Short on Chisinau

I know that I should probably have written a lot more about Chisinau, Moldova and life here. But it is so difficult. Besides statistics and facts, I only have my own impressions and I do not think that they are sufficiently reliable yet to make statements about this country. One of the worst things I know is people who have to categorize others, and say that “Oh, French are like this, and Italians are like this…” or “yes, but that is so typical Muslims”, or “yes but you know how men are…”, or “but you are a women and you women always do like this and this…”  And I do not want to do this with people here. I think you will just have to be content with smaller pieces from here and there, and try to form your own picture. I am sure that I will be able to provide you with more generalizations with time. But for now, the only thing I can say is that my first impression, that Moldovans in general are really nice and like to enjoy life, still stands. And Chisinau has become beautiful with summer. The city is green and very much alive with lots of outdoor restaurants, cafes and bars, and people are spending a lot of time in the parks. In many ways, I recognize the Swedes in the Moldovans and one thing is that people here also seem to live up a lot in the summer; they become more outgoing and social. So even though I had a very nice time here when I came and I have really enjoyed Chisinau this past winter, things are just getting better and better! 

If you are interested in what Chisinau looks like, check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnbc40aXzLA

And here is a quite funny Moldovan short movie, with my friend and neighbour Lars in the role as the sleazy doctor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7Sb1oimmM

And some other small glimpses of life in Chisinau:

Everyone here knows everyone more or less, and you bump into people you know all the time in the city. Sunday, I had lunch with some friends, then we went to an temporary Salvador Dali exhibition and after that to a park to read in the sun and in the evening, we went out for a drink at an outdoor café (yes, life is very hard here for us foreigners…), and during this time, I bumped in to eight persons that I know, both locals and foreigners. I also tend to know the same people though different groups of friends, especially with regards to my acquaintances that are from Moldova. So it is very small!

Many girls here walk hand in hand even when they are in their twenties. Someone told me that this is not a Moldovan tradition, it is just a trend right now, but it still is quite sweet I think.

However, if you are a girl, you are not supposed to shake hands when you meet someone. This is changing little by little as especially the younger generation is going abroad, but it still happens to me now and then and it makes me feel terribly small and degraded. Especially when I come with an all men + me team and the men we meet (the Government in Moldova is still dominated by men) shake hands with everyone except me. Fortunately this is more an exception than a rule and I am learning to take the initiative, and to stand out more among my more senior colleagues and not look like the intern…    

One by one, Chisinau’s many fountains that have been empty throughout the winter are being filled with water. One of my colleagues told me that you can see how well the capital’s economy is going by the number of fountains that have water in them. Fortunately, most fountains that I pass in my everyday life here have now been filled with water during the past couple of weeks, but some are still empty.

People in Chisinau are very found of the flowers of the season. Perhaps because the rural areas have been so dominating in Moldova (very few people that I know are actually from Chisinau – most of them come from villages) and people miss being able to go out and pick flowers. So in every other corner, there is an old lady or sometimes a man selling small bouquets of windflowers, daisies and others for a few lei. And when put in a glass on my kitchen table, they do bring in a scent of nature and of my childhood as I too used to pick these flowers as a kid.

There are a lot of stray dogs here in the city and they are really funny to watch because they really blend in. They really seem to have their own parallel world at the same time as they are quite involved with the human activities that are going on. They have their routines; I see more or less the same dogs when I walk to work in the morning. Some of them are hanging out outside stores, waiting for deliveries of fresh food, whereas other have their favourite cafes or restaurants where they wait around, hoping for leftovers. Sometimes, you can see them playing together in groups in the parks, and other times they are just strolling around town, and even using the crosswalks to cross the major streets. It reminds me a bit of a Disney movie, where animals are the main characters.

More to come…

Three Days in Kyiv

Right now, I am sitting in a hotel room in Kyiv (or Kiev in Russian), looking out of the window over a large city filled with lights. I am here on a short trip visiting our regional office for a three day training session. 

