Idle Words

Transnistria

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0300

I arrived in Transnistria on the happiest day of the year - May 25, the last day of school. Packs of happy, singing students were wandering the streets, the boys dressed in suits or nice shirts and the girls wearing a kind of folk costume that combined apron, scrunchies, stockings and a disturbingly short UPS brown frock. Those lucky enough to be finishing eighth grade or high school also sported a big red sash. It was one of those cool and unsettled May days that can't decide between sun, rain, and clouds, and so tries each in turn. But the high school kids were in indestructibly good spirits, and every time a group from one school passed another there would be a volley of loud cheering. Everyone was headed to one of Tiraspol's big parks, to drink beer, text their friends, and enjoy the working attractions in the slowly disintegrating, Mad Max style amusement park.

Transnistria is a long and skinny scrap of land along the Dniestr river, wedged between Moldova and Ukraine. In Soviet times, when an independent Moldova sounded about as likely as an independent Staten Island, the borders of the Moldavian SSR were drawn a little to the east of the Dniestr, the historical boundary of all things Moldavian. Over time, a large number of Russians relocated here, and the region grew into the Moldovan SSR's industrial heartland. When the Soviet Union began to fall apart in 1991, Moldova decided it wanted to secede, and the Transnistrians decided they wanted no part of it.

The Moldovans sent armed troops to help persuade the Transnistrians to change their mind, at which point the locally stationed Soviet 14th Guards Army volunteered its own opinion that it would probably be best for the Moldovans to go home. The 14th army's job, incidentally, was to oversee one of the largest conventional weapons depots in Europe, holding all of the ammunition and weaponry repatriated from East Germany and other parts of the disintegrating Warsaw Pact. The new Moldovan state found this line of argument very persuasive, and Transnistria has been a de facto independent state ever since.

There are a bunch of warnings online about visiting Transnistria, most of them having to do with shakedowns at the border. These warnings are hard to evaluate, as so much can depend on whom you encounter, where you cross, what kind of vibe you give off, whether someone is in a good or bad mood that day. The day of my crossing, an official film crew happened to be shooting footage of the border formalities, which certainly didn't hurt. It was the fastest and most convenient border crossing in the whole region.

Transnistria is not hard to get to. There are about a billion daily maxi-taxis making the forty-minute trip from Chișinău to Bender, and a smaller number that come from the Ukrainian side. Approaching the border, you first pass some unhappy Moldovan customs agents sitting in the middle of the road. Moldova refuses to build an actual checkpoint, since it considers Transnistria a breakaway province, but they also aren't thrilled with the idea of having a completely unmonitored eastern border. So agents sit in the road in lawn chairs and flag down the occasional truck.

Next up is a pair of concrete barriers designed to break the momentum of any advancing Moldovan armored columns long enough for the Russian garrison in Tiraspol to wake up and mount a defense. This is Transnistria's Fulda gap. Two chain-smoking Russian soldiers form the tip of the spear. Beyond them lies another hundred meters of straight asphalt and then the Transnistrian border checkpoint. There's a small metal trailer for passport control, a more permanent building for customs, and a big, ragged Transnistrian flag flying above it all, bleached pink from years of faithful service.

The guy sitting next to me on the maxi-taxi turns out to be an Austrian doing his dissertation on the political situation here. He's been living in Chișinău with a friend for the last three months, and this is his fourth trip into Tiraspol. He is full of interesting information about the place. Neither of the Austrians speaks Russian, but they claim they've never run into trouble at this border crossing. The border guards take us aside and deal with the locals on the maxi-taxi first.

The border crossing is completely routine. One guard complains that I didn't fill out my patronymic (Maciejevich?). His colleague eyes the Austrian passports and debates me for a while about the existence and interpretation of the letter ß. After the usual frenzy of stamping we receive our entry chits: I can stay in Transnistria until 21:40; the Austrians can spend the night. For all the bluster about independence, I'm surprised to find the guards lack the self-confidence to actually stamp the passports.

Soon we are in downtown Bender, passing another Russian checkpoint and riding over a pretty bridge (no photographs!) that spans the Dniester.

