Moldovan Road Trip: Ivancea

Before leaving Chisinau we had arranged to stay our third and last night of our driving trip in Ivancea, a small town 45 km north of the city. We made plans through Marisha, a one-woman dynamo who arranges lodging, tours, et al for people visiting Moldova. It's a family affair--her father Boris let us into the apartment when we arrived in Chisinau, and her mother Katya was our host in Ivancea. She is our third Moldovan muse.

When we arrived in Ivancea (after getting lost for an hour and a half), we were treated to a late, traditional lunch of stewed beef over mamaliga (like polenta) and a light cabbage, scallion, and jalepeno pepper salad (all from their garden) with Katya. The three of us in ate in the kitchen that Boris and Katya built away from the house--a small room lined with pine panels and toasty on the brisk fall day from a small heater in the corner. Over lunch and a bottle of Katya's home-made wine (delicious; Moldova is known for its light red wine and sweet sparkling whites), we got to know each other through our favorite language--photo album + hand gestures + small Russian phrase book (Katya speaks Russian and a little Moldovan; these days Russian is not taught in schools). Katya and Boris moved to the country ten years ago after living and working in Chisinau, where Katya was a librarian. We bonded over sweaters and cooking and farm life and babies (Marisha has two young ones and we had pictures of our sweet nieces and nephews in our photo album).


































The first image is two photos of Katya and her family that hang in her kitchen. The gentleman on the right hand side of the lower photo looks a heck of a lot like Lesley's grandfather (see second black and white image).





















Sunset stroll around Ivancea.



























This was one of our favorite meals thus far. These are ґолубцьї (pronunced galubtsi), steamed cabbage stuffed with a mixture of rice, carrot, and a little pork. They are then steamed in broth. This is a common Eastern European dish that you find in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. Joe had these twice in Vilnius and Katya's galubtsi made the Vilnius galubtsi seemed like hm, bricks wrapped in newspaper. They were actually quite good, but Katya's galubtsi were light, brothey buttery, velvetty pillows. The fact that you could fit an entire galubtsi in your mouth was heaven, they melted. We were still full from lunch but we enjoyed seconds, which included a small red pepper from Katya's garden filled with galubtsi filling. My oh my, good home cooking tops it all.









In the morning, Katya showed us around her garden. This stash of corn will keep the cocoros (chickens) well fed during the winter.












Katya and Boris keep around twenty cocoros.









Katya's root cellar, filled with jars of preserved vegetables, strawberry compote, a barrel of wine (plus lots of random bottles full of wine), six crates of small red potatoes, cooking oil, and carrots and beets stored in the sand. We were envious and inspired.












A farmer's breakfast. Clearly local sausages, farm fresh eggs, and that delicious cabbage salad with scallion and jalepeno.









We left Katya's place at 9 in a blissful state. Back in Chisinau, we provisioned for a 24-hour train ride, returned the car at 11, and boarded the 11:50am train to Poland. The platform was packed with people sending their loved ones off. Only our car headed west from the Moldovan/Ukraine border to Poland; all other cars headed north to Moscow. It was a totally different feel than the happy-returning home train ride we took into Moldova; it was a poignant way to end our short exploration of Moldova.









A practically empty car this time, with a cabin all to ourselves. And a door.
























This train ride was like a quiet, slow movie or painting of the Moldovan countryside. The train never gets above 40 km an hour and we spent a lot of time staring out the window. It was peaceful. We also missed the people and liveliness from our train ride down.


















Multsumesc, Moldova. Pa!

Moldovan Road Trip: Soroca

Heading north from Ciorbuciu. Vineyards and orchards were seen all over the country.









Pastoral beautiful.









More fancy tin work









Above the Dnister River, heading to the Tipova cave monastery.





















The Tipova Cave Monastery, dating back to the 10th and 12th century. Carved into limestone cliffs high above the river. Impressive.









Here's a 360 video of the caves and the river with Transdniestr, an autonomous, pro-Soviet region in Moldova between the Dniestr and the Ukraine.