What can I say about Kyiv? Well, as with Odessa, I did not know what to expect and I sure did not expect a city of this size. For it is a really a big city, with a myriad of different styles and architectures. From 1000 year old orthodox churches to Stalinist buildings, giant communist apartment blocks and modern glass complexes. My hotel, Hotel Bratislava, is a giant 14 stories high concrete building a couple of metro stops from the city center. (The metro, by the way, is really cool. It goes extremely deep down under ground in the center, with part of it really nicely decorated from when it was built and the steps in the escalators are made out of wood.) The hotel has been renovated not too long ago but it still has a flare of “Soviet luxury”. And the breakfasts are great, like at all hotels that I have stayed at in former Soviet Union republics.

Like I said, Kyiv is a big city. Too big to get a good picture in three days, especially when working during the days, but it seems vibrant and much better off than Chisinau. (I am beginning to realize that most places are…) I have not had the time to go out in the suburbs but the city center is very nice, situated on the top of a hill with the Dnipro River below. There are a few islands in the river and beaches along the banks. Parts of the city were destroyed during WWII but there are still a lot of typical Russian style 18-19:th century architecture around, making some areas extremely pretty.

The inhabitants seem nice too (though I had a bit of a problem communicating with them since I do not speak Ukrainian or Russian), and above all very relaxed. I walked around a bit after work and in every little park and on every small set of steps, people are gathering and hanging out over a few beers, enjoying the first summer evenings.

Finally, I have to give credit to my colleagues. During my three nights here, I have been invited for dinner by two persons in the office (one of which I hardly knew but who has a Swedish wife and therefore wanted to introduce us), and everyone has made sure that I am ok in the hotel, that it is easy to get to work in the mornings, that I have something to do in the evening, etc. So immensely considerate!  

Proud to be European!?

One of my goals for this year was to get to know the region that I am in as much as possible (and with the region, I mean the countries that during my childhood used to be closed off behind the Iron Curtain). To learn about their history and culture and to see what life is like there today. So when Jonas (my childhood friend for those of you who do not know him) and I decided to meet up somewhere half way between Stockholm and Chisinau, Budapest seemed perfect. My only connection with the city was that my roommate in the U.S.,12 years ago (Lina), was second generation Hungarian and had been there a lot, visiting her mom’s family as a child, and she would sometime tell me stories about life in communist Hungary. But here in Chisinau, I have met quite a lot of people who have been there and everyone has told it is beautiful and well worth visiting.

And it was! I must confess that Jonas and I were real tourists there. We did not know a single inhabitant, nor had we gotten any tips about what to do or see there from anyone who had lived there. We only followed our guidebooks but since we did not encounter any larger tourist crowds, it was ok and we did see a lot. Our impression was that Budapest is a city filled with young people who like to enjoy life and who are getting the means to do it. We saw very few old persons; both during the days and at night time, we met mostly young people out.  And in general, people were extremely nice and seemed laid back – like life should not be taken too seriously. (We also did not see any politically engaged students, alternative bars or sub-groups, but perhaps we did not go to the right places.)

Apart from strolling around in Buda and Pest, and seeing all the major sites, we also managed to visit a few museums (I couldn’t miss Liszt’s house for example!) and we spent half a day in one of Budapest’s many famous baths. 

The first days, we tried to find traditional Hungarian places to eat at but after a while, we gave up the idea of eating only traditional Hungarian food and resigned to the more modern restaurants, cafes and bars that are spreading over across the city, where a more innovative cross-cultural kitchen is served. (The food was great by the way!) Most of the places looked very trendy and some of them had fantastic interior design. Overall, the city has (in my opinion) really nice architecture for Central Europe and several places that we went to were located in old jugend style (art nouveau/art deco) buildings with really cool interiors.

So overall, it was a fantastic trip. There were only two things that overshadowed the otherwise completely bright weekend, and that were two reminders of true evil. The first one was an exhibition that we found in the Citadel up on the Gellérthegy hill. When we entered it, we had the impression that it would be an exhibition of historical photos from Hungary, but it turned out to photos of children in conflicts. It started with photos of Hungarian Jewish kids during the holocaust, and continued with the evacuation in Northern Norway during WWII, the Korea war, Vietnam, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, today’s Iraq and other – all showing kids deliberately targeted (sometimes participating as child soldiers) or unintentionally trapped in between. It is impossible to explain these pictures in words, but it was difficult to breath only after having seen a few of them. How can we let this take place?

