Choose another map, showing:

• Ukraine
• Mediterranean
• Europe
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Chişinău

Chisinau meets the Mighty Tourist Scott

My arrival in Chisinau felt like my arrival in so many places, more exciting than scary, but still a small bit scary. I walked around the train station looking for an ATM but it seemed a bit fruitless, so I asked the information booth for bankomat but the woman clearly didn't understand me.   When I left the train station I was able to spot the bankomat.  There were some friendly cab drivers who wanted to take me places but I had a good set of directions to where I was headed.

I quickly bought a bottle of water to make some change for the shared minivan taxi ride.  I was headed to Ion's flat.  I found him on couchsurfing.com.  I was interested in learning about Moldova from a Moldovan and there was also a sparse amount of budget accomodation for tourists available in Chisinau. In return I shared my culture and experiences and tried to give Ion a bottle of Hungarian wine.

The only flaw in my directions is that I was not sure what direction I wanted to ride the minivan so I asked an older man waiting on the street corner by showing him the address I was looking for and the minivan route I wanted to ride and he pointed me in the right direction.  The minivans were a soviet invention and they really are wonderful, there are dozens of routes going anywhere in the city and they come by every few minutes.  They are fast and cost about 15 cents.  Becuase of this Chisinau had excellent public transport for a city of ~800,000 people.

On the first ride in the city there was no place to sit so I was standing with my luggage in a way that put my head above the window and I couldnt see where the van was going. I took it to the end of its route and then started looking for my address.  In true soviet era fashion there sparse addresses marked on only a few of the buildings.  I then walked through a grassy spot in the middle of the traffic circle.  There were about 10 territorial dogs that surrounded me and started barking.  I was worried about them attacking adn was glad that it was morning and there were a bunch of people around. At first I just ignored the dogs but that was mistake and they started getting more agressive.  I then stopped and stared at the closest one and then made a step towards it and it ran and the rest of the dogs backed down.  It was a bit of a tense moment mostly because there were so many dogs and I didn't have a proper stick to fend them off.   I them walked around for about 25 minutes in the wrong direction before I found a proper address that sent me back the way I came and directly to Ion's Flat. There were mostly unmarked larger buildings which accounted for the sheer distance I had to walk before it was clear I was in the wrong place.

Ion didn't have a number on his door and none of the outer doors had markings indicating which apartment numbers were inside. Walking between all the buildings like a lost puppy with all your luggage and plenty of people around wondering what you are doing in their neighborhood is lots of fun.  I was just about to ask someone again when I found the correct building and apartment.  Ion's place was very nice and like every soviet era apartment I had entered it was much nicer on the inside than the outside would suggest. In fact I would love to live in a place as nice as Ion's and so many of my apt's were not so nice.
Ion had been married for a few months to his wife Luda, short for Ludmilla. They were both wonderful hosts, I am not sure what she thought of her husband bringing strangers around.

Ion was also hosting Ion who quite interestingly had decided to walk from the netherlands and had made it to Chisinau in only about 90 days of walking.  He had a wheeled cart with a harness and I was impressed with his stamina deciding to do this in the winter.  His current goal was to make it to the Kazak border but I don't think he told his family that.  He was 35 and a teacher. He was stuck in Chisinau trying to get a Russian Visa.

After much tea and conversation they decided to go to the Russian Embassy and I decided to go into the city center and see what I could find.  Ion had given me some indication of where I could find the US embassy. So I walked around, ran into the central Orthodox church which I made a quick visit to. Walked past a bunch of museums and the central government buildings. And at some point realized that I had strayed from Ion's directions of up the hill and to the right So after getting back and track and walking for 10 minutes I have to say that I was glad to see in the US flag rising from the building. One advantage of living in a superpower is that there are embassies for you everywhere.  One disadvantage is that they are highly secure complete with police officers and security checks.  I had to leave my camera in a different building.  Quite lucky is that I showed up at 2:02 just as the consular affairs office was opening for american citizen services, which was only monday, wednesday and Friday between 2 and 4. The reason I was visiting was that my passport only had one blank page left for entry visa's and if it did get full and I needed a blank page for a visa, I wouldn't have been able to enter the country.  So I applied for extra pages to be added to my passport.  It was an application that seemed more concearned with keeping track of me and determining my potential tax liabilty for working abroad than anything else. I don't like those sort of forms. Happily the addition of pages was done at no cost.  While I sat waiting I spent some time talking to a Moldovan peace corps member. I asked him if there was an expat community in Chisinau and he told me that it consisted of the peace corps.  They had 134 members in Moldova.  He was working on community development in Chisinau.  There were also some moldovan girls who wanted to Au Pair in the united states.  The embassy staff were in general very nice. After being in their for about 35 minutes I had pages A through X added to my passport with some tape and the official seal of the US embassy in Chisinau.

With all those pages added to my passport I felt like it would be some sort of challange to see if I could fill them up before the passport exires in 2014. With my passport a bunch thicker and being in a good mood I headed towards the national musueum of moldova and went in for a visit.  The price on the board was 3 moldovan lei and I was charged 30.  If they had a post that foreigners should pay more I wouldn't have minded, but since they didn't I wondered if I was just lining the womans pockets.  So I showed the woman the sign and she made it clear that I could leave if I didn't like the price.  Since 30 lei was less than 3 dollars I decided to go in for a visit. I am to the point that it would be hard for any collection short of amazing to impress me, but in the course of my visit I did see some great artifacts and photographs of Moldova's push for independence and subsequent small clashes with the newly formed Transnistria Republic.  A republic that I would visit later with much woe and regret.

I hadn't had much to eat that day so I buckled when I found the local fast food joint, I think it had happy in the name.  It was relatively cheap by world standards and I had a burger and  a beer and later ordered some icecream that was more like whipped cream fluff.  I was sitting there finishing my beer when Ion and Ion not only walked by, but were intending to visit the same joint, mostly because walking Ion was hungry.  He had showed me pictures from the day he left and he had clearly lost a little bit of weight.  For the rest of my visit I teased him as much as possible about fattening up. I am sure he would be able to use that fat. I had long been interested in long distance walking journeys and the pictures of all of the men tended to make them look like starvation vicitms after months of walking. It was great to just run into the only friends I had in town.

After eating we left Moldovan Ion behind to take care of his business and we found a basement bar to have some coffee in. There was more talking and then we decided to head back to Ion's flat.  It was raining and the minivan route we wanted seemed to be thwarting us, because a couple of the minivans turned down a different street one block in front of us.  There is something bewildering about a cold rain and I wondered how walking Ion managed to keep his spirits up.  One thing I learned is that he walked in the morning, spent his afternoons drinking a coffee and walking to another village and drinking a coffee and then doing some walking in the evening. Even funnier is that he was jealous of certain portions of my trip and I was jealous of how much natural interaction he had with the places he was visiting. Walking Ion had traveled quite extensively and visited many of the places I had been, when he road the train through siberia there wans't nearly as much food to be found on it as when I rode the train and he talked of only being ablt to eat caviar for a whole day. That was in 1993. I am sure it would have been interesting to compare that Russia with the one I visited, the one that seemed like it still had a long way to go to increase competition and even a more competitive spirit.

Moldova had officialy changed the alphabet back to the Roman one, but there was still plenty of Cyrillic circulating around the city. I know that Moldova has large Ukrainian and Russian Minorities. After getting back I settled in for the evening to spend a small amount of time writing and then some time with my graciuos host.

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "Chisinau meets the Mighty Tourist Scott":