Sheep Guarding Llama

We liked our food at Bouchee yesterday so much and their breakfast menu had looked good so we decided, as we knew of nowhere else to go, that we would go there for breakfast this morning.  Liesl ended up discovering, after months of refusing to try them, that she absolutely loves croissants and she just ate and ate them for breakfast today.  She ate through Bouchee’s supply of small ones and dove into their big ones as well.  We had to wait at the restaurant for a while for Liesl to get her fill of the bread products.

After breakfast we took a slow stroll up the main boulevard and did some shoe shopping on the way (but no one found anything) and worked our way to the Arch of Triumph and the first of the big city parks.  We explored the park and found some fountains and then some playgrounds and let the girls spend some energy there.

Luciana had some attitude problems and missed out on having as much playground time as Liesl got to have, though.

We ended up getting snacks at a little pizza place in the park.  We got a potato sampler tray that turns out is a Moldovan thing.  It is potato wedges, French fries and these unique potato ball snacks all in one.  Tons of places that we have seen already have this.  I got my first Moldovan beer as well, a Chisinau.

After the little snack break we grabbed gelato from a stand by the pizza place and returned to the playground so that the girls could play for another hour or so.

While the girls were on the playground, Dominica and I did our first travelogue videos.  We are starting by working on a Twitter-based channel that can only accept thirty second “Vines” or short video clips.  This will give us some solid constraints and force us to work with that to get started.  Luciana decided that she wanted to record a “YouTube Channel” too, and she made a short clip while we were in the park.

After the first park, we crossed diagonally to the city’s other major park and took the time to see the famous statue there; but the girls were tired and we could not go into that park but had to head back to our hotel.  The walk was not far, but too much for Ciana.

Everyone, except for me, was tired this afternoon.  So I dropped everyone off at the house after their “long morning walk” and I set out for a much longer walk on my own.  I went south and west from the apartment so that I could go to the Armenian Cemetary, a major point of interest in Chisinau as it is where the Soviet Eternal Flame Memorial is with the standing guard is located.  It is a famous World War II memorial.  I had wanted to see that and it was not far away at all.

I went to the cemetery and walked around there for half an hour.  It is well worth seeing if you are in Chisinau.  I walked through the cemetery and out the far side and took the road continuing on for a very, very long walk up hill through the city.  I just kept walking as long as I was going uphill to make sure that I was putting in all of the effort getting there so that it would be faster and easier getting home.

I ended up walking through several really interesting and nice neighbourhoods and got to see a number of the old Soviet era housing blocks as well as lots of new construction in many different areas.  The city really is just amazingly green and seems to be incredibly liveable and great, clean public transportation running everywhere.  I found another Andy’s Pizza located in the middle of a neat residential area, too.

I walked so far that I actually went out to the last road in the city before turning around and walking back to the house.  Many kilometres on this walk.

Last night when we went out for crepes the girls had spotted a restaurant named Jeraffe, that had big giraffes out front and they asked if we could go there.  I checked out their menu online last night and thought that it looked awesome so I was totally up for that.  So this evening that is what we did.

We knew that Jeraffe was on the fancy side so we dressed up as best as we could given the limited wardrobe of impromptu travellers.  The restaurant turned out to be pretty busy with a large birthday party but they made room for us.

Our dinner was absolutely amazing.  Some of the best food that I have had in many years.  Everything was just great and everyone loved their meals.  Great food and great service.  Luciana had had a long day and actually fell asleep during our dinner and slept for at least half an hour at the restaurant and I had to carry her back to the apartment (tomorrow she would wake up and remember none of this as she completely slept through everything.)

Liesl has been wanting to sleep in the upper room in our penthouse here in Chisinau and as it is so warm I am not too worried about sleeping up there myself.  So I slept with Ciana downstairs on the pull out couch and Dominica and Liesl slept upstairs in the warm room.  I find it much more comfortable sleeping by all of the open windows.

During the night we lost power for twenty minutes.  I always know the details of power losses since the CPAP forces me awake.  I got to look out of the high rise windows and see the city had gone dark so I knew that it was not just our apartment or building.

Overall it was a good night’s sleep.

We were up shortly after five this morning to prepare for our arrival in Iasi, Romania, in the province of Moldovia, on the eastern border right against Moldova.  It was a great train ride last night and other than our night being too short, most of us were feeling pretty good this morning.

We got off of the train into the nice, large Iasi train station and went up to buy our tickets for the train going on to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.  We have read about this transfer quite a bit and know that there is a daily train that comes from Bucharest, through Iasi and on to Chisinau every day.  When we got to the window to get our train tickets, they told us that there was no train today and that we would have to wait until tomorrow!  This is a bit of a problem as we have no accommodations in Iasi for tonight but do have them in Chisinau waiting for us.

We were told that we could take a local bus on to Chisinau, so we got some information about that and set off to see if we could find the bus station.

We ended up walking nearly two kilometres on a very hot day with all of our luggage to get to the nearest bus station that we could fine.  Once there, pretty much no one spoke English, but they found someone to help us and he explained where the correct bus station was: back across the street from the train station!  We had gone out the wrong door and missed it.  Argh.

Here we grabbed a taxi since we were at a bus station and taxis were coming in from time to time.  It was way too much for us to try walking all of the way back again.  None of us were going to be happy doing that.

The taxi got us back in just a few minutes and cost almost nothing.  Once at the “real” bus station there was a coordinator who spoke English well enough to deal with us tourist types and immediately got us to the right bus, although he was pretty surprised that we wanted that bus, and coordinated getting our bags on and our payment.  It turned out that the cost of going from Iasi, Romania to Chisinau, Moldova was only $9 per person!  The trip is not that different from going from Rochester, NY to Toronto, Ontario!