After Jonas had left for Sweden a day before me, I went to the House of Terror on Andrássy Út. (http://www.terrorhaza.hu/index2.html) This building was once used as the HQ for the Hungarian ultra-right party, the Arrow Cross Party (then being called the House of Loyalty) and when the Nazi occupants came in 1944, the basement was used as a prison. After the Soviet invasion, the communist-led Political Police started using the building for their activities and after the war, the State Security Police used it for about a decade.

The house was mostly filled with pictures and TV-screens showing film clips from Hitler’s speeches, the insane spectacle of pre-WWII army parades, and the Jewish population and other prisoners being transported off to camps. It continued with pictures from the Gulag labor camps, the post WWII communist propaganda, the 1956 revolution and of the things that happened after that in Hungary. The tour around the house ended with a lift slowly taking small groups down to the basement while a man explained in detail on video how prisons used to be tortured and executed one after the other according to a certain method. In the basement where the lift stopped were all the prison cells and the neck breaking machine that the man in the video had described. Despite the place being cleaned up and despite all the other visitors around me, I shivered and felt a bit panicked while being there. It was like an echo of all the evil things that had happened there still remained in the walls. (I feel a bit sick just by writing about it.)

A few weeks ago, I saw the Eurovision Song Contest (both the semi-final and the final) for the first time in almost 10 year. This year 42 countries competed (when I was a kid, there used to be around 20), from Portugal, France and the UK in the west and Sweden and Island in the north, to Russia, Armenia and Georgia in the east and Turkey in the south. Small countries like Moldova, Montenegro and Cyprus competing against large countries like Germany, Spain and Ukraine. And Serbia won (which perhaps says more about the spread of the diaspora than indicates the hit-parameter of the song, as the contest is now decided by sms voting). My general opinion about this contest has been that it is a bit ridiculous and that the quality of the music is so bad that it is better to spend your time knitting than watching this. But though the music was still really bad, I could not help feeling a bit proud to be from this so widely diversified continent with all its countries, cultures and religions. 42 countries with all their inhabitants under the common name of Europeans!

But then I saw these exhibitions and the horrors that have taken place here only during the past century – that we Europeans let happen – and the thought that repeatedly came to my mind was that we most be the cruelest people on the planet. How all this could happen; so many people dead – executed or just as a consequence of wars and dictatorships is completely incomprehensible! Seeing all of it made me very ashamed of being European.

It will take a very long time and many, many good-doings from our parts to up-weight all we have done in the past (and not only here on our own continent). However, seeing the exhibitions also reminded me of what a miracle the EU actually is. That France and Germany only seven years after all these horrors had taken place and after centuries of wars, actually decided to cooperate and to create mutual dependence. That we today are 27 countries in our Union and that countries in which some the worst crimes against humanity were committed only 20 years ago, now have stable democratic systems with above all a state governed by law and the separation of powers. And that this was finally achieved without weapons or wars. We should not relax just yet, but at least we know that it is possible.

My First Trip to Odessa

A few weeks ago, I visited Ukraine and Odessa for the first time in my life. I had of course heard of Odessa before I came here, but I did not have any image of the city, nor of Ukraine, in my head. I think I thought of Ukraine as a much larger version of Moldova, i.e. vast rural areas dominated by an agricultural landscape and with small villages with pretty but quite simple architecture. And perhaps it is partly true. I have not seen more than a fraction of this large country (the second largest in Europe after Russia). But Odessa definitely did not match this image.

Getting there was quite complicated. I went there with a Swedish friend, Andreas, who fortunately speaks Russian (mine is non-existent though I am planning on learning). Andreas had already bought tickets the day before for the 7:45 bus. Due to the situation with Transnistria (Transdniestria), no trains go between Chisinau and Odessa, and trains rides are generally slower here than buses anyway because of the poor infrastructure. We would have preferred to take a bus directly over the Ukrainian boarder in the south of Moldova for the same reason, but there were no buses going that way that fitted our time schedule, so we decided to go through Transnistria.

