Day 2 or so
With a hangover the size of Crimea I rustle Javier out of bed and we get ready for the winery.
The drive out there is through beautiful countryside, but the roads are rough. Apparently we are on a major highway, but as our friends tell us it was destroyed during WW2. The repairs are due any decade now. Thankfully we are in an SUV - a fact that will be much appreciated later in the week.
About 40 minutes north of the city is Chateau Vartely, a gorgeous French-style winery with a large lodge with a restaurant and tasting room. Little cottages line the hills next to the lodge and on the whole the ambience is more inviting than places I’ve seen in Napa/Sonoma.
We still haven’t eaten so we opt for a meal with a tasting. Our friends choose a few traditional Moldovan dishes for us to sample, but the waiter won’t let us do the tasting simultaneously.
The waiter looks like Moby’s younger, more emaciated, brother. After a few attempts to get our tasting with the food the manager comes out and says it is no problem. Javier and I wonder what degree of former Soviet control is still at play in terms of customer service. We conclude that the general rule is to have tastings in the tasting room and meals in the dining room, and between those the waiter saw no reason to permit tasting while eating. If such a thing were allowed, surely someone would have told him so?
We literally stuff ourselves on placinta, rabbit, veal, grilled vegetables, polenta and a sour cream/chicken noodle soup pronounced “zopa.”
The wine is delicious, a little sweeter overall than I prefer but amazing nonetheless. Javier and I both did some damage in the gift shop before returning to the city.
Javier’s friend that was supposed to pick us up from the airport owns a restaurant in town called “Propaganda.” She is/was a civil rights journalist so the name makes sense. Before heading out for a night on the town we go to Propaganda to get cocktails and hopefully meet his friend. When we get there we find out she’s in Paris, explaining the no-show at the airport. Propaganda itself is in a neighborhood that at night has no lights running on the streets and the restaurant itself is easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it. Even our cab driver drove past it at first.
That may however been partly his own fault. Cabs are really hard to get in Chisinau. We must have flagged no less than 40 before one pulled over, the driver spoke no English but we had saved the address and a map on our phones to show him. It was like trying to explain trigonometry to an aardvark. He looks at the phone with a blank face, and keeps staring at it for another 30 seconds. We think he may be illiterate, so we bring up the photo of the map. He looks at that for 30 seconds, then turns the camera upside down and back around again and continues to stare at it. Never says a word. We cut our losses and jump out. After another 40 flaggings we try again with a new driver and a station wagon style taxi; as we get into the cab we can’t help but notice a shape rolled up in blankets in the back that can’t be anything other than a body. Javier can’t even tell the driver the address before I tell him to get out, I’m not risking a drive from Sergei the body transporter. Our next driver also speaks no English, so we show him the address on the phone. He pulls out a pair of glasses to look at the screen, and after a few seconds he puts on ANOTHER pair of glasses over the first one. Despite his 20/400,000,000 vision he gets going and we eventually found the place. Hint for getting a taxi: use an app called HeyTaxi, because flagging one down is incredibly inefficient.
Some locals told us that some bands were going to do a show at 513 that night so we decide to head there after Propaganda. We miss the band but a DJ is going full steam and the little speakeasy is packed with dancing. Javier is complaining about not having a decent buzz so he starts double fisting double vodka’s. Between the hangover and an afternoon of wine I order water and tell him it’s vodka also.
Some familiar faces from the previous night show up, but the real fun starts after a few hours of dancing. A guy that looks like a young muscular Steven Seagal shows up with a pretty girl wearing a dress with a deep deep deep cut in front. The deep deep deep cut is barely covering her enormous breasts that sucks in the eyes of everyone in the bar. The men and women both look with awe, but the different sexes channel that awe in noticeably different ways. She walks up to me and asks “Vhere you from?” Not surprisingly, we don’t blend in so I’m not surprised she assumes I’m foreign. Before I can answer she says, “I hope it’s not America, I hate America, I lived in Wisconsin.” I tell her that everyone hates Wisconsin, she should have gone to California.
California is like the magic password in Moldova. Tell anyone you are from California and they love you. She turns to Javier and asks if he’s from California too. I go back to dancing, but it’s not long before the girl is taking off her bra and handing it to Javier. Steven Seagal is having none of it and pulls her away and out of the bar. We bail as well in case he comes back and has a propensity for violence and acts in conformance with that trait (FRE 403 would bar this type of character analysis but common sense demands we use it). There are certain things we’d rather avoid in Moldova, getting arrested is one of them. Prelude: we don’t exactly avoid this later in the trip.
Our apartment overlooks a shanty town with no less than 7 million dogs, and at 3am when we get back they are all busy either barking, fighting, or making little dogs so it’s really hard to fall asleep. My room has white translucent curtains so once the sun comes up I can’t sleep anyway. I thought I was clever when picking the room, it was clearly larger with a better view and had some comfy lounge chair as well. Javier picked the one with the black out curtains - a far wiser choice given our activity schedule.
Around 10am I head out, back to Propaganda. The staff the previous night said there was an omelette breakfast that morning to benefit a local charity. It was organized by an ex-pat American that lives in Chisinau so I’m hoping to meet a fellow American and have a decent breakfast. Alas, he isn’t there when I show up, but the crowd is really friendly and I find some new Moldovan friends to share breakfast with while I amaze them with stories of California.
Back at the apartment Javier is trying to convince me to drive to Odessa, Ukraine that night. In my mind Ukraine is on the brink of war and they are probably executing tourists at the border (I know this makes no sense objectively). I decline and decide to walk around the city and see some sights and Javier opts for that as well. There’s a really pretty World War II memorial, very Soviet-influenced but nonetheless somber and respectful. We walk from there to the city’s cathedral in the center and watch a short prayer session before going to dinner at an Uzebekistan restaurant.
We are the only people there, and we choose a table with huge leather couches. For some reason there are TVs lining the place showing motocross racing, we ask if they can change the channel and the waiter says, “No, this is big race today.” Having gone through this before with Moby’s brother at Vartely we know we just have to wait him out. After a few more requests we wear him down, but the channel he changes it to is equally bizarre. Music channels here are American songs, but the videos that are shown with the song are Russian alternatives that invariably involve naked girls, guns, the beach, and prison. The waiter leaves it on such a music channel, and it would only be weirder if there were other people in the restaurant.
Throughout the afternoon Javier was pleading to go to Ukraine and he doesn’t let up at dinner. I break; tomorrow we leave for Odessa.