Trip report: Moldova
Date of visit: August 2019
For someone like me who lives in German-speaking Switzerland, Moldova is one of the hardest countries in Europe to reach. After all, for no other European country are the flight costs so expensive. There are no direct flights and the flights via Frankfurt or Vienna cost about 450-500 Swiss francs, which is about the same value in dollars. 450-500 dollars! With this money you can usually buy flight tickets to New York or Bangkok.
However, I want to travel to every country in the world and I knew that sooner or later I would have to bite the bullet and pay the 450 francs for the flight. All the more surprised I was when one day I found flights from Basel to Chisinau via Frankfurt for 266 francs. Checking air fares is a hobby of mine. Every day I check air fares on Swoodoo or Skyscanner, mostly for destinations I haven’t been to yet. When I saw the flights for 266 francs to Chisinau, I booked immediately.
What became a challenge then was to find someone who wanted to go to Moldova with me. This country is not really a typical tourist destination. Depending on which source you use, Moldova is the least visited country in Europe. I asked several friends and tried to sell them Moldova as good as possible. Since I wanted to combine this trip with a trip to Transnistria, an unrecognized state between Moldova and Ukraine, I used this as an additional selling point. After all, Transnistria is probably the weirdest place you can visit in Europe.
It didn’t work. Nobody, absolutely nobody wanted to join the trip. Neither my friends nor my girlfriend. Not even my mother, who has been asking me for years to finally take her somewhere. Not even she wanted to go. The reaction of everyone was “what the hell am I supposed to do in Moldova?!”
And so I went alone, although I said after my first boring solo trip in Belgium that I would not travel alone in Europe anymore.
Welcome to Moldova
It was a Thursday, the first of three days, when I landed in Moldova. I used the Swiss National Day on 1 August, the last national holiday in 2019 until Christmas, for this trip. Theoretically, I only had to take one day, Friday, off for the trip. However, in the end I managed that I didn’t have to take any day off. More about that later.
Sergiu, the owner of the apartment I booked, loaded my trolley into his trunk. He picked me up from the airport for 150 lei. That’s about 7.50€ for the half hour drive to Chisinau’s city center. If you take a normal taxi, you pay 5€. That would have been a new record for me in Europe. However, I allowed myself the more comfortable variant. After all, you are only in Moldova once.
Sergiu seemed to be a nice man, but he apologized for his bad English right at the beginning. In the car, he opened the Google Translate app and told me to type in any questions I might have. I felt reminded of China, where I was three months earlier. Communication there is almost exclusively via translation apps. It’s an exhausting form of communication.
As a result, it remained relatively quiet in the car during this half-hour drive. Sergiu concentrated on driving and I either looked at the display of my mobile phone or watched the environment outside.
It took about fifteen or twenty minutes until we arrived at the gates of Chisinau. The most iconinc buildings of Chisinau are two multilevel residential buildings, which look like a pyramid that is separated in the middle by the street. These houses are the gateway to Chisinau. It is one of the ugliest architectures I have ever seen. But the idea of constructing two such buildings as the entrance gate to the city is pretty cool.
A few minutes later we arrived at the apartment. It was a 100m2 apartment with whirlpool in the center of the city. For three nights I paid about 100 Euro. Sergiu asked me if everything was okay and we agreed that he would pick me up in three days to drive me back to the airport.
It was now about 14.30 and I still had a few hours to explore Chisinau.
Chișinău – the ugliest capital in Europe
Chisinau has the reputation of being the ugliest capital of Europe. Even if you google for “ugliest city in the world”, Chisinau appears in most of the Top10 or Top20 lists. I was curious whether this would really be true. And even if it were true, it wouldn’t be a problem for me. Pristina and Bucharest, for example, are also unpretty cities, but I had a lot of fun in both. I even find Berlin an ugly city, but I like being there.
I quickly realized that this assertion was not made up. Already on the way from the airport to the city I noticed the desolate condition of many houses. Many facades have seen better times, to put it nicely. I was now walking through the city and saw how some of the streets were in a miserable condition. Some streets had small potholes, the sidewalks were also often damaged.
Besides, the city made a relatively colorless impression, as most houses are grey. At least the sun was shining and the sky was blue. I tried to imagine the city in winter or rain. My imagination was a very dull picture of Chisinau.