We planned to meet up at the bus station around 7:15, just to be on the safe side. Organized as I am, I was of course there 7:10, and waited for a while for Andreas. I knew he had been out partying the night before, but I thought I wouldn’t act as miss goody-goody and check that he actually was up, though the thought crossed my mind several times. Around 7:20, I couldn’t take it anymore and so I called. Twice actually, since he didn’t answer the first time. And of course he was asleep! But he promised to jump into a taxi and be there in 15. Well, 7:30, he calls me again. He had forgotten his passport. I thought about it a bit and decided that it wasn’t the end of the world if he didn’t make it, there were more busses that day. But in the end, Andreas arrived in time for the bus. The big achievement was that I managed to explain to the bus driver in Romanian that my friend was on his way with the tickets that we had bought the day before, which this in itself was a bit of a milestone for me. It means that my Romanian now is good enough to actually travel around in Moldova and Romania by myself, which adds a lot of freedom and independence to my life.

Anyway, getting into Transnistria was ok, but getting out was more difficult. We had to fill out forms in Russian, assuring that not only were we not bringing out bombs, nuclear material, or chemical equipment, but also no information material in Russian.

Then we had to go into a small room with one of the customs polices/militaries, who posed questions and went through all of Andreas luggage. And Andreas was so hangover that I thought he was going to faint. He also checked my handbag. I know that they can be very paranoid with diplomats and since I had both my UN Laissez Passer passport and my diplomatic ID (in order to get back into Moldova again), I was a bit nervous about his reaction. But though he was so thorough in his job, the fact is that he never recognized them. Instead, he asked us if we had any drugs. (No, of course.) – Any E? (No again.) – Not even a little?? Don’t know if they get supplies for their parties this way, but unfortunately we had to disappoint him and so he let us go.

But when arriving in Odessa, it was worth all the trouble. My first impression is that Odessa is like a mix between Barcelona and St Petersburg. It has the Mediterranean, summer resort feeling that Barcelona has despite being a big city and Odessa is also full of art details and artistic architecture. Yet the architecture is the Russian, grandiose, late 18:th/early 19:th century style that I remember from St Petersburg. It also had the grand parks easily accessible for everyone, which I find typical for the communist era. In addition, it is a port city and has always had a highly ethnic and religious mix of inhabitants, so it is a very vibrant city. I loved it! It is still in need of a lot of renovation and restructuring, but the shabby facades, smashed windows, and the old-fashioned shops are a reminder of what the city and its inhabitants have actually been through during this past century.

We stayed in one of the old Soviet Union sanatoria from the 1960s, located right at the beach. It was very institutional-like, but I kind of liked it. During the Soviet Union, everyone got a yearly free holiday to one of these sanatoria. From what I understand, they were divided and profiled according to profession. The workers had access to medical personnel and to the baths, and they got three meals a day so they could really rest for a few weeks. Kind of like the Soviet Union version of Club Med. In general, there are very few things that people miss with the Soviet Union, but the memory of these free vacations is something that tends to make people a bit nostalgic.

Some of these places are still working like sanatoria, i.e. you have to stay for 12 or 24 days, but ours was more like a hotel. But we did take a dip in the in-door swimming pool, designed after an ancient Roman theme, and the medical service was open if we would have needed it. We also ate a few meals in old dining hall, where a couple of groups of mostly big Ukrainian men in workers’ outfits were eating in complete silence. In a way, it was like traveling in time.

This was my first trip to Odessa, but it will definitely not be the last!

Grey Chisinau

 They say that it is always raining in Chisinau on Orthodox Easter. And so it did also this year. At least Thursday before Easter, and on Friday the streets were very wet here and rain was hanging in the air. When it is raining in Chisinau, which it has on alarmingly few occasions during the six months that I have been here, the city gets very grey. As a kid, I always pictured Eastern Europe very grey for some reason. It probably had to do with the sceneries in Western produced spy movies from the cold war era, many of them taking place at night time in urban areas and some of them even made in black and white. But when it rains here or gets cloudy, parts of Chisinau kind of matches this childhood image of mine. This is mostly due to the lack of painting of the houses. Despite a construction boom all around Moldova, many old houses are still in need of major renovations and new paint on the facades, and the grey limestone is very visible in the urban landscape. The houses which have been blessed with some new paint tell me, however, that Chisinau will not be so grey during rainy season in a few years. Bright, clear colors are used and each owner paints in his or her color of choice. A collogue of mine from Washington told me how she had visited a village here a while ago and commented how pretty it was that all the small houses and fences were painted in a bright grass green color, whereby one of the villagers snapped that they hadn’t had much choice because there was only one color to buy during the Soviet Union. But this has changed and hence in a few years, another Swedish Junior Professional here might write a similar article on his or her blog, giving it the title “Colorful Chisinau”

