Lost in The City

The City...

I took a walk, in fact I've taken several walks but I am referring to last night's in particular. Today is Monday, the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King in the US and the second day of the New Year in Moldova, a holiday either way. So last night around 6:30 pm, on the first day of the New Year(Julian Calendar) I took a walk.

Let me digress for a few lines and tell you whence the inspiration came and what the plans were for this walk. Firstly allow me to admit a lack of knowledge of The City. I've been here a month and aside from my hotel, a McDonald's at which I have not yet eaten , though I can tell you that on the menu they have a pie with sour cherries(vishine), a great schnitzel place( it comes on a kaiser roll with fries, sauerkraut and ketchup, and yes the combination works), one Irish Pub aptly named Irish Pub, and work, I know nothing at all. So as this three day weekend approached I made plans to see The City afoot since renting a car is an interesting, expensive, and quite shady proposition here.
Saturday I took two walks, each from the same starting point( the front of my hotel).

The first striking out to the left and the second to the right (I joked with a friend that I would only be making left turns on the first and right turns on the second so as to get right back to where I started). I had reread my Lonely Planet Guide To Moldova on Friday night and out I set. The Guide was quite definitive on the design of the city devoting one whole sentence to it. I shall now reproduce it for you: "Chisinau's street layout is a typically Soviet grid system of straight streets". Now here was a height of clarity I hope to one day achieve, I jest of course. The reason this very old city is built in the Soviet Style, my guide tells me, is that it was heavily bombed in World War II and rebuilt almost in its entirety. One small tid-bit, I believe my Grandfather fought here during WWII but I would need someone from the older generation to confirm.

My plan also included two more walks, saved for Sunday, one forward and one backward, not the most complicated plan I admit but "in this case vot you can do". The hotel being central I figured I would cover much ground this way.

*This is the best map of Chisinau I was able to find on short notice. If you're looking for me squint and see if you can spot the number 9 that is one the closest to my starting point.

Both walks went well but were quite uneventful, I was lost inside my own thoughts, and therefore paid attention only to the buildings not to life on the street. Upon returning home after each walk I was tired but not engaged.

Sunday started off slowly, I set my alarm so as not to miss breakfast. Two eggs over easy, four pieces of toast( not five for that you have to pay), triangularly sliced feta, circularly sliced cucumbers, three olives(not four for that you have to pay as well), a packaged croissant, and something called "Labne" which appears to be cottage cheese and yogurt, suffice to say I recalled my childhood and "just said no" to the Labne. The hotel calls the whole thing Sunday Breakfast Menu 1101(why I don't know). I washed it down with a Turkish coffee, a bottle of seltzer water, and red juice. I am afraid I must call it red juice as after a month of drinking it I have as yet to discern its origin. The only other thing on the menu was English, it is hard to say but the quality of service goes up when you speak it around here.

Upon my return to the room in order to dress for my forward walk, I was however sidetracked by the bathtub. Yes folks, I took a bath. I know that baths went out when I hit puberty but you have to understand my bathtub.


It has a part in the back where you can sit up and read and two jets in the exterior wall, plus someone cleans it daily. So my book, my iPod, and warm water put off my stroll until evening. I'm sorry but you wanted the unvarnished truth and there it is. After the bath I procrastinated by playing some bridge on the laptop.

So at 6:30 pm I went for a walk.



Dressed in a black fleece, jeans, a pair of boots, and a wool hat(must protect the earlobes) I started out from the hotel. The iPod, underneath the fleece and the hat, was blaring Turandot a parting gift given to me by my Evil Twin. I walked briskly to the main drag, Blvd Stefan Cel Mare Si Sfint, where I first started to notice the City.

Neon, it may be an inert gas but it was interacting with everything. Buildings glowed red (like the juice), green, purple, every color imaginable. The glow was reflected in the peoples faces: the old lady with an eye patch(I kid you not) bathed in red from the Men's Health sign in a shop window. The teen whose blue, Pepsi lit, hand was groping his girl's bottom. The man wearing a Red Sox sweatshirt and a Yankees hat made me reach for my camera. The street was alive and people were interacting everywhere, making conversation, kissing, holding hands, arguing, one man was protesting, his manifesto on placards laid out on the ground in front of him, three gypsies were singing bawdily. A couple was walking their young child swinging him up and down the street and I was going for a walk.

It was the first day of the new year, unseasonably warm in the high 40's I think, and people were everywhere. I felt as if The City wasn't foreign anymore it had that atmosphere, that buzzing that cities have, one you don't have to hear to feel. I found a small park and cast about for a bench, not finding one empty I leaned against a wall loitering for what must have been 15 minutes. Three people asked for those things you usually ask a stranger for, one for money two for a light, having brought neither I shook my head silently and the reverie broken I moved on. The feeling however had sunk in, here in The City, far away from friends, family, and the life I had painstakingly created I wasn't alone I was Lost in Moldova and that was not such a bad thing.

It was 7:15 and I was going for a walk.



I continued on, the aria doing its work on the inside while the street life was doing the same on the outside.

The beauty of the Grid System seems to be, aside from its simplicity the prevalence of large imposing boulevards, Str. Ismail being one of them, so I made a left expecting more of the same. And poof the people were gone, erased as if some one had photo-shopped them out while I checked the volume on my iPod. I was alone, alone in a sea of cars careening down the road driven the way only someone who has recently come into possession of a powerful automobile and wants people to know it, can drive. The way my best friend drove his Mercedes in that first year after he got it.

The people had vanished, I don't know if people just don't walk down this boulevard, if I had gone too far and left the center of town behind, if I smelled, or if people had already come this way and I was going against the grain. The street had those large rectangular buildings I had first encountered in New Bucharest. I had stepped back in time the neon was gone, the groping, even the buzz it was all gone replaced by the sound of cars on the way to somewhere else. I walked a ways feeling truly Lost in Moldova, I knew no one, didn't recognize anything familiar and that Oh my god what did I get myself into feeling washed over me. I slowed my pace like the man climbing a mountain who realizes its steeper than he originally thought, finally I just stopped and took in the scene. The buildings were lit by a different kind of light, that of headlights. I wondered what took place in these nameless, characterless buildings. Kafka's The Trial whispered through my head why I can't quite say yet. Where were my friends, my older cousins, my parents, my aunts nad uncles, my mentor, someone, anyone I could share this moment with. I could turn make a joke, some dry remark and diffuse the mood, instead it settled over me like a fog. It was the first day of the New Year but the past was not gone.

I felt the need to move, to leave, to turn left, to get back to that other street.

It was 7:45 and I was going for a walk.


I made the first left back towards the hotel, I'd had enough of the city for one walk. A book, a schnitzel, and to top it off a DVD were in my future. As I walked back I came to this hasty realization, what you could call a first impression: The City just like The Country was one of extremes from rich to poor, western to eastern, engulfed to alone there was no in between. One step either way could take you from one to the other. The middle, the ground upon which I had firmly stood for a majority of my life, didn't exist here.

I took the steps at the hotel two at a time, foregoing all decorum. Upon entering my room I threw myself heavily on the couch and listened to the end of the opera.

It was 8:30 and I was done walking.

Now It is Monday 6:00 pm and I've spent a part of my day reading and a part writing this. Soon it'll be 6:30 and I wonder if I'll go for a walk.



The City awaits...

Postscript. Once again this post is long and overly dramatic. The walk did take place however and so did most of these emotions. So I ask those of you who have made moves like this and taken walks like this, was it at all the same for you?

Thanks for bearing with me
Lost in Moldova

City: Zora