New car, caviar

How kind of boring that it's all just about money. Transdniestr has all the factories and the rest of Moldova is (more) poor and rural. Add the instability of the Soviet Union crumbling around you, and you've got yourself a breakaway republic. Well, there's also the fact that a lot of Transdniestrians don't speak Romanian, and don't want to (and more generally, Moldova is more pro Europe/Romania whereas Transdniestr is more pro-Russian, but I don't know whether that's more effect or cause), but my new Transdniestrian friend Nick says it's mainly about money.

So, no communists, same old 'freedom-to-make-money' fight--the Lonely Planet really oversold the weirdness of this place. It is kind of nice, though. There are lots of trees and a river and it's been sunny and warm and dry with a pretty bright blue sky and it's hard not to at least kind of like a place under those conditions. It basically feels like a smaller, less Romanian version if Chisinau, only with different currency and more hammers and sickles. The currency situation is a little bit of a pain in that to get cash you have to first get either US dollars or Russian roubles from the ATM and then exchange them for Transdniestrian roubles, but for your troubles you do get an official receipt, printed on a tractor feed printer, with lots of official stamps and that satisfying official-stamp clicky noise that goes with them.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Transdniestr is how nice the people here are--definitely the friendliest Russian-speaking population I've come across so far. I had a whole fleet of bus drivers trying to help me when I arrived, and wait staff look you in the eye and say you're welcome when you say thank you. Even the guy at 'border' control was, well, not exactly nice, but he wasn't mean or scary and didn't give me a hard time at all. (The one thing I'm glad the Lonely Planet was wrong about--I really didn't want to have my camera confiscated or be interrogated or have to pay some huge bribe, no matter how much better a story it would have made.) Rumors of the Soviet Union's being alive and well and living inside Moldova are definitely exaggerated.

Also, hooray for catching Ratko Mladic!