Welcome

I guess we are all more or less knowledgeable in various things, and to be honest, blogs are not my main domain. Before going a head with this project, I consulted my Finish friend Risto who has more expertise in the area, and according to him, blogs tend to be more sustainable when based on a theme. So I have for the past weeks tried to come up with a theme and it has been more difficult than I expected. There is simply so much to write about! But I think that the focus will be my life, what I do and what I see. And there will probably be a lot of focus on issues related to my job. Because, sad as it may seem, my job is my life and my passion. Not once have I had second thoughts about my choice in becoming an economist (even though I once doubted that I would have made the choice of going to university at all, had I done my trip to Guatemala, gotten the taste for travelling and met all the inspiring people I met there, at the age of 19 instead of 28). But I will spare you the economic theories, and write more about general development issues. Hopefully, there might also be some reflections on other parts of life too, especially since I am newly arrived in a country and this, as always when I move to a new place, becomes a period of reflection and re-evaluation.

I have also posted a number of photo albums, and will continue to do so when I visit new places. They are perhaps mostly a way to show especially my family the places that I go to (I still haven’t had the occasion to show my mom the pictures from Kyrgyzstan yet, and I was there 1.5 years ago…). But they are also for my friends outside Sweden to see bits of my Swedish life and vice versa. However, don’t have too high expectations about my photographic skills…

2006

As I have been horrible at writing to some of you, I will briefly try to summarize 2006. In three words, the summary would be Rome, work and travel. An extended version would include cool people and new friends. And of course Chisinau.

Rome

In March 2006, Rome was the place where I had lived the longest except for Stockholm. I had then spent one year and seven months there. (The previous longer-time residing had been in Paris, where I all and all have lived for one and a half year.) But despite this, I still did not really feel like Rome was my home. It was strange. I loved much of what the city had to offer: its history, architecture and art; the food, wine and the coffee. And I lived in a beautiful apartment with my wonderful flatmate Anna, in whom I had a best friend. I thought that it was perhaps because I am getting older, that it is more and more difficult to settle down in a new place. (Now that I have started all over again in Chisinau, I know that was not the reason.) There were certain things I missed in Rome, but I think that most of all, I missed many of my close friends. Not only the comfort of being with people that, knowing that they know me inside and out, but also our discussions and the way they challenge me.

So from January 2006, I started going back to Stockholm about once a month. With low-cost airlines flying between the cities, this was easily possible just by giving up a bit of shopping. And it was worth every forgone piece of clothing! Not only to better keep in touch with friends and family in Sweden, but also to get some perspective and realize that although it was jolly holiday when I came home during the summers and Christmas, the more I started to come home, the less time people had to meet up. Life is very hectic in Stockholm and calendars are normally booked weeks in advance. I started remembering that, despite good efforts from everyone, I often didn’t see many of my friends more than once or twice a month even when I was living there. And I realized that although though I give up certain things by not living in Stockholm, I would give up so much more by leaving my work and the life that comes with it, to move back.

Things also changed in Rome, or maybe it was I that changed. My Italian improved quite a lot (thanks to some very patient Italian fiends), which was a relief and really made my life easier. Two friends that had left in 2004/2005 moved back and introduced me to new, very nice people. In late spring, I moved into a room more centrally located in the city and only 7 min walk from work (by Piramide), which made my life much more flexible and saved me a lot of time. And then, after a trip to Stockholm in June when I came back to work, one of my colleagues greeted me “Welcome home!”, and at last, I knew that it was right. Rome had finally become my home!

