Chisinau the long way round

Well, here I am in Chisinau, and I have to say it is a “tick”, my 48th country (or is it 49? I’m not going to count again), but it took a while coming.

Take a look at the map. Chisinau is very close to Kiev. Odessa, about 100km down the River Dnister, is a hop and a skip from Kiev, about 55 minutes by Aerosvit on a good day. But for some reason (and it can only be political) there is no direct flight from Kiev to Chisinau. So we have to go via Vienna. That’s halfway home!

Austrian is the carrier. Have you been recently in an Austrian plane? The seats are basically green, but the headrests are in red and yellow and maybe another colour or two. It reminds you of vomit, or (if you’re that way inclined) a bad trip.

So first I went to Vienna, and I have to say I had one of the very top bad airline meals. A sandwich filled with what seemed to me to be a mixture of tapenade and mozzarella cheese, of such intensity that it was difficult to even eat a quarter. Absolutely disgusting.

Only an hour’s wait in Vienna, but whilst there a storm came up and there was a bit of thunder and lightning. Now these days I’m a good flier but lightning is what I draw the line at. So it was a very quiet plane listening to the safety instruction as the rain beat on the fuselage of the (absurdly small) Canadair 100 jet.

But we got off and we got here and now everything is great. Of course. First impressions? Well, Moldova goes to great lengths to insist it’s not Romanian. Oh no. But the language looks like Romanian, sounds like Romanian. Which is good because being a Latin language I can start to understand what’s going on without having to look closely at Cyrillic script.
Anyway, you can forgive a lot when the time is 9 in the evening, the temperature is 28, and everyone is chilling out. Café society, Eastern European style is OK.