The president of Transnistria is a former apparatchik from Kamchatka named Viktor Voronin. His vaguely Colonel Sanders-like face dots numerous billboards across the territory. In some of them he is shaking hands with Medvedev; in others he is shaking hands with the leaders of South Ossettia and Abkhazia, under the somehwat plaintive slogan "let these countries exist!". Like ostracized kids in a high school, the Transnistrians, South Ossettians and Abkhazians have grown tired of trying to get international recognition and instead banded together, sending delegations to one another and exchanging diplomatic visits in a kind of underground United Nations. In downtown Tiraspol you can even find a sort of embassy flying the very pretty Abkhazian flag.

On the way in to Tiraspol, the bus passes the towering, brand new soccer stadium. When it seceded, Transnistria took not just four fifths of Moldova's industrial base and 90% of its electrical production, but also the country's best soccer team. The new stadium is emblematic of the ambiguous relationship with Moldova, since even the Chișinău soccer team travels here to use it for important international matches. It's the only European class soccer stadium in the region. A five-star hotel is going up next to the stadium, and I spend some idle moments trying to imagine the kind of guest who would stay in a five star hotel and yet not mind the bone-rattling car ride from the nearest airport, in Chișinău.

The hotel, stadium and the adjacent gas station are owned by a conglomerate called Sherrif, Transnistria's answer to the RAMJAC corporation. Sherrif owns pretty much everything in the territory that doesn't already belong to the even shadier Russian gas giant Gazprom. Some bold analysts even whisper of Sherrif of having ties to senior figures in the Transnistrian government.

Further along the road sits the Russian army base, a little extraterritorial compound where a thousand or so Russian soldiers (the exact number is unclear) play cards and try not to go crazy with boredom. Since 1991, the Russians have been nagged into withdrawing or destroying most of the truly heavy weapons once kept here. Even so, dark rumors persist about Transnistria being a big player in underground arms traffic. The kind of smuggling for which there is actual evidence is far less glamorous, involving things like diverting shipments of Tyson chicken parts into Ukraine.

There really isn't anything exotic about Tiraspol apart from the weird geopolitical status. The city is mostly laid out along its main road, a clean and leafy boulevard called October 25 street. The road is anchored at one end by the university and the House of Soviets, and at the other by a large plaza with various monuments, including a large statue of Lenin. In between is an unremarkable selection of shops and cafes, along with local landmarks like the Kvint cognac outlet store (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sherrif corporation). Kvint has been making cognac for a hundred years, and bottles of the good stuff are one of the main attractions of visiting Transnistria.

Tiraspol has a large number of billboards, most of which carry nationalist propaganda. My visit comes hard on the heels of Victory Day, and so most of the posters are in celebration of victory in the "Great Patriotic War", the Russian phrase for that portion of World War II in which they were not the aggressor. Other posters celebrate 18 years of Transnistrian independence, or else proclaim solidarity with the patron state ("our future lies with Russia!"). To be honest, it isn't much different from the various exhortative posters one sees in the streets of Chișinău or Odessa, although those focus more on civic than national pride.

Travel accounts of Transnistria tend to obsess a little bit about the statue of Lenin in the main square. I've come across the phrases "living museum" and "a fly in Soviet amber", which to me suggest a certain lack of direct experience with advanced socialism. Magnavox outlet stores, for example, were not common in the Soviet Union. My favorite construction, though, comes from Leif Pettersen of Lonely Planet, who mentions the city's "Kafkaesque monuments", where he actually means "Orwellian" - a bit of autopilot prose that would have made Orwell beam.

So let's look at these Kafkaesque monuments! Within a few hundred feet of Vladimir Ilyich we find a large Orthodox church, a statue of ~~a man transformed into a giant bug~~ Catherine the Great, and a tank on a pedestal with the slogan "For the Motherland!" painted on its turret. Behind Lenin hangs a large banner reading "Our Future Lies with Russia!". And dominating the square is an equestrian statue of Suvorov, the legendary Russian general who founded this city in 1792. For an American analogue, imagine a big plaza with statues of Patton, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, a giant bald eagle, and triple-life-size Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima.

What is on display here isn't nostalgia for Communism, but nostalgia for the Russian Empire, in both its tsarist and Soviet incarnations. The forms of Soviet iconography are respected because they represent a time when Russia (a nation with a massive inferiority complex) was a superpower, unquestioned leader to half the world, and undisputed victor over the Nazi empire.

