Can you imagine?

Odessa is made of limestone. When the city was being built people bought or otherwise acquired a little piece of land, started digging in the middle of it, and used the limestone from the ground to build around the outside, leaving a courtyard in the middle. That's why there is a well/flower-pot-looking round thing in the middle of all the courtyards here and why a few buildings are sinking. (People dug too much and didn't leave enough foundation). The digging would eventually lead to the neighbors' tunnels, and now there's a whole labyrinth under Odessa. Depending on who you ask, there are between 1000 and 3000 km of tunnels going two or even sometimes three stories down. The rich people made underground ('air-conditioned') party rooms, and the really rich people had an orchestra in the first layer underground and the party room a level below that. Back when Odessa was a tax-free port, the catacombs were used to smuggle things inland. In villages outside the city, peasants dug tunnels under the fields to get limestone to sell, and when the Nazis occupied Odessa during the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II), those catacombs were home to the Soviet resistance.

You can tour part of the resistance catacombs but only with a guide, which was fine by me because even though there are now lights and exit signs it is dark and creepy down there and the thought of making a wrong turn and getting lost gives me actual chills. There were a bunch of school groups ("Oh my," said my guide. "So many children. This is disaster.") but sound does not carry down there and we only had to get a few turns away before we couldn't hear them at all--which is also kinda creepy.

The area of resistance catacombs was huge and there were various different groups operating basically independently. Some were fairly successful in that they killed a lot of Germans and Romanians. One particularly unsuccessful group had a traitor who sold them out to the Nazis, who promptly sealed all their exits. ("Can you imagine?", my guide kept saying.) Waiting to be rescued, they started rationing food. Someone started hoarding and so they killed him. Two soldiers were caught doing something sexual, so they killed them. Then they ran out of food, so they ate the dead people. Then people started going crazy, so they killed and eventually ate them. By the time the German occupation ended, there was only one guy left alive. He couldn't walk, or talk, or see, and he died about two weeks after he was rescued. (Two of the people had been keeping journals, which was forbidden but helped keep them less crazy, and is where that story came from.)

Even though we were speaking English, my guide saved the cannibalism story for the taxi ride back to the city. "If the children would hear, can you imagine?"

She's gotta have it

The downside to being a ruling empress back in the days when European royalty really ruled was that getting married would have meant losing power, and so if you had any sexual appetite whatsoever it had to be satisfied outside of marriage, which immediately meant that you had a voracious sexual appetite, and the next thing you know people are claiming you're into fucking horses. The upside was that you weren't expected to actually fight the wars you started, the way emperors sometimes were, so you could tell your general 'Get me that fortress' and it just might work, without your ever having to leave the comfort of the Summer Palace. That's how Odessa became part of the Russian empire, and now Catherine the Great is all over the city. Lots of things are named after her, including one of the main streets, and one of the squares has a huge Catherine the Great statue. There's also a smaller bust of General Potemkin who did all the work. (Incidentally, Tiraspol was also brought under the Russian crown by order of Catherine the Great, so there are some statues of the Empress mixed in with the statues of Vladimir Ilyich.) Anyway, Odessa is a beautiful city. Trees canopy the streets and it's full of old palaces adorned with actual statues and gargoyle-y, angel-y sculptures. And plus there's the sea.

The beautiful people scene here is a little too beautiful for me, though. The heels and the clothes and the hair and the make-up. And the guys, too, with the pointy shoes and hair product and expensive jeans. Even the guy running my hostel is one of the beautiful people, with his dyed hair and unbuttoned shirt and his cigarettes. I've stayed in a lot of hostels in a lot of places, and they're never run by the beautiful people. Except in Odessa. He has some kind of problems "with the business" so "if anyone asks, please tell them you are my... guest." And then he winked. I bet he has orgies on boats.

Making love or else expecting rain

I think on your first night in Odessa, especially if it's a Saturday night, you're supposed to have a cocaine-fueled orgy on a boat or something. What I did on my first night on Odessa was go to the Irish bar near my hostel, but it's ok because it was to watch Barcelona win the Champions League final. Irish bars the world over are good for one thing, and that is watching sports. ¡Barça!

