"Working for wide sections of the population"

The evening program was the social event of the season for Tiraspolers.  Stas called his friends, no less than the young, intellectual elite of the country.  Biznezmen (a Russification of the English word, but with a decidedly post-Soviet bend on the definition), doctors, dentists, minister’s children, and bankers.  Naturally I was expecting as such, and felt right at home in Tiraspol society.  Our venue of choice was Shinok Kumanyok, a traditional Ukrainian restaurant.  The first page of the menu, painstakingly transcribed word-for-word, deserves its own paragraph:

Shinok Kumanyok
If you are reading this information it means that you’ve come to our restaurant.  Thanks for your choice.

Main principles and distinctions:

• Working for wide sections of the population
• Invariably delicious cuisine
• Democracy in atmosphere and prices
• Regular novelties in our menu
• Respecting atmosphere, interior (many nice particulars, creating agreeable atmosphere) and music (including viola and accordion)
• Our splendid Ukrainian cuisine would help to forget about all daily problems even to blacksmith Vacula
• It is forbidden to use vulgarisms and unquotable words regarding the guests and employees to bring with you food and drinks
• We don’t allow a discount if you don’t have a discount card
• We regularly organise drawing of lotter “Fortune” (prize is given to discretion of administration)
• Form of payments in cash in PMR roubles

We ordered (or they ordered, rather.  I sat quietly) black bread, cheese platters, salad, salo (bacon fat/lard), whipped salo with garlic, pickled vegetable platters, pork-vegetable-cheese things dipped in egg and flour and fried with potatoes and mushrooms, blinchky (pancakes) filled with ground liver, beer and wine.  Those were the appetizers.  Then we had vareniki, pelmeni, more beer, more wine, and other main courses for everyone.  Then dessert, which was a pear soaked in wine, fried, and stuffed with chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, and on a bed of whipped cream.  It was fairly decadent.  And cheap!  For 8 people, the total bill came to something like $100, and because it’s Transnistria, anything goes and you can pay with whatever currency you see fit.  USD, Russian roubles, Transnistrian roubles, Moldovan lei, Ukrainian gryvnia and euros flooded the table.  I meekly paid my share in the local currency while and prepared another helping of whipped-lard-and-garlic spread on a bun before the waitress whisked away my plate.

Then we headed to Denis’s apartment.  He lives alone but has two apartments which have been joined together.  These are the perqs of being the son of the former vice minister of finance of Transnistria, as I’m sure you know.  We passed the time sampling fine local beers and cognac (possibly the most famous in the FSU, despite what a recent spread in Aeroflot Inflight Magazine on Armenia that tried to convince me otherwise), watching the Nostalgia Channel (featuring newscasts from the 1970s announcing Uzbek cotton harvest yields), admiring large bearskin rugs, trying on hats that so-and-so's grandfather had worn in the war, and talking about the good old days.  They told me that every Gen-Y in the FSU remembers when the Soviet Union finally collapsed because they interrupted the once-per-week half-hour transmission of Disney, and they never got to find out how that one cartoon ended.  I told them that the Soviet collapse really hit home for me when my parents bought me an updated atlas and told me to get over it.* 

Then we seamlessly flowed into the topic of Russian grammar as well.  RUSSIAN GRAMMAR.  This is a passion of mine.  I was telling them how annoyed I was by all the prefixes to Russian verbs that wholly change the meaning, and they threw me another curve ball: zaletat, which literally means to be flying somewhere and suddenly be rerouted to another destination without warning, is also used to mean “accidental pregnancy.”  The beauty of Russian is in its simplicity. 

*No joke. 1989—1993 were some heady days for Rand McNally, and frankly one paradigm shift too many for me in my tender and formative preschool years. 