Some of the visual language may be borrowed from Soviet times (partly because it's great visual language), but it's no coincidence that you never find a statue of Marx or Engels in one of these "living museums". The same kind of cognitive dissonance that lets Alabama rednecks wear a Confederate flag as a patriotic symbol obtains here. Vladimir Ilyich and Suvorov would not have found a lot to say to each other over sherry, but in Tiraspol they are happily celebrated as symbols of heritage. Their presence is a reminder of happier times, when Tiraspol was a new city in a dynamic and growing empire, rather than a the capital of a ridiculously shaped renegade province of the poorest country in Europe.

For some reason, Transnistria has a large and entertaining online presence, and a lot of it is in English. My personal favorite is the official tourist site ("Compared to Moldova, it's like the Riviera!"), which gamely confronts the challenge of luring tourists to a country with no recognized borders or airport, all while taking as many shots at Moldova as the format will allow. If you ever wondered what Charles Kinbote would sound like as an embittered Minister of Tourism, you will want to savor this piece of prose, possibly over a snifter of fine Kvint cognac.

Less otherworldly but equally entertaining is an outfit called the Tiraspol Times, which seems to be run by native speakers of English sympathetic to the Transnistrian cause.

Having sipped all the nectar I could from Tiraspol, I boarded a maxi-taxi back to Bender, with vague hopes of finding the recently-opened museum of the 1991 conflict. Instead I found myself wandering around a pleasant town, its streets marked both in Russian and in the mind-warping Cyrillic version of Romanian that still gets used here. Many people were out strolling and running errands. I discovered that Russian soldiers look far less intimidating when they are walking hand in hand with a two year old, sharing an ice cream cone. Bender was a normal, pleasant city, but it was a city curiously diminished. Everywhere were signs of how much things had fallen off in the past two decades - a disused central train station, an empty bus terminal now replaced by a small ticket kiosk, enormous and nearly empty factories the size of a city block.

Someone had left the door to that disused terminal propped open, and you could go in and admire the nice socialist realist mosaics and the outdated schedules. In Soviet times, this was a place you could easily leave. Odessa and Chișinău were a short ride away, further afield were Kiev and the Crimea, there was regular service to Moscow and other major cities. Europe was off limits, of course, but the USSR was a big place. Since then, people's horizons have narrowed. My mind wandered back to those happy graduates, and what kind of a future they could reasonably expect in this place, and more than ever I was annoyed with the uniforms, peaked caps, officious titles, stamps, checkpoints and other frippery of modern nationalism. I find it impossible to take the play-acting at countries and borders seriously, whether it's being done by Americans, Transnistrians, Molodvans, or Zemblans, but then I have the luxury of holding the right passports. For these kids, the asinine dispute over what to call this place and what flag to fly here will, unfortunately, have enormous consequences.

More photos here.

Seeking Testers For A Bookmarking Site

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0300

These are lean times in social bookmarking. The staff at del.icio.us has been eviscerated by layoffs, and the project is now being run by a skeleton crew. Magnolia, the other useful bookmarking site, has gone offline for the summer while it implements a new "don't irretrievably lose everyone's data" feature.

I was never able to make my peace with the delicious redesign, and like many other people ended up building my own little bookmark management tool. I would like to try and turn it into a public site that's a little less about the social and more about the bookmarks. Here's a representative sampling of feature ideas:

searchable, cached content
better bulk operations through a gmail-like 'star' interface
a lightweight 'to read' status for stuff you want to get to later
better support for private bookmarks and tags
integration with twitter, facebook, IRC, the usual stuff
retro interface (no tag chevrons, fewer than three toolbars per page, etc)
don't irretrievably lose everyone's data

You can find a longer feature list here.

I am looking for volunteers to help me alpha test the service while it is still full of bugs. The ideal alpha tester is someone who does a lot of bookmarking, pines for the days before the del.icio.us redesign, and has endless reserves of patience. Please send me an email (maciej@ceglowski.com) if you are interested and I will send you an invite.

Moldova

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0300

In a sufficiently parallel universe, Moldova would be the Napa Valley. There are vineyards and grapevines everywhere, and the area is famous for its wine and brandy. The country is a pretty green landscape of rolling hills and forest, in a mild climate tempered by the nearby Black Sea. The local produce is better than the expensive heirloom varietals you would find at a Northern California farmers' market, possibly because it is intensively cultivated by hand on small plots. Strawberries, for example, are ugly as sin, go bad in a day, and taste better than any I've ever found in the United States. Sour cherries transport me back to early childhood visits to my grandfather's large orchard, which was similarly run on hand labor and lacked expensive Western techniques for making fruit beautiful and durable*.