Now that I have left the Eternal City, I am thinking of what I picked up there, what I will keep with me, and what I will miss. Italian pizza, pasta and coffee are already on the list. (I didn’t even drink coffee before coming to Rome.) A new weakness for having aperitivi at piazzas, probably. But perhaps more importantly is the knowledge and understanding of so many things related to Western society, history and art that I gained by living where so much has its origins. Just the tremendous fortune of being able to visualize and even feel the smells and noises when reading references to Rome and other places, buildings and art objects in books. To recognize how architecture all around Europe and North America has copied buildings like Terme di Caracalla and the Pantheon. It makes the world smaller and easier to understand.

Work

The spring of 2006 also turned out to be good with regards to work. I think that those who worked with me might laugh while reading this, because I have never worked so much in my entire life, with workweeks more common than not approaching 60 hours and with most weekends in part given up for a couple of hours in my office or working at home. In the end, I thought it was too much, because the work load never diminished until I finished my contract, but I enjoyed immensely working in the division where I spent my last six months in FAO. My major assignment was related to preparing a number of reports for the Committee of Food Security’s annual meeting. The meeting in 2006 differed a bit from past meetings in that it was the half-time period for the goals that were set up during the World Food Summit in 1996, of which the most important is to halve the number of undernourished in the world till 2015. This goal has been politically controversial and not all states agreed on this. Instead, the second indicator under the Millennium Development Goal no 1, to halve the amount of undernourished, became somewhat a compromise. So most of the documents focused on evaluating how this and the list of other goals that were set up in 1996 are proceeding in different countries. And it is not going very well. The MDG is approaching its target better as population is increasing, but the number of hungry people in the world remains more or less constant. Today, there are around 850 million undernourished people around the world. Even here in Moldova, more than 10 % of the population is suffering from undernourishment. Considering that we do produce enough food in the world to feed everyone on our planet, this is of course a disgrace. But the worst is perhaps that while really poor countries like Vietnam and Ghana (with per capita GDPs of 471 and 269 US$ per year respectively) have succeeded really well in decreasing hunger, more than a third of the countries where hunger has increased the most in the past 15 years has a per capita GDP of above US$ 3000 per year. Totally unacceptable! About 25,000 people die every day from causes directly linked to hunger. I can’t even find words to describe how I feel about it… I believe that this is one of the issues that my grandchildren will ask me how we in the Western world, with so much resources and knowledge, could be so passive.

The State of Food Insecurity (SOFI 2006) for those of you who are interested in reading more:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0750e/a0750e00.htm

My work in itself was very research oriented. It was very interesting and I learned a lot. But regardless of how much I enjoyed my work, my colleagues and the environment in FAO, my work situation (and that of most other people in my age in the organization) was not sustainable in the long-run. With three months contracts, no vacation and no retirement plan, it had to come to an end and so I started looking around a bit for other jobs and sketch some alternative plans. I didn’t have to do that much planning before I was called to interviews in Sweden for two assignments as a Junior Professional Officer for the World Bank Country Offices in Moldova and Kyrgyzstan. And the rest is history.

Travel

Although 2006 did not offer as exotic travel destinations for me as 2005, when I had the opportunity to go to Tanzania, Turkey and Kyrgyzstan though work, I did see quite a lot of new places. And above all, I realized a childhood dream and visited San Marino. Ever since I was a kid and I heard of this minimal country high up on a mountain in Italy, I wanted to go there. I have no idea how I heard about it, neither why it became such an obsession to see it. None of the other miniature states around Europe, like Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein or the Vatican (surprise, surprise) have seemed equally alluring. And with everything else there is to see in Europe and around the world, why a small country in the middle of Italy? I honestly don’t think it would have caught my attention, had I heard about it for the first time today (although you never know, as I right before Christmas read about the Russian island Sakholin and got super interested in going there). But it got stuck in my head as a kid and I have since become used to it being one of the places that I always wanted to see. So during a one-week trip in Northern and Central Italy this summer, I took a bus up to the top of Monte Titano. Did it meet my expectations? Well, yes and no. Without all the tourists and the duty free stores it would have. The view was beautiful and the fortress (or the towers) looked more or less like I pictured it. But I think the most important thing is that I got to see it because otherwise, I would never have known and I would always have wondered.

Another great trip was to Barcelona. Jenny and I went over the Easter holiday and I have to say that the city exceeded al my expectations. The atmosphere, the architecture, the people, the bars, its history, its contemporary art and life! I discovered Gaudí; his indescribable imagination and genius constructions. And had a whole new world of modern art opened up to me after a 2.5 hour audio guided tour at Fundació Miró.(If you are interested in seeing some pictures, look at the album Barcelona.)

