Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Chisinau

As the ancient sleeper starts to pull out of Chişinau station, with me curled up and inert in a corner of one of those compartments of faded grandeur, it feels like a good time to reflect on this trip.

Lamps in the Stephen the Great park.

The Kyiv train. Maybe another time.

Moldova has been through an insane number of administrative shifts in recent times. In 1800 it was part of the Principality of Moldavia, along with northeastern Romania, which at that point was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire ruled by the Phanariot Greeks. Not long after, in 1812, the Moldovan part of Moldavia was ceded to Imperial Russia and constituted most of the Bessarabia Governorate. While the rest of Moldavia and Wallachia unified to become Romania in 1859, what is now Moldova remained Russian-dominated for the rest of the nineteenth century, with varying degrees of self-determination. In 1917, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, a Moldavian Republic was founded, first as an autonomous region within a federal Russia, then in 1918 as a fully independent state, before two months later it unified with (or was annexed to) Romania. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in 1940, the Russians strong-armed Romania into ceding the region to them again, becoming the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Despite the Romanians' best efforts (recapturing the area in 1941 with a little help from the Nazis, but then losing it again in 1944), it remained so until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991 the modern state of Moldova came into existence, and almost immediately the transition from state planning to an unfettered market economy caused financial crisis: it remains by far the poorest country in Europe by nominal GDP per capita. Today's government is pro-Romanian and westward-leaning, but that hasn't always been the case: from 2001 to 2009 the Communists were in power.

History museum.

All this means that the oldest living people in Moldova have lived through three separate periods of Russian rule, two separate periods of Romanian rule, and two separate periods of independence. What has this chequered history done to the city of Chişinǎu?

I'll be honest: I wasn't expecting much from Chişinǎu. This is one of the reasons I decided to spend more time in the countryside than in the city. On TripAdvisor, the top two things to do in the capital involve visiting parks, and the third is "Malldova", a shopping centre. Overall, though, I was pleasantly surprised. Both days I was in Chişinǎu I spent wandering around on foot, experiencing and learning about the place. It is an incredibly green city: if you want to get from A to B as a pedestrian, odds are that you'll be able to do a solid chunk of the journey without walking next to a road. The Stephen the Great park borders the cathedral park, which opens onto Chişinau's Eugen Doga pedestrian street. And these are lush, well-maintained parks full of people enjoying the greenery. To the west of the city, the much larger Valea Morilor park is more open, with a lake as its centrepiece, and is frequented by Chişinǎu's fitness freaks. This in turn is separated only by a single road from the Dendrarium, an enormous space for trees, skulking cats, and frolicking children. The heat picked up again over the last couple of days, but the tree cover in these parks meant that it was never unpleasant to explore them.

In the Dendrarium.

People seem happy and relatively well-to-do (though I'm aware this is likely only a city-centre phenomenon). The westward-lookingness is very prominent culturally too, with a lot of Chişinau's restaurants having American, German or especially French pretensions. If it doesn't succeed in being quite as Parisian as it apparently wants to be, that's understandable: Paris itself doesn't always succeed in being quite as Parisian as it apparently wants to be, either. As regards architecture, there are some horrible blunders – both Soviet and post-1991 – but also some beautiful eclectic and neoclassical buildings. One such is the National History Museum. Here, too, there's a westward-looking bias: the museum has lots to say about the Soviet era, none of it positive, but nothing at all to say about Romania's Nazi collaboration, other than to mourn the victims. There is, however, a whole room devoted to Old Orhei, and the lion's share of the finds are evidently here, not in the rather feeble archaeological museum I visited on site: I get a better feel for Old Orhei here, with the painstaking reconstructions and collections of silver ingots and coins, than I did at the place itself.

Former Soviet stadium, now overgrown

St Theodor of Tiron monastery on the outskirts of town

Flash forward. It's 8pm and we're at the border. Earlier I found out that A., a student I once taught at Konstanz, is on the same train, next compartment along, in one of those one-in-a-million chances. There's a bar car on the train, manned by a man who speaks Romanian and Russian. When I use my mixture of Duolingo level 1 Romanian and ropey Ukrainian on him, together with some hand gestures, to ask for the menu, he picks up his phone and shows me a photo of a fry-up with eggs and mici. I assent and put away a beer while he's cooking, in the process getting to know a garrulous New Zealander. The food comes and is magnificent; we waffle on. Later we're joined by A. and his partner, and I opt for another beer. 

Gauge change station at Ungheni.

We need to return to our compartments for passport control, and stay there while the train is switched to standard gauge and we cross into Romania proper; but it's a good opportunity for me to finish writing this post. This is what international travel should be like, not crammed like sardines into a flying tube!