Tour du Tiraspol

1. The fortress built by Suvurov.  SUVUROV.  Do you know who he is?  I didn’t until I went to Transnistria. If ever there was an ethnogenesis that can be pinpointed exactly, it’s the Russian population of Transnistria.  As a subordinate of Potemkin, Suvurov actually oversaw the creation of the Potemkin villages, and I think Tiraspol was/is one of them.  There were patriotic old pensioners outside of it drinking (surprise) and the walls had recently (1930s-40s) been redone by stuffing them with the bodies of political troublemakers (surprise!).
2. The bridge over the River Dniester.  This is of note because no cars are allowed on this particular bridge but ours’ was.  My driver rolled down the window, mentioned to the guard that he knew his boss.   The guard didn’t believe him and said, “Oh?  Call him.  Let’s see what he says.”   So Stas called the boss, handed the phone over to the guard and said smugly, “He’d like to talk to you” and we were promptly waved through.  Snap.
3. The Belarusian Olympic Rowing Team.  Yes, you better believe they were here.  OF COURSE they were here.  Where else would they be?  Everyone knows that the Belarusian Olympic rowing team practises on one of the slough/oxbow arms of the Dniestr.  Everyone knows this. 
4. The tallest church tower in Transnistria.  I know what you’re thinking—okay… that’s not that tall, but bitch, please, do you know how flat Transnistria is?  It looks tall.  And the priest was so delighted to have a foreign dignitary that he insisted we go up the belltower to have a view of the ENTIRE COUNTRY.  We could see clean across from Moldova to the Ukraine and then some.  I also had a good bird’s eye view of the monastery, which was extensive and full of industrious monks, presumably scribing, brewing beer, and storing tubers.  The monastery was also at the junction of the 45 and 36 lines, which has some sort of historical importance.  I didn’t press for more information on that one. 
5. The largest church bell in Transnistria, cast by Nicholas II himself (o.  As legend/proven fact goes, when Nicholasha was on his 300^th Anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty Tour of All the Russias, he was dismayed to learn that Tiraspol’s church did not have a bell so he had one cast and send there.  It was massive and they had to bring in dirt from somewhere else to build a ramp to get the bell up on top.  It weighed like a million tonnes or something.  Like, at least one million.  Or something.   And the walls were two metres thick to support the weight.
6. The Great Patriotic War Monument up on the hill that overlooks the other hill that the Soviets stormed up to push the Germans out of Moldova for once and for all.  Evidently they did not have guns or something but what they lacked in guns, they made up for in sheer numbers and spirit(s).  Communism over Fascism prevailed, and now there is a large monument to remind us of it.  Some workers—Moldovan speakers (hello, underclass) and who worked for one of Stas’s friend’s company—were fixing it up for the 65^th Anniversary of the end of the war and the FSU’s favourite day to parade tanks around the street, May 9.
7. The Opera.  Something by Pushkin was playing (okay, I’m assuming something by Pushkin was playing, but it doesn’t matter because I am right.  Something by Pushkin is always playing.)
8. A large fighter plan on a pillar.  It was the first Soviet plane with the engine inside, so it was either a rocket, or a fighter plane, or both.  It was either made in Tiraspol, or someone from Tiraspol flew it.  It was dark and I was really tired and cold by the time we got here. 
9. A real estate development that my host’s friend was involved in. 
10. A statue of Suvurov.  If you’re about to make a comment about I have already mentioned Suvurov and who he is, stop.  Just stop.  There is a whole lot more Suvurov coming up, and if you have ever had the dream of leading a group of people to settle an area and form an isolated community and ultimately become immortalised by the descendants by sheer virtue of their ethnogenesis having such a limited pool of historically relevant figures to draw from, then please soak up as many lessons from Suvurov as your spongy gray matter can.  Also, to be fair, this statue of Suvurov is really big because he’s on a horse and there is little else puncturing the immediate landscape.
11. A church in Tiraspol.  Get out your camera, it’s an Orthodox cathedral!  You only get to see one of these every two blocks in the Russo-Christian-dominated areas of the FSU, so you better believe I soaked this up.  While I appreciate how much gold went into the church’s roof, I was hard pressed to come up with new and original adjectives to discern it from the 47 others I had recently seen.
12. The Heroes of the Soviet Union display in front of the town hall.  Oh, and what’s that?  My host’s grandmother was up there?  Yeah, no big deal.  She only managed the hospital during the Great Patriotic War.  She’s only the greatest person ever.  

Tearing into Tiraspol

I would love to simply apply the term “bender” to all my post titles for the Transnistria series of this blog because I was on a total bender the entire time I was there.  I have never had anything go so smoothly in my life.  Everything about the republic seems perfect.  Broad boulevards, not a scrap of garbage, large billboards encouraging family values and local pride, and clean, white, concrete apartment blocks—I had stepped into a 1970s postcard from the Soviet Union.  Even my encounter with the Russian army was delightful.  Approaching the bridge across the Dniestr that would take me from cis- to Trans-nistria, a soldier popped out from behind a scantily clad tank (I was later corrected sternly that this is an armoured vehicle and not a tank.  A rose is a rose) in the centre where the highway divides, ran across the street to shake my hand and laugh in disbelief.  He welcomed me to the republic and wished me luck on my walk to Tiraspol.

I realise that I may have claimed I was going to walk to Tiraspol, and subsequently have told people I walked the full way, but I actually took a city bus for the remaining 2 km.  There were trolley buses running along the main artery between the two metropolises of Bender and Tiraspol and I decided to catch one so as not to be late.  The fare was about $0.02.  I de-bused at the central station and took stock of my surrounding: how was I going to contact Stas, my couchsurfing host?  Furthermore, I had written down the name of the main hotel in the city as my place of residence while there—was I going to be arrested for not sleeping there?  Were they waiting for me?  Naturally, I was on edge.  

I bought a phone card and tried to call my host from a pay phone.  I have a hard time using a phone period, much less a card-operated pay phone in Transnistria.  Some teenagers noticed this and followed me as I was walking, assuming they were going to jump me and steal all my belongings (which consisted of precious little as I left most of my belongings in Chisinau) I was, as usual, ready for a fight.  They instead asked me if I spoke English and if they could help me in any way.  Evidently I had been trying to dial on an emergency-only military phone.   In my defence, what on earth is as “emergency-only military phone” and why was it on the side of the street in the centre of town?  They brought out their cell phones and called my couchsurfing host, then waited with me for him to come.  They told me that they studied English in high school and that it was their dream to meet a real, live English speaker.  They insisted we meet up the next day and gave me their number.  Then Stas arrived, we shook hands and I loaded my bag into his car. 

Stas then sent out the standard “The [Canadian Goose?] has landed" call and people suddenly started to materialise.  “Is this the Canadian?” one young guy shouted out of a passing car that parked up ahead.  He came out to shake my hand. Then more people suddenly appeared to talk to me.  Sacha, Stas and I got into Stas’s car and the Grand Tour de Tiraspol commenced.  We hit every single site in that town.  Every fortress (1), every Great Patriotic War monument (1,000+), and every other feature of interest.  The following post bears a list that is by no means exhaustive but was, I admit, a bit exhausting.