Back in Romania

Written on August 25, 2008

I am now in Bucharest for the first time in my life. It is true! I haven’t gotten around to go here during my two years in Moldova. I know it is a bit embarrassing but at least I am here now. My trip here was nice. I took the night train and this time I had very pleasant company in my compartment. A Moldovan girl who had gone to university in Bucharest and who was now looking for a job there (her sister was also living there since many years), and a Romanian guy who had visited friends in Chisinau. He on the other hand was working on and off in Italy, but was now considering investing his money in a small business in Romania. I.e., they were both quite typical for this part of Europe and we had some interesting discussions.

Even though I have never been here, Bucharest does not seem foreign to me. I think that it is the language that makes everything feel like home. Being able to understand what people say around you really makes a difference. Besides, Chisinau is home for me now, and this is the language that people speak in my home-town. Bucharest is also a very European city and everything seems very familiar.

Later today, Jessica will arrive from Stockholm. We will travel around in Romania for almost a week and then go to Chisinau for a few days before she goes back to Stockholm.

Back in Lovely Chisinau with New Adventures Waiting

Wednesday morning, I flew back to Chisinau. After a very intensive week in Stockholm, I was a bit sad to leave and felt like I could have had a few more days there, to spend more time with my family and friends and to fix with my apartment, which is a bit of a mess after the renovation of our building this spring. But once I arrived in Chisinau, I was really happy to be here. I guess the fact that it was 30 degrees and the sun was shining when I got off the plane helped a bit, but I was also happy to get back to my little house and to walk through beautiful Chisinau the short way to my office. (No, I am not a workaholic. I came back a day later than planned and therefore worked the second half of the day.) And I really longed to see my friends here again. In the past few months, I have really felt like I have my home here and I was happy to come back.

But I only have a few more weeks here in Chisinau before it is time to leave for good. Yesterday, I got the final confirmation that my transfer to the World Bank HQ has been approved, and I will most likely move to Washington DC in the beginning of October. Even though I have known about it for quite some months now, I did not want to write about it here before it was final. And now it is confirmed. It is for real! And yet, it seems a bit like a dream! Before I leave Moldova, I will travel to the Balkan for my new assignment. (I will work mainly with Balkan countries and with countries in Central Asia, along with a few other countries.) And next week, I am meeting Jessica in Bucharest and we will travel around Romania for a few days and then she will come back to Chisinau with me. I am SO looking forward to her coming here!

But leaving Chisinau will not be easy. When I moved from Rome, I was quite ready to leave. This time it is different. I can think of at least a dozen different reasons, from my work situation at FAO and the contracts that I had there compared with my employment here, to how different it is to be a foreigner in these two countries. Or it is simply because I am getting older and am less restless (something I am quite happy about actually – the latter that is!). Regardless of why I have felt so comfortable here, I will miss Moldova very much! My two years here were in many ways very different from what I thought they would be, but I have learned so much –in my work, from the people that I have met, and about the region.

At the same time, I am of course extremely happy about the opportunity to get to work at the HQ and excited to get to work with new countries, and I will be forever grateful to everyone in my surrounding that has supported me. Especially to my supervisor who suggested that I would try to come over and work with him in DC instead and who then made it happen. I hope I will manage to meet his expectations over the next year. If not, these three years will have been a fantastic experience and will probably have opened up many opportunities for me in other places, so I am not so worried about the future. Right now, I am just enjoying the moment – my moment!

A Few Impressions on the Way

Jonas and I made some comparing bullet points over some trivia that are of course of no real interest, but just for fun:

• Best food: Moldova;
• Best beer: Ukraine (according to Jonas – I drank wine in some countries);
• Most luxurious hotel we stayed in: Sibiu;
• Most designed hotel we stayed in: Vilnius;
• Coolest hotel we stayed in: Hotel George in Lviv;
• Most horses and carriages on the roads: Romania;
• Least cars on the roads: Belorussia;
• Most boring bus stops: Ukraine (the bust stops are in general very arty throughout all the former Soviet Union);
• Scariest waitresses: Ukraine;
• Best boarder crossing: Moldova and Belorussia, and the Shengen non-control between Lithuania and Latvia of course  (though they were all ok, except for the one between Ukraine and Romania);

I also realized that many of you do not know who Jonas is. Jonas is one of my best friends and the closest I have to a brother. We have known each-other since we were six years old and he moved in next door to me, and I walked in on their back yard to check out the new family. We went to the same class for nine years, before we chose different programmes in high-school but even then, we were still in the same school. In addition, our mothers are really good friends and Jonas parents now live on the corner of Vikingagatan (the Viking Street), where I too have my apartment in Stockholm (it was really a coincidence that we all ended up on that street). This is far from the first time we travel together ad hopefully not the last. (Though by the end of our trip, Jonas commented that it was amazing that we still had something to talk about after 2.5 weeks…)

