i decided to hit up lebanon this passover break! because lebanon and israel don’t get along particularly well, one must make every effort to ensure that neither county’s immigration knows that you’ve ever been to the other. thus, i had to take a circuitous route to get there through a third country. actually, it ended up being five different third countries! the first stop was ukraine, where it was unbelievably cold and i really wished i would have brought along a hat and some gloves. at the airport in kyiv, the bus that was taking us to our airplane got stuck in a snowdrift on the tarmac for a considerable amount of time. as it lurched back and forth trying to get unstuck, elderly people were falling and hurting themselves.
the next stop was odessa, also in ukraine, on the black sea. i learned that in the era of imperial russia, this was the fouth most important city in the empire. it has paled in significance since then, but is still quite a nice city. i wandered around the expansive outdoor market for most of the day, listening to audio pathology lectures, before catching a train in the late afternoon to chisinau, moldova. thankfully i did manage to catch the train despite discovering mere minutes before it departed that it was leaving from a location other than the main train station. it was a pleasant and well heated little ancient train, with a huge picture of an orthodox Jesus with a halo looking down from the front of every car. of course, it was inevitable that i become very well acquainted with one of the region’s token alcoholics with absolutely no concept of personal space, who spoke to me in slurred, drunken russian for the entire seven hour journey, seemingly unable to comprehend that i wasn’t understanding a word he was saying. all part of the experience!
a fascinating thing about this train trip was that it went through a little known de-facto independent country called transnistria or transdniester, which occupies a narrow ribbon of land along the dneister river in the eastern part of what the rest of the world considers to be moldova. moldova itself doesn’t recognize transnistrian sovereignty, but the latter has their own military, border controls, currency (the rouble), etc. the place is considered a last remnant of the soviet union, as they have an obtusely omnipresent communist government, soviet symbology along the lines of hammers and sickles, and until very recently, required bribes for foreigners to even get in. unfortunately due to the train schedule it wasn’t really feasible for me to stop in their capital tiraspol to take a look around, but their border guards did enter the train to rough up our passports some. rumor has it there’s not much going on there other than the admiration of soviet statues. traveling back in time is always fun though!
the train then continued to chisinau (pronounced kish-ee-now), the capital of moldova, where i spent two nights. i stayed in a hostel room with a permanent resident of the hostel, an ebullient middle aged irish guy who generously offered me anything i might want from his wide selection of prescription anti-psychotics, tranquilizers and stimulants that were spread about the room. i said thanks but no thanks. he also shared with me a plethora of conspiracy theories, and at any given time seemed to be either putting on or taking off some contextually inappropriate article of clothing. an interesting character. my initial plan was to meet up with the moldovan family of my israeli friend victor, but unfortunately that didn’t work out due to inadequate planning in advance on my part.
chisinau was interesting, but one got the sense that there wasn’t a whole lot to see. one obvious exception was an epic new large and glamorous shopping mall called MALL DOVA. get it!? amazing place. moldova is known for the attractiveness of their females and for being the poorest country in europe. despite being quite poor on average, there is tremendous wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, which leads many to question the legality of the methods used by those few to become so unbelievably wealthy in just the relatively short time since the dissolution of the soviet union. interestingly, at certain times in history well over half of the population of what is now moldova has been jewish. tens of thousands of the huge wave of post-soviet immigrants to israel were from moldova, including the infamous current israeli foreign minister avigdor lieberman, who somehow manages to hold onto his job despite being a racist bigot and facing trial for fraud. but i digress.
then it was stops in munich, germany and a night in istanbul, turkey before touching down in the fascinating land of lebanon!
