The price is right here in Brașov. This city has most of the features I love about Europe, at half the cost of, say, València. This combination makes Romania a strong contender for my future home. Romanian currency is quite durable too — it has this odd waxy, plastic-like feel to it. When 25 lei ($6.23) in bills went through the wash in my shirt pocket, they came out completely unharmed. And, presumably, cleaner.

• Rent: 7.5. The average montly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the center of Brașov is an incredible $341.39. That makes this city my cheapest European destination thus far, at least in terms of lodging. And my own experience lends credence to the low rental cost statistic for Brașov: I paid $31.90 a night for a huge two-bedroom apartment for seven nights here. I was actually a little embarrassed to be staying in such a large apartment all by myself. (Admittedly, I would have preferred to stay somewhere with working wi-fi and hot water. Bigger is definitely not always better.)
• Walkability: 5. Brașov earns the lowest walkability score among the cities I’ve visited in Europe. Yes, it has a few pleasant pedestrian-only streets. But fewer than you would think. Romanians somehow find a way to drive on cobblestones, on narrow medieval streets, wherever. Streets that in one of my previous destinations would surely have been fully pedestrianized are in Brașov full of parked cars. And walk signals and crosswalks are at times in short supply.
  

  Cars drive through here. I’ve seen it (14 June 2018).

  

  Um… I could really use a pedestrian signal here, or at least a crosswalk. No? (16 June 2018).

• Dating: 7. According to Tinder, there are plenty of matches for me here. But most of the attractive young ladies I saw on the streets and in the cafés of Brașov fall firmly in the “jailbait” category. I’d prefer to see more women (slightly) closer to my own age here.
• Food: 8. Romanian cuisine isn’t about to supplant French or Italian cooking as one of Europe’s great culinary contributions to the world. But the food here, of whatever genre, is incredibly cheap. Supermarkets here are just as inexpensive as in the rest of Europe, even slightly more so. But what really impressed me is how inexpensive restaurants are here. As I noted in my first blog post on Brașov, I can eat (and drink) out here to my heart’s content and still stay under budget. A typical meal at an outdoor café, including a main course, a side dish or dessert, and two drinks, costs less than $15. Here I needed no recourse to picnic lunches as I did in Spain and Portugal — I ate a sit-down restaurant meal whenever I wanted. It was amazing!
  

  The Romanian staple dish is called mămăligă. It’s a bland yellow cornmeal mush (although it’s tastier than gray Slovenian buckwheat mush). It’s often served, as here, with a sour cream sauce as an accompaniment to meat dishes (13 June 2018).

  

  Romania does soup (ciorbă) very well. They’re hearty and have a slight sour taste that I like. Unfortunately, even when soup is listed on the menu, it’s only actually available 1/3 or so of the time. Maybe it’s a lunch thing (I usually only eat dinner) (13 June 2018).

  

  A big pile of meat and cheese. You can’t go wrong, especially with this people-watching and a $3 rum and coke (16 June 2018).

  

  And let’s not forget dessert. Papanași are huge chunks of fried dough slathered in jam and cream. It’s like eating two plain doughnuts, two plain doughnut holes, two scoops of ice cream, and half a jelly jar all at once. Even I didn’t ask for seconds. Ahhh (15 June 2018).

• Ambience: 7. Brașov comes through with most of the pleasant European phenomena I enjoy: Café-lined streets, brooding churches, and colorful old mansions with reliefs of faces or gargoyles or coats of arms. My only complaints are that too many cars have intruded into the city center, and that Brașov is such a small city that it lacks the urban rhythm of, say, València, Porto, or Zagreb.
  

  Stately old buildings (some in disrepair) that sprout dramatically from the foot of a mountain. But can we please clear these cars out of here? They’re ruining my shot (15 June 2018).

  

  I can fix this: Replace these parked cars with a bike lane, make the street pedestrian-only, and put some café tables and umbrellas out here (18 June 2018).

