Still Alive and in Chisinau, Moldova

One complete day of travel from Sofia we brought us to Chisinau, Moldova, last Friday the 2nd. After checking into the wonderfully decrepit Soviet-era "Hotel Turist" we decided to familiarise ourselves with the city. Full of parks, cafes and restaurants Chisinau seemed the most relaxed of the any of the cities we'd visited so far on our trip;in fact, it's a little hard to believe over 800,000 people live there. Wandering around all day we ended up at a cafe where after asking for help with a menu a group of Moldovan Russians invited us to hang out with them and one of them, Natasha, invited us to the club where she works as a dishwasher: "Military Pub". We jumped on a bus with her and headed directly to the club. The place had a tank in the middle of the dance floor and soviet type paraphernalia all over the place. Chris and I hung out with Natasha, and drank a pile of beers before the mid-evening show: the Soviet national anthem followed by a weird cabaret featuring three fat girls in uniform dancing while the audience laughed and cheered. Chris and I wondered what the deal was: were these three fat girls dancing because no one here is fat and fat is sexy OR was everyone laughing at them?. Turns out they are paid to wear uniforms and dance a burlesque routine so everyone can have a chuckle at them -I don't know what this says about Moldovan society but it was pretty friggin strange.

On Saturday we rented an apartment as it costs the equivalent of a hotel and was much more comfortable while affording us the opportunity to see how the locals live. I passed the day doing nothing and resting up but on Sunday Chris cooked a meal and invited our new Moldovan friends, Natasha and Rigina, over. We hung out, ate, drank and talked before heading out for a walk. Not 10 minutes after we left the house a group of Chisinau's finest accosted us on the street demanding our passports. Not being accustomed to living in a police state, nor bringing travel documents with us whenever we left the house, Chris and I didn't have our passports on us. We all argued with the police saying we could get our documents if only they'd let us go back to the apartment but they insisted we follow them to the police station. For the next hour or more we sat there as these corrupt cops yelled at us, yelled at our friends and threatened them before the pig in charge suggested we could give them some money and we'd all be allowed to leave. Chris handed over a couple of hundred lei (16 dollars maybe) and we all walked out worse for the wear. Unfortunately this sort of shit could have been avoided if cooler wiser heads had prevailed but the end result is Moldova seemed pretty ugly all of a sudden.