Crazy wedding traditions and dancing bears

Wedding sightseeing parties are all the rage in Chisinau
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Day 18

My train was due to arrive in Chisinau around 11pm. Given the hostel seemed some distance away, I didn't fancy a long and dark walk to it as I thought that I would end up as some criminal statistic.

The hostel website said that it could arrange lifts from the station. I thought that would be a wise investment and so I phoned ahead only to be told that they could not give me a lift and that I should get a taxi which should only cost 30 lei.

Oleg, 24, was publicly outed as being HIV pozitiv
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Given the general nature of 'honest' taxi drivers who hang around train stations at night, I felt sure that none of the taxi drivers would agree that 30 lei was a reasonable fare for a ride to the hostel. After a 15 hour train journey, I could have really done without such arguing/haggling. However, I was spared this scenario due to none of my cashcards working in the machines in and around the station. I presumed that Moldova must be a rogue debit/credit card country so a card is automatically blocked when it is tried to be used. What I would have given for some bartering with a taxi driver.

In Moldova, bears are always first to hit the dance floor
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Actually, it was not too bad a 25 minute walk to the hostel as the directions given were rather good. Obviously there was lots of nervous looks over my shoulders but there were actually not that many people about. The only scary bit was when a dog ran out of a house towards me and I was thinking, 'Please don't give me rabies' (and it didn't).

Day 19

After an expensive call to my bank in England, they told me that there was no block on my card. After speaking with people at the hostel, they told me that they were only certain visa machines that worked despite them all having a visa sign on. After learning the secret handshake concerning where these machines were located, I now had Moldovan money and was ready to part with it.

'So what's the word on the street then?'
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I'd read on various travel blogs that Chisinau is generally not that pleasing on the eye and that there is not much to see either. As such, I held off visiting the centre of Chisinau until the afternoon whilst I sorted out my ticket to Romania. My original plan had been to go to Bucharest and then head of to Transylvania as I'd heard that connections between Chisinau and that region were far from reliable. However, there was a bus directly to Brasov in the heast of Dracula country so I thought that I would get a ticket booked in advance.

Chasing cars (and buses) in Chisinau
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The bus to the very out of town bus station was like a marshrutka and I was now getting very used to this mode of transport. The one that I hopped onto was packed. I was stood on the steps out of the bus with my head rather too close for comfort to the windscreen. If there was an accident then I was gonna be a gonner. And I was greatly increasing the chances of an accident due to the fact that I was blocking the driver's view of his nearside mirror.

On the way to the bus station, there was a fancy looking state buildings with some token big guns outside. The bus station was a rather barren looking place. On the bus back to the hostel, we passed this park with a very soviet military style monument so I got the driver to drop me off there and then. This park also had its own eternal flame.

The Chisinau Hilton hotel...erm, no - its the President's Palace
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And then it starting gertting very bizarre indeed. There was a wedding party nearby and then they started having their pictures taken at the big monument and eternal flame. Just as I was thinking that this couldn't get any more weirder then another wedding party arrived and started getting up to the shame photo shenanigans.

I would later meet more groups of happy couples at other tourist sites around the place. It seemed that after couples tie the knot here then they get their pictures taken at all the main sites in the place - parliament buildings, churches, other monuments. Plain odd...'Now that we're married honey, let's turn into tourists in our city'. Who says that romance is dead?

A wedding party near a church in Chisinau.....how odd
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Sure enough, there was not much to see in Chisinau. There were in interesting enough statues on the sides of some buildings. There was not the poverty en masse that I was expecting. The main street, Stefan cel Mare boulevard, looked nice with wide lanes and trees on either side. However, the trees blocked the view of the other side of the street and therefore it was hard to get a feel for the place.

Chisinau therefore seemed the sort of place to people watch since there was not much else to watch. The quality of people watching (ie good looking young ladies) seems to get better at the end of the main street near the MacDonalds.

Moldova's got Talent, Talent's got Moldova
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There was a nice grandiose square and park with churches at the end of the main street. There was a 'concert' (well, an erected stage in a park) which had gained quite a crowd. The 'entertainers' were singing 'I just called to say I loved you' in Moldovan. In any language, it does not sound a good song.

The most interesting part of my day was actually seeing the president's palace. I thought that my lonely planet book had got the location wrong. However, after asking directions, I was pointed to a building that I had previously walked past trying to find the palace. It was a building that did not look palatial in any way. In fact, it looked more like a hotel - you could easily have slapped a hilton sign on the place and nobody would have batted an eyelid.

It was getting late so it was back to the hostel and then catching a bus to the bus station. When I arrived at the bus station, the weather suddenly started to change for the worse. There was now rain, winds and even a few flashes of lightning. Maybe this was a warning that I should not be heading towards Dracula country.

Shortly after the bus journey started, a couple of tvs came down from above. A film with Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz was showing that had been dubbed into Romanian. Despite the language barrier, I realised very early on that the film was not going to be good and that there was going to be no lesbian scene to save it.