I did it with a wiffle ball bat

In the end, I could have made it to Moldova last night. Someone offered me a ride and a hotel as soon as I got to Iaşi. But by then I was tired and starving and had already booked a hotel and was committed to playing harmonica before going to sleep. So I stayed, and played harmonica, and some kids stared at me a lot and everyone else ignored me.

Anyway. The way to get from Iaşi to Chişinău (the capital of Moldova), unless you want to spend another whole day on a bus, is to go to this one supermarket parking lot where maxitaxis (i.e., vans or station wagons) leave whenever they fill up, or whenever the driver feels like it. My particular driver was a burly older Moldovan man with big thick hands and a Finlandia vodka hat; for someone who runs a maybe-slightly-sketchy cross-border van service, he was a surprisingly careful driver. He got out of the van at the border where between (I think among is the word I should use here, but between just sounds better) him, the passport control guy, the customs woman, and some other un-official-looking guy in a t-shirt, a few cartons of cigarettes changed hands several times. The woman in the front seat of the van was wearing leopard print and talked nonstop, on her phone or to the driver, in a really shrill, grating voice; but then at the border she wanted to see my passport and told me I look really young and I decided she wasn't so bad.

And now I'm in Moldova! I took an instant liking to it. They speak Russian here. Not that I speak Russian really, but I speak it much better than I speak Hungarian, Bosnian, Serbian, Turkish, Bulgarian, or Romanian. It's nice to at least know how to properly greet people and ask some basic questions correctly enough to be understood. My hotel is this huge Soviet concrete block and they sell kvas everywhere and you can buy pretty much everything you need to live from a kiosk on the sidewalk or in the underground passageways that you have to use to get across the main streets. Cigarettes cost about $1 a pack here. (God, I wish I still smoked sometimes.) I didn't notice how much they cost in Romania, but I assume that explains the driver and the cigarettes at the border.