  

  And of course, not all of the city is as quaint as the historic center. Most of Brașov’s residents live in modern apartment buildings like these (18 June 2018).

• Transit: 6. Brașov’s public transportation system is comprised solely of buses, but they’re quick and cheap. A bus whisked me to the train station in less than 10 minutes and cost something ridiculous like 1.80 lei ($0.45).
  

  The bus is also a good alternative to walking on a rainy day like this one (18 June 2018).

• Health care: 5.1. I don’t have data on health care in Brașov, so I substituted in the number for Cluj-Napoca.
• Nature: 10. You may recall that in my second blog post on Ljubljana, I described what my ideal, fantasy city would look like. One line of that went: “It’d be surrounded by tree-covered hills and mountains crisscrossed with hiking and running trails.” That’s pretty much exactly what you get here in Brașov. For closeness to nature, I’m confident Brașov can’t be topped, and so I bestow upon it my rare, coveted “10” rating. For photographic evidence of this, see my Mt. Tâmpa hike blog entry.
• Internet: 4. I suppose it had to happen eventually. My apartment in Brașov was the first and thus far only of my lodgings so far where the wi-fi completely failed. I know that’s not universally true throughout the city, as I found a coffee house three blocks away where the wi-fi was great. But it does make me suspicious of Romania’s internet infrastructure all the same.
  

  I’d rather be doing this at home. Although I have to admit, all three drinks I ordered here at Kafe Pub were amazing (17 June 2018).

• Crime: 8.4. Brașov’s crime rate is even more freakishly low than Ljubljana’s. I saw several pairs of cops on foot patrol around Piața Sfatului and Strada Republicii, but for the most part they didn’t seem to be doing anything more than taking a pleasant paseo-style stroll through town, just like the tourists and the local civilians.
  

  This here is the one time they seemed actually to do something. The woman in the white shirt and jeans came up to them, and one of the cops spent forever writing in a little book while the woman and the other cop looked on (16 June 2018).

• Language: 5.5. If Portuguese sounds like Russians trying to speak Spanish, Romanian sounds like Italians trying to speak Czech. The Romanians are an interesting demographic outlier: They claim descent from ancient Rome (unlike most other Europeans who sprang from the Germanic, Slavic, or other tribes that overran the old empire) and speak a Romance language more closely related to French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than to the tongues of their Slavic and Hungarian neighbors. To someone like me who’s studied French and Spanish, written Romanian looks very familiar. Pronunciation-wise, Romanian does have some more Slavic-sounding “sh” and “ch” sounds, but overall I’d say the spoken language it most closely resembles is Italian. I think I could pick up Romanian more easily than Croatian or Slovenian (or Portuguese, for that matter). And as I’ve found with other Europeans who speak languages not widely spoken outside their homelands (i.e. everyone but the Spanish), almost every young person I chatted with here, and a good number of middle-aged people too, speak excellent English.
• Bikeability: 5. I was pleased to note that Brașov has some bike lanes, but it’s definitely a car culture here. I didn’t see very many bicycle commuters; rather, I saw a lot of mountain bikers with their crazy helmets. From what my guidebook says, there’s some excellent mountain biking areas in the area surrounding Brașov. I just hope nobody’s nutty enough to try riding on the steep, muddy hiking trails on Mt. Tâmpa.
  

  This very nice bike lane runs by Brașov’s main park (16 June 2018).

• Friendliness: 6. I expected Romanians to be more like the dour, unsmiling Russians. Surly even. But I saw plenty of people here smiling and laughing, and I’d actually say that the table service I’ve gotten here has been the quickest in Europe (which is to say, still slower than American service). Romanians are generally more reserved than the Spanish or Portuguese (or the Slovenes for that matter), but they’re polite. They certainly don’t seem miserable to me.
• Pollution: 8.3. Brașov pips Ljubljana as the lowest-pollution city on my itinerary thus far. Maybe it’s all that rain clearing the air every day.