Getting to Odessa was also pretty much the opposite of a cocaine-fueled orgy on a boat. I know that guide books are full of errors and so you should always double-check anything important, but when the Lonely Planet said that there are at least 24 buses a day between Tiraspol and Odessa, it really seemed safe to assume that I could show up to the bus station any time and a bus would leave soonish. I showed up around ten to find that the next bus left at two. Joder. When the bus finally did leave, it was an oversold, unventilated van with no room for luggage, but everyone had luggage so the luggage plus some people filled the aisles. I was shoved in the very back next to an old man who sweat alcohol, and the bad roads plus bad van made it so bumpy that sometimes my ass left the seat. At the Transdniestr side of the border, they made us all get out of the van and put our luggage through a metal detector. (To make sure we weren't taking weapons out of Transdniestr?) Then once we and all our stuff were packed back into the seats and aisle of the van, they made me get back off (i.e., climb over everyone's luggage) and go to a little building to have an entirely useless conversation with an immigration guy, and so then crawl back over everyone's luggage to the very back of the van... I'm realizing as I write this that it's not a good story at all and I'm just whining. Traveling in poor countries means crappy infrastructure and sometimes border crossings are slow and stressful. Deal with it.

Anyway, by the time I finally made it to Odessa, which so far looks like a lovely city, I was in no condition for any kind of orgy. Some of the other patrons of the Irish bar seemed to be, though. Hot girls in spike heels drank fruity drinks and colorful shots and made out with boys who were only sort of watching the game. Beautiful or strangely-dressed people continually paraded through the bar, and some wealthy-looking people had very important conversations with the manager. So, with the exception of TVs showing sports, even the Irish bar felt like some ridiculous night club. Yikes.

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!

Back in the USSR?

Man, this place isn't communist at all.

Tiraspol is the capital of Transdniestr, which declared independence from Moldova after the Soviet Union split up. Transdniestr has its own police, currency, and border controls, but isn't recognized by any other countries. Going to a country that doesn't officially exist seemed like a good adventure, plus the Lonely Planet descriped Transdniestr as a last bastion of communism, or something like that. Sign me up. But, although there are hammers and sickles and communist stars to be seen, plus street names like 25 October, Sovietic, Gorki, Rosa Luxemburg (I could go on) and some Lenin statues, Transdniestr isn't communist at all. Ok, so they maybe have a president for life (whose name is Igor Smirnov--can you think of a more perfect name for the president-for-life of a post-Soviet country that doesn't officially exist? I can't.) and Russia maintains a police force here. But the government doesn't set prices. People own property and have passports (some have Moldovan passports, others Russian or Ukrainian) and can come and go as they please. There is a House of Soviets (Dom Sovetov), but it's just the city government building whose name hasn't been changed. The one supermarket may actually be a state monopoly, but the stores are bright and shiny and full of food. Not even one crummy bread line.

Speak my language

I didn't know that Moldova was a country until I saw it in my east Europe guidebook. I knew it was some kind of place, I think, but maybe I thought it was a region in some other country, or a place that doesn't exist anymore like Byzantium of Czechoslovakia. Anyway, it is a country, right now, between Romania and Ukraine, with about 4.5 million people. (That is about one and a half Brooklyns, or 15 Icelands.)

I only recently (like, within the last week) decided to come to Moldova, and I haven't really done my homework; all I know about it is what the Lonely Planet and Wikipedia have to say and what I've seen in 1.5 days. Moldova used to be bigger, and Romanian-speaking, and called Moldavia, and controlled by (of course) the Ottomans. Then the Russians got it and made everyone learn Russian. There were wars and treaties and borders changed and eventually Moldova became one of the Soviet republics and now it is independent. Stalin apparently really pushed the idea of a Moldovan identity, distinct from Romanian. He decided that Moldovan was a separate language from Romanian (fucking dictators and their linguistic decrees) and switched it from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. (Romanian was originally written in Cyrillic and then changed to Latin, for whatever that's worth.) Now most everyone is bilingual (I think? -- it seems that way in Chisinau (the capital), anyway) and Moldovan (Romanian, whatever) is written in the Latin alphabet again. When I hear older people talking, it's almost always in Russian. Younger people mix it up; Romanian seems to be more common. The older people get kind of excited when I try to speak Russian; at first I thought it was a political statement that the younger people don't, but it probably has more to do with the fact that they mostly speak English a lot better than I speak Russian.

Language politics are sort of fascinating to me and I would like to understand them here. But this trip (the Moldova part of the trip, I mean) is super short. I hope I come back.

Also, the Moldovan cell phone company is called MoldCell.

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.