What also struck me was that the city was very quiet. There was relatively little street-life in the center, although the weather was wonderful. I assumed that it was because it was Thursday afternoon. But during the whole three days I noticed that Chisinau is much less lively than Bucharest or other Eastern European capitals.
So, how did I keep myself entertained? I took a first tour through the city and took some pictures of the sights. Most of the sights are quite close to each other. So I started in the Cathedral Park, where Chisinau’s most famous cathedral is located.
Right next to the park is the Moldovan Triumphal Arch. It refers to the victory of the Russian Empire over the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish War 1828-1829. So Chisinau is another city that has a Triumphal Arch. I tried to remember in which cities I still saw such arches. There are quite a few of them: Paris, Barcelona, Delhi, Mumbai, Vientiane and Pyongyang came to my mind first.
The Moldovan flag also hangs on the arch. Flag experts will notice that this is a slightly modified flag of the neighboring country Romania. This is no surprise, because Moldovans are basically an ethnic subgroup of Romanians. Moldovan is not a language of its own either, but Romanian with some words taken from Russian.
Romania and Moldova are therefore sibling states. They were even united until the end of World War II, before Moldova became part of the communist Soviet Union and Romania oriented itself towards the capitalist EU in the following decades. One could therefore compare Romania and Moldova with the two Koreas: a common culture, a long common history, but separated for decades by two different systems.
My next stop was Valea Morilor Park. Chisinau may not be the most beautiful city, but at least it has some nice parks. Valea Morilor Park was the most beautiful I have seen. This is partly due to the beautiful staircase leading from the city center to the park and partly to the large lake in the park.
However, I came mainly because of a strange attraction. The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen and Manneken Pis in Brussels are often called the most underwhelming tourist attractions in the world. “Hold my beer,” some Moldovan must have thought and built perhaps the smallest statue in the world.
The Little Prince is only 11 centimeters tall and can easily be missed. I also discovered it by chance when I read a travel report about Chisinau before the trip. So I walked along the lake promenade until I saw something golden from a few meters away.
The statue is indeed ridiculous, especially if you look at its face. But that’s what makes it so cool. One of the funniest sights I’ve seen lately.
After that, I have seen almost everything I wanted to see in Chisinau. However, the fact that Chisinau does not have many sights this time was actually quite convenient for me. Chisinau is not a city where you have to check off a “top things to do” list and do it as fast as possible, so that you later don’t have to think about whether you have missed something.
So I took it easy and stopped several times for a coffee. When it comes to coffee, Chisinau is top anyway. There are lots of coffee stands in the city where you can buy a coffee to go for one euro. Otherwise, I also sat in a café for a while and observed what was happening around me.
I had time for that anyway, because it usually took 15 minutes or longer until someone took my order, although there were perhaps a maximum of ten other people in the café. The service quality in Eastern Europe is quite low, whether in Moldova, Romania or Bulgaria. I remembered the quote of my friend in Sofia who said that employees in restaurants treat you not like customers but like debtors.
Nevertheless, the restaurants were my highlight in Moldova. The Moldovan cuisine is as usual in Eastern Europe quite hearty and meaty. As Moldova belonged to the Soviet Union, the cuisine is also influenced by the Russian cuisine. Borscht, one of the most famous Ukrainian and Russian dishes, can be found on practically every menu.
There is also a lot of cheese, potatoes and corn on the menus. Interesting is the drink kvass, a fermented drink made from rye bread (yes, you have read correctly). It has a sweet-sour taste reminiscent of a mixture of malt beer and lemon juice. Kvass is definitely one of the most special drinks I’ve tried so far.
The best thing about the restaurants is the prices, because Moldova is cheap. Very cheap. I usually paid between 5 and 10 Euro for a starter, main course and a drink, but I also chose the better restaurants of Chisinau. It will be cheaper if you leave the city center or pick lesser known restaurants.
However, the prices also indicate the poverty of the country. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Measured by gross domestic product per capita, the country ranks 124th in the world. This is one place behind Cabo Verde and one place before Angola. Moldova also ranks worst of all European countries in the Human Development Index, which can be regarded as a prosperity factor for states.
