The next day, we wandered around the city some more and had lunch at a cafe. In the evening, I boarded my train to Bucharest. Minivan bus is the more popular way to take that trip, but I especially wanted to take the train. That's because I'm a train freak, and at the border between the two countries, the carriages are lifted off the Moldovan bogies and placed on Romanian ones because the rail gauges of the two countries differ. If you plan to take this train, you have to make a reservation in person at the station. All my other train trips in Europe I booked online before leaving for the trip.

It was a very old train, with a wood-fired piped hot-water heating system that was unbearably hot in my particular carriage, but fine in some of the others I walked through. The sleeper was comfortable and I was the only person in it. We got to Bucharest at dawn the next morning.Read more