Moldova

Moldova is very cold right now. There is a lot of snow. This can make life difficult sometimes when you are in buildings without central heating. We made it down to the village ok. We over-paid the guy who took us down there because we didn’t know what the going rate was at the time. Nonetheless, we were able to keep our entire trip for the past two weeks under $200, most of which went into transportation costs.

When we got off the maxi-taxi in the village, everyone was looking at us. We ran into some people I knew on the way to the house. When we got in, Tolea (old host brother) met us at the door. He had put some nice new doors in on the house, and has changed the back yard around almost unrecognizably. We were able to hang out for only an hour or so before we passed out for the next 14 hours.

My room, or rather my old room, is heated by “soba”, which is a fireplace downstairs with a big chimney that goes up through the wall next to the bed. They also had a mini-heater they hooked up with us but since it’s a big room, it was still in the 50s at night.

People were happy to see us. They invited us over to their houses and we never went hungry and of course we never missed out on a drinking opportunity. The school was having a 10-year reunion (every graduating class every 10 years gets together in the middle of winter) when we were there so we went and froze our asses off watching as people told stories about the “good old days” when they were in school. Afterwards we ate and drank some more booze of course.

Amanda is a veteran of walking on ice now. She was hesitant at first but thanks in part to her winter boots she is almost an expert. People don’t shovel snow in this part of the world and the definitely don’t salt their roads so consequently they have ice to walk on instead of a sidewalk or street. It can be aggravating throughout the entire snow cycle because when the snow melts it turns into lakes where you walk. We are both glad we have waterproof footwear.

There were some changes in the village but overall nothing changed spectacularly. My good friend Vitalie got married and has a baby now. She was born on my birthday this last year actually. They live very modestly with an old Soviet-era TV that barely shows a picture. But they are on the internet.

The “casa de cultura” (big building of events) no longer has a “discoteca” (dance club with booze). Now they just have an enormous room with teenage boys having free unsupervised reign with a pool table and pool cues. The cue balls are about the size of large gumballs but amazingly they still have all the equipment.

Of course I got asked all the time why I wasn’t married and when I was going to have babies. I told people that I was waiting for my host brother first. At this, people just rolled their eyes, saying that Tolea was helpless.

I was amazed to see that the Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu program is still going and all the mats are still intact. Sandu, the now 12th grader is in charge of the program and he has been able to incorporate some judo that he learned in Cahul to the program. I participated in one of the practices and felt every pound of weight that I have added to my body over the past few years. My back was a little messed up the next day but not too bad. I have some video that I will be adding later. Again, it was very cold at practice.

We left the village after a week and our next stop was Tiraspol.

From Amanda’s journal: February 10, 2010

We’re sitting at the border of Moldova and Romania right now on our overnight train to Bucharest. This will be the second border we’ve crossed today…well, kind of. We took a three-day trip to Transdneistria / PMR and just returned to Moldova proper today. Transdneistria is the break-away eastern region of Moldova which has claimed independence and has the international support of Russia (although they don’t even recognize them as a legal country), other break-away regions, and that’s about it. There are currently Russian “peace-keeping” forces stationed in Transdneistria to prevent any further conflict between them and Moldova proper, though the likelihood of there being another war isn’t very likely. I thought there was the possibility of having problems at the PMR border since we’re foreigners, but it only amounted to a little extra paperwork and bureaucracy. During our stay we wandered the streets of Tiraspol and got to know our host, Andrey, his wife Iana and their miniature terrier, Keks (roughly translated as “Muffin”). Andrey is a journalist in Tiraspol where he’s lived his whole life. As for the city, it didn’t look much different than Chisinau. With the exception of the language (Russian ONLY), the money (rubles and kopeks), and the border, you wouldn’t really know that you were in a different “country.”