Timisoara is a stop-off for those on the Belgrade-Bucharest route. Because there is no direct train from Belgrade, the popular option is to take the four hour ride to Timisoara, and then take the 8:20am train which travels through the popular destinations of Sibiu (5 hours) and Brasov (7 hours) in Transylvania before turning South and continuing on to Bucharest (12 hours).
According to Wikitravel (as of July 2014) Timisoara is known as the most cosmopolitan city in Romania. I'm pretty sure this was written by the owner of one of Timisoars's two main hostels. It is a weird, kind of cool, sort of industrial place where once grand buildings with incredible architrecture sit in decay. According to the manager of the hostel at which I stayed, Timisoara is the first city in Europe to be fully electrified (the second in the world after New York), and the city in Romania with the most parks and the most bike lanes.
Timisoara is currently in the midst of a large scale revitalization process, the result of which most streets and entire squares in the downtown area have been dug up. As the manager of Freeborn Hostel explained to me "If you don't know about Romanian construction, it is very slow." A bike ride around the outside of the city is a great way to see the parks along the canal running through the middle of the city which are really beautiful, the huge kids playground area which I missed but which is supposed to be incredible, with huge play structures, and to stop at the beer factory, not open for tours but has a nice outdoor bar which serves fresh unfiltered beer and Romanian food.
At night there's a few options - Cuib d'arte is a cool bohemian bar with live music - on the night I went it was a band with string instruments I had never seen which sounded unlike anything I'd ever heard. Underground Bunker Bar caters to a younger crowd and reminded me of college.
It may have just been the slowness of a college town in the summer but one afternoon in Timisoara was plenty to see it and move deeper into Romania.
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