Chisinau

Sophia meet the family, family meet Sophia!

Sophia and I had started seeing each other only a few weeks before I left Australia, which was bad timing all around, but as luck would have it she was planning a trip to Europe as well and was only too happy to meet me for an adventure through soviet styled unrecognised separatist states and nuclear wastelands.

We rendezvoused in Chisinau, the capital of the least visited country in Europe. Everyone I had met on this trip who I told I was going their expressed a mixture of disbelief and a warning that there was very little to see or do, but it was a necessary stop due to being the best launching point to get into Transnistria.

Abiding by the warnings, we only spent one night in Chisinau, but I actually got quite a bit of nostalgic pleasure out of the city. It took e a couple of hours to realise why, but it finally hit me that it reminded me a lot of Bucharest in Romania. The language is Romanian, the people are ethnically Romanian, the food is Romanian and they spent most of the 1990’s advocating to become part of Romanian. I had fallen in love with Romania last year, so it was nice to indulge my nostalgia.

It was true, however, that there is not a lot to see, nor was there any free walking tours to show us around, so after a late start in the morning, we constructed our own tour, and managed to see all the sites in a couple of hours. The highlight easily being catching an orthodox service in a gold and blue monastery, those priests sure can sing! We followed that with a huge Romania feast for lunch where I ordered half the menu, extremely happy and excited to be back in south Eastern Europe and the middle eastern influence that provides.

Finding our bus to Transnistria after lunch proved to be challenge as we were sent to the wrong bus station a few kms to the north by our hotel receptionist, but that at least got me to introduce Sophia to the unique Romanian style public bus system as we backtrack to the correct bus station, which happened to be located a couple of blocks from our hotel.Read more