Moldova also has a perfect location, sitting midway between the Carpathian mountains and the Black Sea, scenic places that are full of hot springs, therapeutic mud, and have been attracting European tourists and convalescents for centuries. If not for the baneful roads and resentful Transnistrians, both Odessa and Iași (Romania's second city) would be an hour's drive away from the Moldovan capital. It's possible that the country could benefit from a small name change - "Moldova" doesn't sit well on many foreign ears, especially when you start in with derived company names like "Moldtrans" and "Moldcell" - but otherwise the conditions are perfect for yuppie tourism. Even the old regional flag is awesome:

Instead, of course, Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. After 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart, trade collapsed and the most industrialied region in Moldova (the strip of land east of the Dniestr) seceded to form its own unrecognized nation. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that Moldova returned to the economic output of its last years under Soviet rule, and per capita income is $650 - five times less than Albania. The country suffers the ususal constellation of Second World symptoms: bad infrastructure, rural poverty, weak and corrupt government, a kleptocratic political system, and large numbers of people forced to leave the country to find work, often in terrible conditions.

Moldova sits atop Romania like a liver sits atop a stomach. The relationship between the two countries has involved a certain amount of bile. You arrive in Moldova from Romania by crossing a little river called the Prut, without many outward signs that you are in a different country. There is no difference in language or culture between the people on either side of this river, although the Soviet Union went to enormous lengths to try and foster a Moldovan national identity disjoint from Romania, to the extent of not telling people the language they spoke was Romanian.

The province of Romania adjoining the country is also called "Moldova", and the two Moldovas are the halves of what used to be an independent kingdom during the Middle Ages. In those times, anybody with a horse, a pointy stick in his hand, and a song in his heart would at some point try to invade the territory. Moldavian kings became adept at pitting various combinations of Hungarians, Turks, Poles, Cossacks, Wallachians and Tatars against one another in order to drive these invaders off while preserving their independence.

In this, they were pretty much successful until the early 19th century, when Russia fought a war against the Turks and annexed the eastern half of Moldavia to its growing empire. Except for a brief interval between the world wars, this territory stayed under Russian control until the fall of the Soviet Union. This difference in historical trajectories, along with the sizable Russian minority that moved to Moldova during the period of Russian rule, is what prevents Romania and Moldova from seeking unification today.

The Russian influence is particularly strong in the capital city, Chișinău. My first impression of the city was strongly colored by the fact that I had been living in Romania for many weeks without speaking the language. In Chișinău, my world acquired subtitles. Street names, signs, billboards, newspapers, flyers, conversations in the street, everything was suddenly in Russian, and therefore comprehensible. I fell in love with the city immediately.

Chișinău has the kind of modern history that makes you want to crawl back into bed and not come out for a while. At the start of the 20th century, it was a predominantly Jewish city. Nearly half the population were Jews, with a mixture of Moldavians, Russians and Ukrainians making up the rest. When the Russians capitulated during the First World War, the city along with the rest of the province decided to join Romania. It remained Romanian for twenty two years, until the Soviet Union annexed Moldova under the terms of a secret pact with Hitler. Less then six months later, a strong earthquake severely damaged the city. And six months after that, Romanian armies allied with Germany poured over the border to demolish what was left, murdering Jews and Roma as they went.

The city was retaken in 1944 by the Red Army, and Moldova again became a part of the Soviet Union. But the good times weren't over. in 1946, there was a famine (in a country where you can't drop your lunch on the ground without accidentally growing a crop!) due to Stalin's efforts to wipe out the richer peasants as he had previously done in Ukraine. By the time it was all over, the province was severely depopulated, and over the next decades many Russians and new settlers would come in, leading to the ethnic distribution you see in Moldova today: Russian cities, Moldovan countryside.

In rebuilding Chișinău, some anonymous genius had the good sense to order trees planted along every major road. There is nothing 1950's Soviet architects could throw at a city that a sufficient number of big trees haven't been able to neutralize. The trees form a beautiful leafy canopy down each block, and along the main street, Stefan Cel Mare, there is even a double row down either side, creating a pleasant and airy tunnel effect on the sidewalk.

