First Thoughts on Chisinau

Chisinau brought me very mixed feelings. It's at the same time dusty and very leafy, all the streets lined wity generous canopy. Its communist heritage seems mixed as well: crumbling blocks with stupidly closed balconies and some of the greatest and most monumental blocks of flats I've seen in the ex-communist world. Its neighborhoods, particualy the one perched above some very green hills, seemingly a separate city, seem even majestic from a distnace if this term can be employed for communist architecture. Dirty,very dirty, mountains of garbage, people throwing everything everywhere. The Piata Centrala, a total nightmare, where thousands of rather poorly dressed people, scheming taxi drivers, old and horrible buses and minivans going apparently to every village of this Republic, a lot of pollution, weird merchandise, dust, scary looking dogs, invading manele coming from the West. Romania apparently exports oil, mineral water ( the ubiquitous Dorna) and bad music. The northern strip parallel to the river ( ahem, a swampy mess) has innumerable kilometers of talciocs, selling everything from extremely cute, if tremendosly bored, kittens to rubber for cars, Chinese shoes and phosphate fertilizers.

Then, there's the feeling this could be Omsk or Tomsk or Khabarovsk rather than the capital of a country with a 68% ethnic majority of a non-Slavic people. I hear, with very few exceptions, only Russian on the streets, signs show a prevalence for Russian. And above all, the dominating mullets. Mullets everywhere, the kingdom of mullets, typically Russian, Eurovision Dima-like. How my Swedish travelmates put it, some girls also look more Moscow than EU, with that specific skirt style that makes a Russian girl a Russian girls.

Where is my Moldova then? Well, not in Chisinau. I don't know how I'm going to look at this place after two weeks. Now it seems rather grim and ugly, urbanistically boring, but nightlifewise rather dynamic.