Before you are even out of the city limits, the agriculture begins. We passed this cow herder and group of cows not far outside of Chisinau.
A popular mode of transport outside of the city.
Our first picnic site. The rural landscape in Moldova is stunning. The mature plantings of trees, as along this road, speak to a strong rural culture.
Cabbages! Throughout our fall journey, we saw cabbages being harvested all over Moldova and other places we visited in Europe.
We learned that the all of the water in Moldova is safe to drink and clearly revered. Along the highways, there is a well every 1-2 km. Many are decorated with fancy tin work or other ornamentation.
There are large wetlands in southeastern Moldova along the Dniestr River. The area is in process of becoming protected as the Parcul National Nistru Interior. The wetlands look like an ocean as you come over the hill--you may want to click on this one for a closer look.
We drove down into the village of Cioburciu. Accommodations outside of large cities are hard to find without a local guide, rural Moldova is not set up for tourism yet. We'd read that there was a pensione in this small town and it is here that we met our second Moldovan muse: Diana.
Cioburciu is a small village of a few hundred homes built of brick and plaster, on the slopes above the Dnister River. It is surrounded by farmland and located 10 km off the main road.
A new church made of limestone blocks with tin roof.
The main road.
As we drove through town, we stopped and asked a few people for directions to the pensione. Most laughed and shrugged, so we continued on our way until we hit the end of the town's road. On our way back through town, one of the women we'd asked (the proprietor of a small grocery store) flagged us down. She asked Joe if we were Italian--when we speak Moldovan from the phrasebook we have an Italian accent--and motioned for us to wait. She sent a young girl down the street to get someone, and a young woman returned with her shortly. She greeted us in perfect Italian, Buona sera, and introduced herself as Diana. She invited us to her house to have a coffee and tp help us find accommodations. Diana was certain there was no pensione in her village, a village the size of one street, and made some phone calls to a nearby larger town. After no luck on the phone, she casually invited us to stay with her. We were touched by her generous offer but didn't want to impose, so we sat for a while and chatted, had some cookies and a cup of coffee. After a while, she again offered to put us up, saying its just her son and herself and her mother, and reminded us that at this point, we needed a place to sleep and food. Given that dark was fast approaching and the drive to the next large city was a few hours away, and that we were enjoying each other's company, we accepted.
We had a lovely evening--through Diana's stories, we learned a lot about life in Moldova. Diana spoke fluent Italian and German after working abroad for the last ten years. She explained that every family has one person working abroad given the lack of income potential in Moldova, and we were reminded of our train ride into Moldova with many people returning from work in Moscow. When asked what she did for work in the village, she said that her family owns one of the markets (it was her mother who flagged us down) and that this year, she grew wheat. It wasn't a good year for wheat, so she did what she could to earn money. She was in process for applying for a visa to work abroad again, but was facing a long wait due to restrictions by the Moldovan government (which she explained was a communist government run by the mafia). She went into more detail about the economy. The government sets the bank interest rates at 18-24%, so that it is virtually impossible to borrow money and the interest earned on your money in the bank is set at .007. Much of the food and other products are imported from elsewhere, so though there is fertile land and farming everywhere, it is not lucrative. The imported products and bank situation also means that prices in Moldova are similar to those in Western Europe, a staggering situation given that the Moldovan average income is less than a tenth of Germany's. At one point, Diana explained that in places like Cioburciu, "va bene, ma non andata bene", roughly translated as "we're doing ok, but it's not going ok." We also chatted about other things, the US election (she was not interested; it's all about the oil, she said), our lives in the States, similarities and differences in cooking and meals.
For dinner, Diana prepared a delicious vegetable soup with fresh cream from her neighbor, and a pasta with wild mushrooms, tomatoes, and sharp goat cheese, also from a neighbor. She was very sweet, explaining she normally has salad with pasta but since we'd been traveling all day, we needed to fill up. After dinner we pulled out the Moldovan map and explored possible towns where Sucaron (Lesley's Zaida's village) may have been. The closest Romanian name was Soroca, a town in the north where a large Jewish community had lived. We also went through lots of town names for stonework [Pietar] given that Zaida's last name, Matzevahman, means someone who works with stone. Soon Diana's mother came home, and we had a good laugh about the Cioburciu pensione that we had read about in a guidebook from several years back. Once Lesley said the name of the pension, Diana and her mother broke into laughter and Diana explained that this man had rented rooms, but in a house smaller and dirtier than hers, and that it was years ago that he did this. She also explained that he had made money attracting tourists interested in learning traditional Moldovan handicrafts and ran ad hoc basket weaving classes, with accommodations. A healthy reminder that a guidebook is a guidebook; once you are there. you're there.
Our evening walk--Diana reminded us to not get lost so she wouldn't have to come find us.
In front of Diana's house (she was gracious enough to let us take the picture of her in her robe) before we left to head north to explore Soroca. We ate heartedly again at a breakfast of french toast and ham, Diana reminding us again like an Italian mother that we needed to eat well since we would not be arriving north until midday.
Grazie mille, Diana!
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