As a consequence, Moldova has a shrinking population. The old people stay, while the young people do everything they can to leave the country as quickly as possible. Namely to Romania. You have to imagine that. Despite EU membership, Romania is also one of the poorer countries in Europe. For Moldovans, however, it means the entrance ticket to an EU passport.
How I can travel so much
The next day my alarm clock rang at 7.00 o’clock. 45 minutes later, I was sitting in the Moldovan version of Starbucks called Tucano Coffee. Tucano Coffee was founded in 2011 in Chisinau and has even expanded into other countries. The cakes and coffee there are delicious.
But I wasn’t (only) there to drink coffee, I was there to work. A few weeks before this trip I thought that I could just have my weekly home office day in Moldova. After all, it would save me one vacation day, which I could certainly use at a later date. And since I was alone and the exciting activities in and around Chisinau are limited anyway, that sounded like a good idea.
I am often asked how I can travel so often. I explain the basic rules in detail in the About section of my website. However, with a few tricks I sometimes get some extra vacation days. For example, if I have a flight at Friday 14.00 o’clock, I work from 6.00 to 12.00. That’s a short working day with six hours, but I compensate the two missing hours some other day. And I don’t have to take a day off.
In this case, I had my weekly home office day abroad. After all, it doesn’t matter whether I work from home or from Moldova, as long as the result is the same. And Tucano Coffee actually offered a quite pleasant atmosphere to work in.
The trip to Orheiul Vechi that didn’t happen
It was out of the question for me that I work all day. I wanted to see Moldova in the afternoon and my first choice was Orheiul Vechi. This is a historical and archaeological complex, whose highlight is a monastery surrounded by beautiful nature. Orheiul Vechi is often called the most important sight of Moldova.
The best way to get to Orheiul Vechi is by bus, as the trip costs just over one Euro per way. Therefore, shortly after lunch I went to the bus station in Chisinau. The bus station is also the main market of the city. It’s a very chaotic place. While the center around the Cathedral Park was rather quiet, there was a huge crowd at the market. Where exactly the bus station was, was not visible at first sight.
It was confusing and nothing was written on, so I approached a security guard. “Do you speak English?” I asked him. Without looking at me he shook his head. I tried my luck with two people standing behind a market stall. After all, their English was good enough to understand my question and show me the way.
And then I saw the buses. However, there were between 50 and 100 buses spread over a relatively large area. Some drivers kept calling the name of their destination. I spoke to one of them, but he didn’t speak English. “Butuceni?” I asked, because this is the next town from the monastery I wanted to visit. He explained to me with his hands that I should come back in 15 minutes, as the bus would leave from that place.
I did as he told me but the gentleman was gone. “Butuceni? I asked the next driver hopefully. He pointed with his finger down the road and I tried to find my luck there. But when I asked the next bus driver, he pointed with his finger back to where I came from.
Although my weather app showed only 26 degrees, it was incredibly hot. I read on the internet about the “very hot Moldovan summer”, but could not imagine anything about it. Now I knew what it meant. The sun had an incredible power and I felt the hot sun rays on my back. I am usually a heat resistant person who has no problem with 35°C upwards and sweats very little. But here I in Moldova I was struggling with the heat.
I walked back to the place I came from, where I met the man who sent me in the other direction. I asked him one more time, if the bus to Butuceni would leave from this place, but he pointed again in the opposite direction. Fortunately, the man who just sent me back to this place was not far away from us. He saw the gesture of his colleague.
The two men now gestured wildly and a heated discussion in Moldovan followed, while I stood next to them and just wished that I would find the bus soon. “Ok! here!” one of the men finally told me and pointed to a small bus. All buses have the destination behind their windshield. On this bus was written “Trebujeni” and not Butuceni. However, I read that you can also walk from Trebujeni to the monastery, but it would take a bit longer than from Butuceni. But that didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to leave.
About 30 minutes have passed since I arrived at this bus station. Therefore, I was relieved that I finally had a bus. I stretched 50 lei towards the driver to pay my ticket. Pretty unfriendly he turned me away and pointed to a ticket booth that was on the other side of the road. “Great,” I thought, “now I’m standing around here for the longest time, even though I could have bought a ticket.”
I ran to the ticket office and paid for my ticket before I boarded the minibus. The minibus was about half full, but there was an object on all free seats. Either a drinking bottle, a cap, a bag or something else. I wasn’t sure if the stuff belonged to the people present, so I looked at an older gentleman and asked “can I sit here?”
