Under the Moldovan Sun

"Our last week in Romania was spent cycling across the terrifically flat plain of the Danube Basin, leading us northeast to the Moldovan boarder. Along the way we had the great fortune of soaking in the warmth and hospitality of the Romanian people, while marveling at the unique ways that 21st century technology collide with the 19th century agrarian lifestyle. Old men driving horse carts mounded sky-high with hay while chatting on a cell phone or club music thumping out of a chicken coop are sublime sites. We could not help but to have heads full of strange images as we rolled into Moldova (see Eastern Europe map from last entry, capital Chisinau). It is infamous for poverty, die-hard communism, watermelons, and rivers of wine. We found all of these things to indeed be in abundance. A watermelon fresh from the field will cost you about twenty cents, while a bottle of decent wine will set you back a dollar. As for poverty, you know you are in a poor country when the locals use the phrase 'So, are you in the Peace Corps?' as a conversation starter. Even if from a car window the infrastructure of the country does not look that bad, it doesn't take long for the reality of the situation to become apparent. Allow us to paint you a picture of Moldova using a real-life example which might serve as metaphor for the situation here on a larger scale.

A Case of Deterioration: Our Hotel Room

After a week of biking five or six hours a day, sleeping in a tent every night and showering very infrequently a four dollar a night hotel room seemed like a dream come true. Rachel described the room as the worst she has ever stayed in (though David claims to have been in one worse hovel on the Louisiana/Mississippi boarder).

The 'perks' of this zero-star facility include the following:

a) one functioning faucet in the whole building

b) locks: the lock on the door to our room stuck terribly, but only from the inside, which made leaving our room something like a jailbreak. The bathroom (shared, though as far as we could tell we were the only guests in the hotel) had no lock whatsoever, leading to a hilarious situation involving us bathing (using that one functional faucet) only to have the old lady that ran the joint walk in on us, then run off howling and muttering in Russian.

c) flooded bathroom floor (don't worry, it was like that before the shower)

d) very little working electricity (maybe half the outlets and a third of the lights so we had to use our flashlight to go to the bathroom at night)

e) cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, and man-eating bedbugs that we eventually defeated by sleeping on our tarp over the sheets

f) random garbage left in the room by previous guests, never to be removed by hotel staff.

What is central to understanding the situation of this hotel is that it is at the intersection of the two main streets of a fairly large town (35,000 maybe) and looks fairly normal from the outside. It just seems like about fifteen years ago it died, and what remains is something part ghost part rotting corpse. It is hard to overstate how frozen-in-time the place felt. It's like if a wall was in the process of being painted when the USSR crumbled the guys painting dropped their brushes and left, never to return."