Best of Bessarabia

When I awoke, I was presented with the programme for the day: tour of Bender and the museums and monuments there, the Tiraspol “Museum Crawl,” register at the police station, meet up quickly with the helpful teenagers from yesterday, and then about two hours of “free time.”  We accomplished all of this, though registration took about three attempts because Nadia forgot her passport first, then the staff was on lunch break starting at 11am until 3pm or something, and then the third time, it went through without a hitch or any money paid.  It may or may not interest you to know that they did not stamp my passport but rather a piece of paper that I can, at any time and at my own volition, attach to my passport with a stapler.  Grumbling slightly at the lack of officialdom, I questioned my whole reason for being there.  I can pass time with ministers’ children and descendents of heroes of the Soviet Union literally anywhere, but passport stamps are unique and timeless.  

We went to a few museums.  One was in Bender, where Stas’s wife Oksana works as an orthodontist.  At the next museum we somehow scored a deal on the entry fee for me (2 TDR for locals, 25 for foreigners).  I bought a book on Transnistrian industrial achievements and some postcards.  For information on cognac and the major textiles production centre located in Tiraspol, please inquire, I have everything anyone could ever need.  When everyone pored over what I had bought, one of Stas’s friends (the son of the former minister-representative of Transnistria to the Moldovan parliament in Soviet times) told me that his girlfriend’s aunt and uncle were two of the people featured on one of the postcards.  They’re, like, famous.  No big deal or anything. 

Then free time!  I went to 7Fridays, or Fr7days, or something along those lines for its name and was aghast that the trendiest place in town was serving chicken salads and designer coffee for $1-2, and also had Turkish-style toilets—I suppose a remainder of Catherine the Great’s plunge into Bessarabia and its hasty Potemkinisation.  I spent a few hours seeing and being seen, and then met up with the old gang to plan the evening’s festivities. 

We first went to dinner at La Placinte, a Moldovan restaurant that serves the favourite polenta with bacon fat, garlic and cheese.  This is what Denis ordered.  He also, being a 200+ lb, 6’6”, smiley Russian who spoke no English, was wearing a T-Shirt that said, “Kiss Me, I’m Filipino.”  Then we went to a traditional Russian banya, which had the sauna, the birch branches, the bucket with the rope that you pull to dump ice-cold water on yourself, and the whole works, really.