Minsk and the Rest of the Trip

Our perhaps most exotic destination (if anything in the former Soviet Union can be defined as exotic) was probably Minsk. At least Belarus was the only country that we needed a visa for. I did not really know what to expect from Minsk. I heard very different views from people who have been there, both that it was quite sleepy to that it was far above expectations. What I did not expect however was the quite beautiful city that we met. I think I had pictured more of a fairly grey city with post War communist buildings. Minsk was however a mixed city in terms of architecture and a very green and clean city with many nice areas. Even the suburbs that we went through were well maintained and did not the give the depressing impression that so many of the suburbs from the Soviet era do.

Basically, we spent the entire day just walking around the city and looking at different sites. Unlike most other places around the former Soviet Union, Minsk has kept all the names of place and all the statues from before the independence, and hence, we found both the Communism Street, the Engle Street and a Lenin statue. We ate well and the local beer was good. The only bizarre thing were prices, which due to inflation now reaches quite high numbers, and thus we had dinner one evening for over 100.000 rubles (about € 30).

The people we saw seemed to do ok, though I have to say that the EU fashion has not really come to Minsk yet. It reminded me a bit of Finland in the early 1990s, with kids in heavy metal t-shirts and torn jeans. Quite a few Western brands had however reached Minsk (including Mc Donald’s of course), but there were less adds and billboards and smaller, more discrete signs on the shops. Jonas and I agreed that it was really nice to see the actual city instead of it being covered with names of brands and shops. People, especially adolescents) seemed to meet up by the river in the evening with a couple of bottles of something and just hang out. We saw some restaurants and bars, but there seemed to be less than in Chisinau for example, so I guess having a few drinks by the river was a good alternative.

Except for the limited advertising and the overly clean city, it was difficult to see the impacts of the political system during the short time that we spent there. In the kiosks, I saw some of the foreign magazines such as Elle, Cosmo and National Geographic, but I am not sure if they had any of the more political magazines. I also wanted to use the internet at the hotel one day and even though I pre-paid for the internet time in cash and I could only access the wireless in the lobby, they still wrote down my room number very thoroughly and saved it on the computer. I couldn’t help but wondering if they traced that traffic. And speaking of traffic, there was very little traffic on the roads outside of Minsk, and especially on the way up towards Lithuania, where we barely saw any cars at all.

Minsk

Minsk

Minsk

A somewhat more patriotic poster than we are used to in the EU…

During the drive between Minsk and Vilnius, the country changed a bit. It seemed poorer and the houses and the grounds were less maintained, but I haven’t verified if this was a correct observations. Just before the boarder, we stopped for coffee in a little town. The town seemed lively enough, but we could not find a single restaurant or canteen, even when we asked people there, and the closest thing to a café that we found was a mini-market that served coffee and that had a few tables inside.  People were really nice and asked us were we were from, but I have never seen a place in Europe were time seemed to have stand still in the way that it did there. Though people did not seem to wear old clothes, I got flashbacks to the 1980s and it was like the past 20s years had completely escaped this part of country – like modern communication had not quite reach all the way there. The town itself did not seem to have undergone a lot of changes either. A Lenin statue was still standing outside the Town Hall and the small stores probably looked exactly like they did during the Soviet Union, though with a bit more products on the shelves.

Crossing the boarder to Lithuania was easer than expected. Above all, I was really surprised that no-one checked our trunk neither when we left Belarus nor when we entered the EU. We could have brought whatever we wanted across the boarder. For the trucks trying to drive across the boarder, it was a different story, and we passed kilometres of trucks standing in a non-moving queue, waiting to cross. It is insane!  

Entering Lithuania was like coming home. Everything seemed so familiar. It is quite interesting that so much in the EU is being harmonized and how visible this is, in everything from infrastructure to brands and chains. The flows of goods and services across the boarders help this mainstreaming of course. And I have to admit that it was a relief to return to the use of the Latin alphabet!

Vilnius was very nice; beautiful and with a nice pace. We enjoyed it very much, and walked around the city the whole day. I would like to go back one day and spend some more time there.

Vilnius

The morning after we drove up to Riga, had lunch and a two-hour walk, and then took the ferry back to Stockholm in the evening. And Tuesday morning, we drove ashore in Frihamnen in Stockholm. After over 4000 km in Eastern Europe. Though it will probably take a while to process all my impressions, I have to say that it was probably one of my more interesting journeys that I have done so far. It was fantastic to discover another part of Europe, especially one that is so close to Sweden.

