The Road Less Traveled

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I woke up late and no one was home.  Lena had left a post-it note on the fridge that their assistant Sylvia would not be coming in the morning to make cirniki (fried sweet cheese patties).  I wasn’t feeling up to the adventure of boiling my own milk and coffee, and since seeing placintas (a long rolled flaky pastry with fruit or cheese inside) in the Fourchette supermarket yesterday, I’d had a real craving for them. I decided to walk up the street to the La Placinte restaurant I’d seen the day before.

When I sat down and looked at the menu, the placintas in the pictures looked different. The one called placinta looked more round and flat like a pizza. There was another variety that looked more like what I remembered, so I ordered a cherry one. Shortly after, the waitress came back and said the cherry one would take 25 minutes, so I ordered the apple.

I was embarrassed by the size of the thick perfect circle of cooked apple, pastry dough, and powdered sugar set before me, and the latte which seemed to be steamed milk with just a splash of coffee. I told myself I would not go again without friends to help me eat such a concoction.  But I was also determined not to waste it.  I’d skip lunch, I figured.

After gorging myself, I walked down the street to the park near the pedagogical university. Lena (the 22-year old university student in my Moldovan family) told me the park had been renovated, and that people line up to pay money to get it in or go there after they get married to have pictures taken.  I walked in, paid my 2 lei (students pay 1 lei), and found immaculate rows of flowers, hanging baskets of more flowers, trees, even a pond with ducks.

I walked back to the house to freshen up, then Lena came and took me to the Hippocrates Center which her mother Diana runs. The center provides physical and social services for children with disabilities, a rare service in a country where parents will abandon healthy or disabled children to work overseas. See http://www.chcmoldova.md for information on the center; click on “donatii” to give money to support their work.

When I walked into the center, one of the employees, Galina, shouted with wide eyes and open arms, “Bridget!” “Bowling!” before giving me a big hug. The last time I was in Moldova, I had gone with Diana and her colleagues to the bowling alley in Chisinau. (See my post, http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Reisefrau/dec-9-part-2-bowling-in-moldova.html, for a description of that experience.) That had been their first time ever bowling and I had to teach them the basics of it, though Diana told they have been bowling other times since then.  It never in my wildest imagination occurred to me that I would be remembered so strongly for teaching them how to bowl.  Other employees hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks and made similar comments before sitting me down—to what was left of their lunch.  Instantly set on a plate for me were pieces of bread with fried chicken or ham on them. And there were plates of placinta with cherry and placinta with cheese. At least I balanced it with fruit tea, tomato, and cucumber.

At the table sat two women from Britain, an occupational therapist and a recreational therapist.  I later found out Linda was from Kent (where my aunt’s mother lives so I’ve been there) and Renata was originally from Berlin but has lived with her husband for many years in Nottingham.  The three of us, Lena, and our driver Boris set out for the Purcari winery.

Although the winery is only 100 km from Chisinau, it took two hours to drive there. The roads are full of potholes that have to be avoided, and we also agreed that Boris is the most careful driver we’ve ever had in Moldova.  It’s good to have such a careful driver transporting disabled children and us.

We arrived at a chateau-like white building set among rows of grapevines.  We met our tour guide, Svetlana, who escorted us through the different stages of wine making.  To be honest, the tour felt out of order at times (we saw the labeling area before the barrels the wine matures in) so I’m still not sure I understood the whole process of fermentation and freezing and maturing and filtering.  But I understood big steel vats, old oak barrels (from France), bottles made of Italian glass so the wine can be exported to Europe,  spots for fishing, and the natural spring running under the grounds.

Our tour ended at the hotel and restaurant. We saw a 4-star suite. It costs 90 Euros a night, but you get three free mini-bottles of wine.  The restaurant had oil paintings hanging tastefully on the white walls, and three windows with a view of the vineyard that looked like a painting themselves.

We sat at a table and watched a video in English about the winery (a bit redundant, but well done) then sat at a table for our tasting.  We tasted four wines—a chardonnay, a pinot noir, a cabernet sauvignon, and cahor (a sweet wine usually used in church ceremonies). We even had a pen and paper to mark our ratings of each wine.  The chardonnay and cabernet came out as the top two, but the pinot noir and cahor were not to my taste at all.

Throughout the day we had heard about the winery’s “black wine”, a darker variant of cabernet-sauvignon.  We were disappointed when it wasn’t included in our tasting.  Apparently we had gotten a special deal on the tour, so we only got four wines. However, our tour included dinner at the hotel (shashlik/grilled meat) and was 25 Euros instead of 23 Euros.  The tour guide agreed that we could use the 2 extra Euros to have a small bottle of the black wine with dinner.  It was without a doubt supreme, totally worth the 175 lei for a big bottle (from a Western standpoint).

