At a silent signal, up they rise from the vast expanse of Victory Square (Piata Victoriei), a three-block-long rectangle between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Opera House. The pigeons flutter skyward, circling once, then again, before landing in dense clusters on the facades of Hapsburg-era buildings, most of them at least passably restored to house restaurants, shops and offices. A few minutes later the show repeats itself, the birds this time plopping fussily down in and around the circular dish of a dormant fountain set in the gray-tiled plaza. Now comes a stocky older man in an ill-fitting brown suit, carrying a plastic bag full of bread crumbs. Out to impress a 3-year-old in a ski jacket, the gent holds out some crumbs to the pigeons, and one flaps up neatly onto his open palm. It is, for all its ordinariness, a remarkable sight.

I recognized the same kind of (comparatively) laid-back, pleasure-seeking lifestyle in a provincial capital that I found in my adopted European base, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Almost by intuition I homed in on the N&Z cafe near the opera. It was time for the main meal of the day, lunch, and locals were digging into Romanian soul food like sarmale (meat-stuffed cabbage) and mamaliga, the ubiquitous cornmeal side dish similar to Italian polenta, while salsa music blared over the sound system. (Romanians consider themselves Latin, descendants of their 2nd century conqueror, the Roman Empire of the Caesars, to set themselves apart from ethnic Slavs and Hungarians, both outside and within modern Romania's borders. The Romanian language, too, is Latin-based, like Spanish or French.)

Timisoara is only about 40 miles from both the Hungarian and Yugoslavian borders, ensuring its destiny as a cultural crossroads, trading center and Romanian window on the West. "Timisoara is a place for ethnic diversity," writes a Romanian expat with the nom de Internet of CyberTim, in a Web site devoted to this, his hometown. "Along {with} Romanians (65% to 70%) there are Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Slovaks and a Jewish community. And contrary to trends in other parts of Eastern Europe, they do get along remarkably well."