There are bus stops like these all over Moldova, many with beautiful tile mosaics and paintings.


















Soroca! A medieval town in northern Moldova, known for this fortress.









Along the Dneistr in Soroca. One can reach the Ukraine from here by a simple car ferry (click to enlarge).


















We received these local flowers from an older woman that we gave a ride to into town. In Moldova, personal cars function as taxis--people walk from their small village to the main road, and wave you down; if you have room, it's up to you whether you want to stop. We later learned that it is customary to be paid for this service; for us, it was a way to meet people and give back some of the generosity that we'd received.












The Hotel Centro, found by conveniently located signs.









The town was pretty quiet in the offseason. We had a hard time finding a place to eat with the few restaurants we found hosting weddings that Sunday evening. We stumbled upon a hotel bar and asked if they served meals. And met our second Moldovan woman who worked in Italy. She asked if there was anything we didn't eat, and prepared for us a wonderful schnitzel, fried potatoes, and dilly salad.

We found this little gogosi (donut) shop around the corner from our hotel.

We waited until 9:15am until the oil was hot and enjoyed fresh gogosi with a dusting a sugar.









In Soroca, we had another friendly encounter with a Moldovani in the grocery store. He overheard us discussing which yogurt to buy and introduced himself--he was a retired English teacher and relished opportunities to practice. He gave us directions to the Jewish cemetery up on the hill above town. It was a large cemetery with both large, recent gravestones (many of which had porcelain enamel photographs) and older stones that were no longer legible. We wandered around , looking at pictures and names; to find a Matzevahman would have been unbelievable, we were really there to pay our respects.

Moldovan Road Trip: Cioburciu

Picked up our Dacia Logan at noon on Saturday and headed southeast. We wanted to explore the south of Moldova because of its Turkish influence--not knowing at all where Lesley's Zaida's came from, his dark features were enough for us to explore this region. We were excited to explore the country by car. We love renting cars to experience a place, and the size of Moldova is ideal for this--it could be traversed in a day and we gave ourselves three nights.









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!

Chisinau

We rented an apartment in Chisinau for a few days. It was a small apartment in an old concrete building. The apartment was nice and cozy; the building caught us off guard--it appeared that most construction in Chisinau is done with sloppily-laid concrete block and compared to some of the other cities we’d recently visited, there is zero ornamentation or finish. This is likely a result of years of Soviet occupation and poverty during those years and to this day. Moldova is one of Europe’s poorest countries—its average per capita income is 2,500 euro compared to @15,000 euro in Central Europe (e.g. Poland) and in the 30,000’s in Western Europe (e.g. Germany). These statistics aren’t evident when walking up the main street of Chisinau, with cafes and shops with Western European prices. We'd read that the modern side of Chisinau exists to support its upper class, whose wealth is mostly mafia driven. While we weren't there long enough to make our own evaluation, the juxtaposition of brand new Mercedes and the poor conditions of much of the city was striking.

Our apartment.

A nice statue near our apt building.

A beautiful park near the center of town, where two main parks lie kitty corner of each other: St Stefan cul Mare and Cathedral Park. There were a lot of people strolling and hanging out on a warm fall afternoon.









One night we visited the huge main market in the center of town. It was a mix of indoor and outdoor stalls, all devoted to different items—smoked meats, cheeses, vegetables, poultry, grains, basic household supplies, you name it. We made our first home cooked meal in a month, pork chops, caramelized onions and rice, with delicious pickled salads from the market: carrots; curry cauliflower; grilled eggplant and mushrooms. It was nice to enjoy a home-cooked meal.


















While in Chisinau, we visited the university library to look for an old map of Bessarabia, in hopes of finding out where Sucaron once was. They were very helpful and accommodating and sent us to the national library nearby. We were guided by a young women named Dorina, who told us her story of getting lost in Montana trying to find the town of Whitefish as she escorted us. At the national archives, this time with a cool teenage kid as our translator, we didn't get very far. We decided to visit local bookstores, get a map of the country, rent a car, and head out to discover the country on a road trip.