After dinner we went to the gift shop to pay for our tour  and to buy wine to take home with us. Then we drove off into the sunset, gazing at the green rolling hills and grazing cows as long as there was light to see.

Grigore and Lena took me to the train station in Chisinau and put me on the overnight train. Somehow I lucked out—I had the entire kupe’ (a 4-bed compartment) to myself.

I was a little more nervous about this trip than past trips into Ukraine because it was my first time crossing the border into Ukraine under Ukraine’s new “visa free regime” for Americans. I knew someone who had flown to Kyiv and entered the country without a visa with no problem, but I’d heard stories about train crossings between Azerbaijan and Georgia. It was supposed to be possible to get a visa on the spot, but the person ended up having to pay a bribe to the border police above and beyond that in order to cross the border. One person refused to pay and held up the train for seven hours as a result. Kashmar! (What a nightmare!)

Fortunately, the only surprise on my trip across the border was a visit from the Transdinistrian border police; for the first time in my travels, they collected a 6-lei (50 U.S. cent) border-crossing fee. Transdnistria is an impoverished sliver of land between the Dnister River and the Ukrainian border. It was part of Moldova until 1992, when it started a war with Moldova and created its own border and its own flag. It’s also considered a good place to store or smuggle guns and other illegal goods. Eventually, it wants to be a part of the Russian Federation. I doubt that is going to happen.

In the morning, I ordered tea from the providnik (train car conductor). To me there is something poetic about sitting on a Ukrainian train, listening to the clickety-clack of the wheels on the tracks, looking out the window at the miles of snowy plains I’m passing, and drinking tea in a tall glass with a silver glassholder.

I arrived in Vinnitsya at 9:30 a.m. Normally I would have gotten off an hour and a half earlier in Zhmerinka, an east-west north-south train junction. As Grigore says jokingly, “All roads don’t lead to Rome. They lead to Zhmerinka.” However, when I checked the train times online, there was no connection from my overnight train to another train going to Khmelnytsky. My friend Tina told me there are elektrichkas (regional trains that run on electricity) that go between Zhmerinka and Khmelnytsky, but no one knew the schedule and I didn’t want to be stuck sitting in Zhmerinka for hours on end. I knew in Vinnitsya I could catch a taxi to the bus station and then catch a bus to Khmelnystky; they run at pretty regular intervals and only take two hours.

When I got off the train in Vinnitsya, I was surprised there were no taxi drivers waiting on the platform. In the past they were always there when you didn’t need them. Now that I was hauling a 50-pound bag of winter clothes, teaching materials, and gifts for friends, they were nowhere to be found. I ended up lugging the big bag down the stairs to the underground platform passage and back upstairs again to the exit. Not only did no one offer to help me, one man in passing said, “you should use the ramps”. There are special polished concrete ramps for carts with wheels, but I could not figure out how to get and keep my bag and myself on it.

Finally, at the train station exit, I found a taxi driver willing to take me across town to the bus station. I got really lucky—he took me to directly to the bus platform, and the bus took off about 5 minutes after I got on it. I was able to buy my ticket directly on the bus; I didn’t have to go to the kassa and get one.

About 40 minutes into the journey, I felt a need to go to the bathroom. There are no bathrooms on Ukrainian buses. I tried to ignore it, even when we stopped for another 20 minutes 50 yards from a gas station while the driver and assistant fixed something that was wrong with the bus engine. After we started moving again, I asked when we could stop for a bathroom break. They said not for another half an hour. After another 15 minutes, I said, “could we stop here?” He said, “5 more minutes.” Of course, In Ukraine, “5 more minutes” translates into American English as anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours. I felt like an idiot with my constant asking and tapping my feet like a three year old. I imagined the other passengers on the bus were getting impression that foreigners don’t know how to hold their pee. I asked myself, what happened to the girl who used to pride herself on her “biological control” in Ukraine? The girl who once took a 15-hour train ride from Kharkiv to Odessa and didn’t use the bathroom once?

When the bus finally pulled into a town bus station, I walked as fast as I could to the bus station outhouse. It was a dirty, concrete hole in the floor with no lights and no door (there was a wall for privacy from the rest of the station). Snow flurries were drifting in. On my normal bathroom rating scale, it would have received zero stars, but at that moment it was the best bathroom I’d seen in my life.

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I woke up early (jet lag) and had breakfast with Grigore. I can’t imagine myself eating cold bread and cheese in for breakfast in America and being happy with it, but in Moldova it just seemed right. The ... [Continue reading this entry]

The flights to D.C., Vienna, and Chisinau were fine. Grigore (the father in the family I had rented a house from when I taught in Moldova) and his daughter Lena were supposed to meet me at the airport, but ... [Continue reading this entry]