Enjoying your time in Chișinău, like other places in the former Soviet Union, depends on the appropriate setting of expectations. A visitor unfamiliar with the Soviet hotel experience, for example, might enter the Hotel Cosmos with the same mixture of feelings Dante experienced as he boarded the ferry that would take him to Hell. All the standard elements of advanced socialist hospitality are present and conspire against the senses: massive concrete exterior, dim lobby, that strange hallway smell that permeates hallways from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, and a certain ammoniac harshness to the bright blue tile bathroom, occupied by a coarse toilet paper roll with no tube in the middle and several strips of cheap newsprint that have been placed across toilet, sink and shower drain, proclaiming the Russian word DISINFECTED in sickly blue ink.

The visitor willing to overlook such superficialities would find himself in a jewel of a hotel. The Cosmos has that great rarity - a competent, friendly staff - and the rooms are clean, comfortable and actually seem to have been DISINFECTED. There is hot water round the clock, room service, cable TV, and in certain rooms even such gems of old product design as the Mayak radio or Latvian rotary phone. And please take a look inside the minibar (the full-size refrigerator standing unplugged in the corner of the room):

  1 bottle red wine
  1 bottle white wine
  1 bottle champagne
  500 mL cognac
  500 mL vodka
  500 mL "Chișinău" beer
  1 carton orange juice

That is nearly four liters of booze, replaced nightly. I am sure if you make a significant dent in it, they bump your quota.

Tell me how it is possible to stay in a place like this and not enjoy each day of your stay, descending in the mornings into the quiet breakfast room to eat pale pink sausages fished out of a chafing dish, with a hearty spoonful of buckwheat and a hot cup of Nescafé. I wanted nothing more than to stick around and wander the Moldovan capital, but I had already booked my trip to Odessa, and Chișinău would have to wait.

* Class issues in food production bug me. Specifically, it bugs me that industrialized farming techniques that have made farmers in the West relatively wealthy have also stripped most of the flavor out of common foods (see: chicken, pork, tomatoes, apples). It additionally bugs me that natural-tasting fruit is now either a luxury product for the rich (see: Whole Foods), or an unintended side-effect of widespread rural poverty in places like Moldova. It is nearly 2010; we should not need to seek out adjectives like "heirloom", "organic", "artisanal" in front of fruits and vegetables in order for them to have some kind of identifiable flavor. We should also not have to choose between widespread exploitation of small farmers and mechanized cultivation on industrial scales that eliminates an entire rural culture of family-owned farms. It is important that we find a way to turn Eastern Europe into Vermont rather than Nebraska. Already the ham is starting to suck.

Into Moldova

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0300

At some point in late April, the countryside in northeastern Romania explodes in bright crayon green leaves, the cats all come out to lounge in the sun, and the hatching of a million mosquitoes tells the world that spring has arrived. Suddenly the streets are full of Romanian youth in their faux-hawks and colorful Puma sneakers, looking for all the world like little San Francisco hipsters. It is a good time for a road trip.

The straight-line distance between Iași and Odessa is 247 kilometers, and there's not much in the way of natural obstacles - just a couple of small rivers and low rolling hills. In more innocent times, I would have expected to find a cozy regional train, or maybe an Argentine-style bus service that would feed me a steak dinner while covering the distance in a comfortable three hours. But after a couple of months in the region, I knew better. Fortified with maps, dramamine, two passports, and my trademark sunny disposition, I climbed aboard a bus to Iași and tried not to worry.

Few parts of the developed world embrace the motto “you can't get there from here” with the enthusiasm of the old Soviet Bloc. Under advanced socialism, border crossings even between fraternal nations were never really encouraged. There was the understanding that if you really needed to cross a border, you would pour over it with armored divisions. And there was little reason for trade between the satellite states when their goods could more usefully be sent directly to Russia. The massive changes since 1989 have made the old borders far more permeable, but they haven't done much for the infrastructure. The train cars may be new, but they still run on a 1983 timetable. And no one has the budget to even contemplate building new roads, when the old ones need so much help adapting to the sudden presence of actual cars.

So the eastern half of Europe is very poorly and strangely connected. Ljubljana is practically on the Italian border, but getting from there to Trieste (72 km) means a seven hour train ride, despite the lack of any border formalities. Suceava (Romania) is 40 kilometers from Chernivtsi (Ukraine), but there is at best one bus a day. Lviv to Kraków (390 km) requires a nine hour train ride, complete with a wheel change. Timișoara is 119 kilometers from Belgrade, but the one daily train takes a sleepy five hours to reach Belgrade after leaving Timișoara at 5 AM.

