at least throw some words together about the Romanian city of Timisoara, and just let the pictures do the rest.

Our arrival into the city couldn’t have been any more stressful and we would have probably been kicked off a train into the bleak Romanian countryside for not purchasing our tickets correctly had it not been for the intervention of a kind young couple.

We eventually arrived nonetheless and eventually navigated our way from the city’s main train station into the city centre which more than 300,000 call home.

After a much-needed catch-up sleep we hit the streets and enjoyed a few hours browsing the student city dominated by the Timisoara Orthodox Cathedral and smaller St George’s Cathedral.

Timisoara is spotlessly clean and feels like a pretty relaxing place to call home with its slow pace of life.

Students sit around chatting and sipping coffee while locals casually go about their day to day lives.

The city is strikingly beautiful with lots of wide open spaces and is the historic capital of the region of Banat. Much like Belgrade, where we had come from, it was refreshingly cheap.

We enjoyed a few hours sitting and strolling in the sun and the time in Timisoara, a former European Capital of Culture, almost felt like a city detox after Belgrade’s high octane hustle and bustle.

Timisoara has also played an important part politically having in the late 1980s seen the birth of a country-wide demonstration which led to the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescue, and again recently been the scene of gatherings protesting about government corruption.

In an ideal world we would have had a little more time to look around, but I still think myself lucky to have had the chance to at least briefly sample life in Romania’s third city which I can only imagine is a world away from the capital of Bucharest and considerably more picturesque.