He answered me something in Moldovan and pointed to the seat with a cap on it. Carefully I put the cap on the seat next to it and sat down. The temperature in the bus was about 30 degrees and there was no air conditioning. The sweat ran from my forehead like a waterfall. And so I was supposed to spend the next hour.
It came even worse. Slowly the minibus filled up and apparently some people already reserved a seat by putting an object on it. The seat I was sitting on was one of them. I saw a mother come in with two children. The boy ran ahead with a cheerful face until he noticed that I was sitting in his seat.
The corners of his mouth were moving downwards. His face now looked as if I had stolen his sweets. I saw him snitching on me to his mother, who a few seconds later told me in Moldovan that this was her place. At least, that was my interpretation. She might have cursed at me too, I don’t know. Somehow I had already feared that this would happen soon. Apologizing, I got up and gave the family their reserved seat.
Now I was standing in the bus, but I wasn’t the only one. Apparently it’s normal for some people to spend the ride standing. It was hot like in a sauna and the driver didn’t make any effort to start. Sometimes a passenger got out and then back in again. And I was standing in the heat of this metal box.
The bus should have left at 14.15 or so and now it was already 14.35. I was sweating like crazy. After another five minutes I had enough. A trip under such circumstances was out of the question. Although I had already taken much more strenuous trips, I got off the bus again. I might take such a trip in Africa, but not in Europe.
In hindsight, I don’t regret that I didn’t take this trip. Sometimes, things don’t happen as planned when traveling. If I hadn’t work this morning, it would have been an easier undertaking to visit Orheiul Vechi (I would just have taken the next bus). But I was a bit under time pressure that afternoon, as I would have arrived after 3 PM and my bus back would have been shortly after 4 PM if the information I got were correct.
If I hadn’t had a plan B, I would probably have taken the trip anyway. But so I still had time to visit two sights in Chisinau that were a little outside the center. First I visited the Ciuflea Monastery, a beautiful Moldovan Orthodox church, where preparations for a wedding were going on.
Afterwards I went to the Eternal Memorial Complex, a monument dedicated to the fallen Soviet soldiers in World War II. The fact that the monument looks incredibly ugly suited the city. By the way, I also have to mention that the real ugliness of Chisinau gets visible if you leave the city center.
If I had gone to Orheiul Vechi, I probably would have missed these two sights due to time restrictions. So I was glad that I could at least see Chisinau completely.
Is Chisinau really the ugliest capital in Europe? I hate to say it, but I would agree. Together with Pristina it is really the ugliest capital. But this ugliness didn’t bother me. What disturbed me a bit more was how sleepy the city was. Also in the evening hardly anything seemed to be going on and it was after all weekend. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend Chisinau to anyone, even if my time there was okay.
My time in Chisinau was coming to an end after that day. I still had one day ahead of me on which I went to Transnistria (find this trip report here).
Moldova as a travel destination
Moldova is certainly different from most European countries. The country seems to be one to three decades behind most European countries. But it also had something refreshing. Globalization has not yet really arrived in Moldova. That means that Chisinau still has a very authentic cityscape without Costa Coffee, Burger King, Zara or H&M.
Otherwise Moldova is just typical Eastern Europe. And when I write Eastern Europe, I don’t mean the Central European countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic or Poland, but real Eastern Europe like Romania, Bulgaria or the Ukraine. This means that everything is a little more chaotic, the degree of internationalization is low and bad service is part of the mentality. On the other hand, it also has advantages, for example very cheap prices and everything is still relatively untouched.
I am often asked if a country is worth a trip. In Moldova, the answer depends strongly on the person asking the question. Travelers who spend most of their holidays in mainstream destinations such as Spain, Italy or France will not enjoy Moldova. Even those who prefer to travel to the usual countries, but would like to experience something new, are probably better off in Romania or Bulgaria. Moldova is in fact rather something for consistent off the beaten track traveler. You really don’t have to be afraid of meeting many other tourists here.
All in all, I had fun in Moldova. Perhaps my report sounds more negative than it actually was. It wasn’t a bad trip, it was an interesting one. Nevertheless, I don’t think I will visit Moldova again so soon. After all, the country was too little vibrant for me. But you should never say never.
