Moldova

After a short flight on Moldovan Airlines (yikes!), we landed in Chisinau only to find a similar fate as in Belarus…..no taxis. I grabbed Sharon and yanked her onto a bus that was just pulling away. Sure, the odds were good it was going to the center of town, but there was a bit of a leap of faith; I like traveling this way! Pretty minimal English in Moldova and everything was in cyrillic, but as we found most everywhere else, there were a few younger folk around who spoke English and two of them guided us right to the hotel (Park Central), a lovely place on a pedestrian street near Chisinau’s version of Central Park.

The check in staff was great and gave all info needed for the following day’s travels. The room was nice and the bed was terrific; our backs began to improve. The next day we did pretty much what everyone does in Moldova and that was to visit the Cricova Wine Cellars. We hopped on a bus and rode the 30 minutes to the winery, but found the only tour that was immediately available was in Russian; well, we’ve been to quite a few wineries, so we jumped on the tour which took us through part of the several hundred kilometers of underground caverns initially created by limestone mining. Man! It was cold down there, but quite interesting as this wasn’t exactly the sort of tour you’d ever get in the States. In the VIP room there were photos of the two most esteemed US visitors: John Kerry and John McCain. I can only imagine Trump visiting there and his aides removing the McCain picture; no, wait...Moldova would certainly be on the European shithole country list. Anyways, the tour was fun, the wines pretty decent and the bus ride back an easy one.

Wine Cellar Tour

For dinner, we discovered the amazing La Placinte. This was truly a local place since who visits Moldova except a few scattered o

200KM of Caves!

enophiles? Sharon had the second best rabbit dish (in white wine) I’ve ever tasted. The best? Michelin starred French Laundry. The difference was that it cost about 90% less. I went with the tamer beef stroganoff, but it was served over super delicious potatoes instead of noodles. A fine dish. I also enjoyed some of the best local soup called Soleanca. I gotta figure out how to make that at home. It was nice that they included some smoking hot serrano-like peppers since three weeks of no heat wasn’t making me happy. Total tab for the soup, a liter of great wine and the two mains was under $20! That’s not a typo.

We did observe that the average Moldovan isn’t a very happy person. In fact, about ten years ago it was rated the most unhappy country on earth. It has since “improved” to the 55^th most unhappy country. Some of these small countries were, no doubt, better off in a communist state; Moldova is basically run by a dictator who retains close ties to Moscow; meanwhile, a breakaway state, Transnistra, exists in the Northern part of the country and, to date, the government of Moldova is leaving them alone. Sadly, we didn’t have the time to make it up there since the next day involved a nine hour bus ride to Brasov, Romania.