In the Balkans, things are even worse. Most of the Croatian coast is only accessible by air from western Europe, except in summertime. And if you want to go to Albania, it's probably easier to fly in from Italy than travel overland from any neighboring country.

In Iași I enjoy a pizza covered in the inevitable cașcaval (“tastes like velveeta, smells like feet!”*) and wander around the edge of town for a while. Every second store is a branch of some regional bank, a mysterious pattern common to all of eastern Europe. The central bus station is a large, empty lot surrounding a little sheet-metal roof and some benches. I am not confident that the maxi-taxi to Chișinău will be clearly labeled, and i don't speak enough Romanian to ask for help. But the gruff guy in the information kiosk sees me fretting and walks out to calm me down. “Vine, vine. Cinc minut!” ["it will get here in about an hour"].

If you think of Romania as a big round goldfish, Moldova is the remora that has attached itself to its back. There's no real geographical reason for the border between the two countries; rather, it's a historical artifact of old wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The two sides ended up drawing a line along a dinky little river called the Prut, surrounded on both sides by the same rolling landscape of dark earth and bright green fields. Like everywhere else east of the Carpathians, this is prime invadin' country.

The maxi-taxi to Chișinău is a big creaky van with soft seats. I am the fourth passenger, after an elderly Moldovan couple and a young woman up front who seems to be friends with the driver. Soon after leaving the city we pick up the first of many hitchikers, a smiling blond woman and two kids who look to be about thirteen. The kids are dressed in old muddy jeans. One of them has a pair of disintegrating sneakers completely covered in mud. They get out after a few miles, while the woman stays on.

Near the border the driver pulls over to tighten the lug nuts on each wheel - an ominous sign that I don't pick up on. The blond woman takes off running down a nearby dirt road, and we spend a long time waitng for her to come back, out of breath and apologetic, carrying a basket. The van is full of other cargo, notably several dozen bottles of tasty Borsec mineral water being taken to their fate in Moldova. I'm the only person with a suitcase.

We are met at the Moldovan border by Ann Coulter, looking dashing in a Soviet officer's cap, military jacket, black miniskirt and heels. For a moment I worry that I have taken something other than dramamine, and have wafted into some weird Republican fantasy. But the pseudo-Coulter turns her head and the resemblance fades. Her colleague is much more conservatively dressed, wearing full military uniform and the familiar expression of distaste common to border guards the world over. It is no fun being asked to do one's easy and well-paying job. I notice that the Moldovan border patrol is an enthusiastic contestant in the popular post-Soviet game, "who wants to wear the ugliest shade of green"?

Things have been tense lately between Moldova and Romania, but there is no unpleasantness at the border. We are pretty much the only people there. Coulter brings us back our passports, but before we can leave the security perimiter a grandma appears and knocks on the van door. She is selling filled pastries, kept warm through some kind of black magic.

The next two hours are unforgettable. It's not clear whether the roads are just more awful here than on the Romanian side, or if it's the driver's decision to go at full speed that's to blame, but everyone is bouncing all over the van. Luckily for me, the dramamine has kicked in and I feel no sense of motion sickness. Unluckily for me, the dramamine has kicked in and I am so drowsy that I fall asleep for a few seconds after each major bump, waking up only when my head whips around from the next one.

Every few minutes the van stops to admit or expel a hitchhiker. The protocol seems to be that you can flag down whatever passing bus or van you like, and it will stop and take you for a negotiated fee. After what seems like a very long time we bounce our way from open fields to the outskirts of Chișinău, and soon we are under a leafy canopy of trees, zipping around an old but pretty city. The last passenger hops out at the corner of a large park, and i figure it's a good time to make my own exit. I find myself standing in a beautiful, tree-lined street, next to a clean and beautifully maintained park. People are strolling along, all the signs are in Russian, and it isn't even raining anymore.

* I will one day have a lot to say about cașcaval, a.k.a kashkaval, a.k.a кашкавал, a.k.a. cacciocavallo. I have spent far too much time with this cheese of a thousand faces to leave it without comment. But revenge, unlike cașcaval, is a dish best served cold.

Idle Words Spring Offensive

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0300

I will be heading east in a couple of weeks to nose around Moldova and Ukraine. I would love to meet people who live in Chisinau, Odessa, or the curiously skinny republic of Transnistria (actual slogan: "Compared to Moldova, this is like the Riviera"). If you live there, or have contacts there, please drop me a line!