Riga

On our way to Stockholm

From Odessa to Minsk

Tuesday morning, we left Odessa and drove all the way up to Kyiv with only a stop at Ukraine’s beautiful Botanic Garden outside Uman. The highway passed outside of villages and towns, so we mostly saw fields on the way up to the capital. (That Ukraine’s domestic agricultural policies have an impact on the world’s grain markets becomes obvious when driving through the country.)

Kyiv was nice as always. We stayed at Hotel Bratislava a couple of metro stops outside the centre, and to save a bit of money, we decided to stay in a unrenovated room. The receptionist was reluctant to even give us the key, but we insisted. And no, it had not been renovated since the 1960s or the 1970s. The beds squeaked a lot at the slightest movement, and the bathroom left a lot to wish for. But it was quite cool to stay in true Soviet style for once. These rooms will for sure be renovated in a year or two.

Our first day, we mostly walked around the city, looked at the main sites and visited the Chernobyl museum (sad and dark). The second day, we went to the famous monastery caves at Saint Anthony’s Monastery. Jonas and I agreed that some of the monastery’s grandeur was probably lost to us because we are not religious. While the monastery was beautifully situated on a hillside above the Dnepr river, there was an immense commerce inside the monastery’s walls with icons, candles, scarves, and entrance fees. In the end, we only went down in the actual caves. I don’t know what I expected, but not really what I found down there. Inside the small rooms down the caves, there were glass coffins with mummified bodies wrapped in embroidered velvet drapes. The caves were full of people, all holding candles and many of them kissing the lids of each coffin that they passed. I just thought the whole experience immensely bizarre and somewhat tasteless and undignified.

The last thing that we saw in Kyiv was the Babyn Yar ravine (or park today), were approximately 100,000 Jews, Roma and others were killed during WWII. Of them, 35,000 people had been gathered there when the Nazis first occupied Kyiv in 1941, and in killed in 48 hours. The horrors that took place are simply beyond understanding!

Independence Square in Kyiv

Kyiv’s last statue of Lenin

In the afternoon, we continued our journey and drove up to Chernihiv, a few kilometre from the Belarusian boarder. I have to say that in spite of a population of 300,000 people, Chernihiv was an immensely sleepy town and I had the impression that very little goes on there, and the thought of being young there almost pained me. But perhaps it had something that we missed during our short stay there. We did however end up in the most central hotel in town (Hotel Ukraina), located in a building that seemed to have been an administrational building that had been turned into a hotel, with long corridors and concrete staircases. Our room was a small apartment with golden wall paper and golden curtains. But it was really comfortable as everything was brand new (except for the taste of the decorator, which seemed to have been stuck in the old communist style).

Jonas in Chernihiv

Friday morning, we headed towards the Belarusian boarder and Minsk. We had feared the boarder quite a lot and foresaw a lot of hassle, especially on the Belarusian side. But everything went smooth and I was even surprised to see that the boarder guards on each side were too lazy to even bother to check our trunk.

The road from the boarder to Minsk was really pretty and in some ways, it reminded me a bit of the Swedish country side. The houses had changed from stone cottages to wooden houses in the last kilometres of Ukraine, and in Belarus, almost all houses were made out of wood. The difference was only that in Belarus, all houses were really well taken care of and painted in nice colours. So were the roads. And the bus stops. And the street signs, and so on. Everything was very well maintained and many times even new.

We stopped for lunch and a coffee at one of the few roadside cafes that we passed (traffic was not exactly heavy in Belarus), and ended up watching part of the opening of the Olympics. I have to say that it felt a bit surreal, sitting there at a café in the middle of no-where in Belarus on 08/08/08, watching the opening of the Olympics from Beijing. But I guess that is the charm of travelling: that you experience things that you are not used to and do not do in your everyday life!

Люблю тебя мая Одеса

Three days in Odessa. My fourth visit in 1.5 years. And I never get tired of it. I just love the city and (hence the headline of the posting: “I love you my Odessa”, which was the slogan of a tourist campaign posted around the city when we were there). Valeriu and Doina came with us down to the seaside to spend the weekend at the beach. They had however brought a tent and stayed on the beach when we headed into Odessa Saturday evening, and then we joined them again the day after. (Needless to say, I was a bit tempted to stay with them and spend the night at the beach, but we had already booked our hotel.) So we had two relaxing days at the beach, not taking into account all the time it took to drive back and forth to the beach, which was quite far away but a lot better than the beaches closer to Odessa.