In addition to this, I travelled a lot around Italy. As I wrote above, I did a one week tour in Northen and central Italy during the summer, during which I first me up with Therese and Niklas from Sweden at Lago di Garda, with whom I saw both Venice and Verona for the first time in my life. I then continued by myself for a few days and saw Ravenna with its fantastic church mosaics, stayed in Urbino for a few nights, right next door to the house where Raphael grew up, and took day tours to San Marino and Pèsaro. Other trips shorter trips during the spring and the summer went to Naples, Terracina, Pompeii and Florence, which were all fantastic places. As for Pompeii, what can I say except for in certain ways it seems like time has more or less stood still during these past 2000 years. Fast food, bars, hooliganism during derbies, students thinking their teachers are boring, rental ads for apartments, graffiti – nothing is new. I also went to Pisa a few times to visit Anna and her family and I loved the town. And I still have a lot to see of this beautiful and fascinating country. I will be forever grateful that work brought me to Rome and that I got the chance to live in Italy and really get to know the country, because there is a slight chance that I would have missed much of it otherwise. Now, it will instead always be like I am travelling in my home country. (For those of you who would like to see more photos from these trips, check out the album Italy.)

People

The best thing about travelling is all the people I meet, and I met a lot of cool and nice and interesting people in 2006. At FAO, I had the opportunity of working with supervisors that I learned a lot from, with volunteers that provided fantastic support in really stressful situations, seniors that I learned a lot from, and colleagues that I had a lot of fun with also when we thought that the work flow would never end.

In Rome, outside of work, I got to know a lot of really nice people without whom Rome would have been much more dull and unfriendly.  

Here in Chisinau, I have also been fortunate enough to both have very nice and helpful colleagues at work, and have met super cool people outside of work. Persons that have helped me get around in the city, find an apartment, explained how things work, introduced me to Moldovan traditions, showed me the cool places, where to find the best bargains, etc. Above all, I have met persons that have just been around, inviting me to things and taking me out. And the value of this should never be underestimated when moving to a new country! (I will get back to the people I’ve met here some other time, because I am very impressed by Moldavians, including many of my friends, for their determination and accomplishments. But more about this another time.)

Chisinau

The city that is so unknown that it doesn’t even exist in Word’s Swedish spell check… I didn’t really know what to expect before I came here. To be honest, I didn’t know a lot about Moldova at all before I had my interview. And I still can’t say much more about the country than some facts because I still haven’t travelled a lot.

But Chisinau embraced me immediately and I am still in love with this small city. There are about 750 000 people living here but the center is very small – in all dimensions. You can basically cross central Chisinau in any direction in less than half an hour and most buildings are one or two storeys high. In the center that is. As soon as you leave the central areas and go out in the different surrounding areas, there are enormous apartment complex in true Soviet style. But the city is not too densely populated so even these building have their charm.

But as a whole, this is a pretty and quiet and very green city. There are several large green areas with lakes around the center and some smaller, planned parks inside the city. There are trees everywhere, and a lot of park benches everywhere to just sit down and enjoy the surroundings. The low buildings in combination with relatively broad streets (at least in comparison to Rome) make it a very light city. And it is definitely the sunniest city in Europe that I have been to. Kind of like “Stars Hallow”: seasons but always with sunshine. It is beautiful!   

In a country where the per capita GNI is US$ 880 (2005) and where the 73% of the population lived under the poverty line in 1999, and more than 20% still do, I didn’t expect to find a fantastic offer of places to go out to. So I was positively surprised when I found quite a broad variety of nice restaurants, bars, cafes and night clubs. There is also a fairly active music scene (though mostly classic and folklore) and several theatres. Moldavians likes to have fun and enjoy life and so it is very pleasant to live here. (Shopoholics should not bother, though. The selection that stores have to offer is still quite limited and some Soviet style department stores are still in place.)

In conclusion

In conclusion, 2006 was an interesting year when quite a lot happened. In addition to all the things that happened in my life, my sister Emma got a daughter (Filippa) in July and so I became and aunt for the first time.