Monday, we stayed in the city, walked around a lot and saw the main sites. We also wanted to have lunch on the top floor of hotel Odessa, which is out on the pier by the Potemkin stairs. We were quite far away when I started getting hungry and we walked and walked, determined to have lunch out there. When we finally got there, it turned out that the restaurant was closed for renovation. By then it was already 3:30 in the afternoon and we were terribly hungry so we just sat down at the first restaurant that we saw when we got to the top of the stairs again. It turned out to be a “Mexican” place. But since I had not had a burrito in two years, it was fine with me. The waitresses were however not the least interested in their customers and looked mostly annoyed about our presence. And when we finally got our meal, we were almost scared of them and hurried to get out of there.

In the evening, we met up with Anna E, an acquaintance of mine who is moving to Minsk for work and who was in Odessa for two weeks to study Russian. I got super excited about the idea to study Russian in Odessa, so if I do not have any other plans for next summer, I will seriously consider doing that. 

It is interesting to see how Odessa has changed since the first time I was there in May 2007. Many of the buildings that were then being renovated have been uncovered from the plastic that used to cover them and are now shining in all their splendour. The City Park has also been reopened. At the same time, some buildings have been torn down, others are being renovated, and entire streets are dug up to be repaired. To me, some of the charm with Odessa is the fact that it is a bit rough while traces of its former glory can be seen through the dust and the faded painting. But I am sure that Odessa will be even more beautiful and grandiose in a few years, when the entire city centre had undergone renovations. And I am of course happy for the Odessians. To me it is really the jewel of the region!  

The Black Sea 

Sibiu, Driving to Moldova, and Two Days in Chisinau

We are now in Ukraine again since Saturday morning, and we have seen a lot since I last wrote. When we arrived in Sibiu on Monday night, little more than a week ago, we instantly felt that we wanted to stay for a while. There had been too much driving and too little relaxed tourism. And Sibiu was an amazing town, built in the middle-ages and with a myriad of small streets and allies, and with colourful merchant houses. Since Sibiu was the EU’s Cultural Capital of the East in 2007, the town centre has undergone immense renovations and is now shining colourfully and with newly laid stones on the pedestrian streets and in the squares. There were quite a lot of tourists in Sibiu, but mainly Romanians, and my impression was that there were still mostly locals hanging out on the bars and cafés in the centre in the evenings.

It was already quite late when we arrived on Monday evening and after looking around a bit for somewhere to stay, we ended up getting a room at a luxurious hotel that according to my guidebook dated back to the 1500s. It had now been renovated and probably lost some of its former charm, but there was still a lot of blue, white and gold, and high ceilings, giving it a bit of a royal touch. So it was quite different from our previous, back-packer style lodgings. I felt very posh!

The best about our stay in Sibiu was that we had plenty of time to walk around the town, but also just to sit and read in a park, and to relax and watch people at out-door cafés. I.e. very much vacation. The only thing that disappointed me a bit was that no-one was the slightest impressed with my Romanian. In Chisinau, it is not unusual that people comment on the fact that I speak Romanian (and not Russian) and are happy about the fact that someone has learned their language. But no-one in Romania even seemed to notice – they spoke Romanian with me and English with Jonas. And I was so proud of the fact that I could speak the local language!

Sibiu

On Wednesday, we started our long drive back to Chisinau. I thought in my ignorance that at least the first part through Romania would be quite smooth, and I mostly feared the border to Moldova and bumpy roads from there to Chisinau. It turned out that I was wrong. Due to road works in Romania, the first 130 km took tree hours. After that, there was less work on the roads, but oh so many villages to drive through! But even if it took time, it was nice to see how the landscape and the villages changed along the way to Moldova. When we drove through the Romanian region Moldavia, the rural areas started looking more like the ones that I have grown accustomed to of in these past two years. And it was interesting to see old Romania meeting new Romania, with all the roads and construction work, and at the same time passing an uncountable number of horses with carriages, transporting hay and agricultural produce.

When we finally arrived at the boarder to Moldova, it was ridiculously empty and we only had a few cars in front of us. After we had crossed the boarder, the road to Chisinau was perfect: newly paved and almost empty. It only took us about an hour to drive from the boarder to Chisinau. Needless to say, Jonas got a very good first impression of Moldova. 

Showing Chisinau to a friend was great. We walked around and looked at the sites around the city: old buildings and parks, communist monuments, the local hang-outs, and even UNIC (or ZOM), the old department store from the USSR. We also ate out a lot, and every time at a different restaurant. In Jonas’ view, Chisinau has by far the best food of all the countries he has visit so far on this trip. I can only agree!

Since we are going by car, I wanted to bring some things back to Sweden and so I started to pack up some of my things. It felt very strange and a little sad. After all, Moldova has been my home for the past two years, and even if I seem to have many new adventures waiting for me, I can’t help feeling a bit sad about leaving this lovely country.

Sunflower field in Moldova