We were there at least an hour before our bus was going to leave so I got us some coffee and everyone used the bathroom while we were there.  We met some of the other people getting onto the bus with us.  Mostly it was a band that was travelling to Moldova to play a concert.

We were under way around nine thirty.  The bus was full and we were most definitely the only tourists on the bus.  And everyone from the band to the other people on the bus to the bus driver were pretty surprised that we were going to Moldova just to “see it.”  Getting tourists, especially non-Romanian tourists, going to Moldova is as unheard of as we have heard that it is.

The bus ride was pretty comfortable.  It was way too warm, but that was about it.  The girls played on their Kindle Fires the whole way.  Dominica is the only one that had a hard time.  Warm buses or aeroplanes really take a toll on her.

The first leg was quick and easy, under and hour and we were at the border.  The crossing was packed with cars that were backed up very far but we were waived through as a bus and probably completed the entire Romanian exit and Moldovan entrance in under and hour.  Considering that we are a bus and that Moldova is a non-EU country and a former Soviet Republic this was pretty good time.  We had no issues going through the border, it was all organized and nice.

Once onto the Moldovan side it was pretty apparent that we were into a much poorer country and the bus started routinely picking up hitch-hikers as we went.  The roads were mostly terrible and in some cases it was hard to tell that we were even on roads.  I was very thankful that we had not tried some scheme by which I was stuck driving around Moldova.  I am sure that it would have been fine but I would not have been happy at all.

One of the upsides to taking a bus like we did is that it just dropped us off right in front of our apartment building.  We did not get a hotel room as they are very hard to get in Chisinau and we rented an apartment instead.  Dominica had found this really nice penthouse that looked incredibly interesting so we had decided to stay longer in Chisinau than we had originally intended so that we could enjoy it for longer.

We had no problem finding the apartment but we had an issue getting into it when we first arrived.  We took the girls to our private playground and let them play for about an hour or so while we waiting for the apartment people to respond to us.  Dominica had been talking to them all morning but once we arrived they acted all surprised that we were showing up when we did and they just stopped responding for a while.

Eventually they let us in to the apartment, it was around one in the afternoon by this point, but it was not our apartment but another one that was not the penthouse.  There was some confusion at this point, possibly brought on by the language barrier, and we cannot tell if they were trying to bait and switch us or if they were just trying to offer us this apartment instead of the penthouse.  The one that they put us into was on the fifth floor, instead of the thirteenth, but was larger than our penthouse and all on a single floor instead of being a two floor unit.  It was very nice and spacious and would have been fine but we were specifically staying longer in Chisinau because we really liked the apartment that we had chosen.  Suddenly instead of being ready for us at two in the afternoon, the originally intended arrival time, it was not going to be ready for us until nine at night!  At least we had a place to drop off our bags so that we could do things while we were waiting for the apartment to be readied.

Our first order of business was getting cash as we had no Moldovan money whatsoever.  So I left everyone at the apartment and went out for a walk looking for a bank.  I did pretty well and had an ATM in no time, not more than two blocks away.  I got money and returned to the apartment and let Dominica know about a good looking restaurant that I had found on my walk.

We were all getting hungry so we decided to just go to the place that I had found and see what they would have.  It was a very short walk and very easy to find.  The place was called Bouchee and they ended up having just amazing sandwiches and lots of stuff that we did not get a chance to try to night that we hope that we might get to try again.  So far, Chisinau food is impressive.

Liesl did not like anything on the menu, in particular, and so since she really wanted pancakes and I had seen a creperia not far away I agreed to go there as well for her to get the food that she would want there.   It was a short walk, but we had to wait on our apartment to be ready anyway so there was really no reason not to go to two restaurants as it would make everyone happy.

The crepes were very good although the service was very slow and several tables that came quite a bit after us not only got their orders taken but were actually getting food before we even got acknowledged.  But things were good once they started taking care of us.  The girls both had crepes and were very happy.

After we were done eating we returned to the apartment getting back around six thirty.  We did not know when they might be ready for us to move up to the penthouse so we wanted to be in the apartment and ready even though we had not anticipated that they would have it ready until around eight this evening.

This gave us a chance to do some catch up.  I had my laptop set up.  The girls had their Kindle Fires and were in their own world.

It was well after nine, maybe after nine thirty, after we started hounding the apartment to let them know that we were just sitting around waiting to get into our own place that they finally “got it ready” and let us in.  The penthouse was pretty awesome and the girls, having liked the other apartment and being sure that they were not going to like this one, were suitably impressed.  The views are fantastic.  Overall it is not a kid friendly apartment, the renters were correct about that.  But our girls are good and safe and this would be fine for us.  It was a bit smaller and only one bedroom instead of two, but the girls were going to be happy on the pull out couch in the living room (they had tried to tell us that there wasn’t a pull out couch to convince us to take the lesser apartment downstairs earlier!)

We were in the penthouse for maybe an hour at most, getting it all set up, when, of course, the kids were hungry.  There were not too many options and we did not know the area but I had seen an Andy’s Pizza not far away so I offered to walk down there and see what I could get.

Andy’s Pizza turned out to be way, way more than a pizza place.  This is the big Moldovan chain and is more like a TGI Friday’s, Applebee’s, pizza place and Red Lobster combined.  They had several menus, all of which were large, and a bar and a massive amount of seating.  It was all very impressive.

I ordered two pizzas and sat down at the bar for my first glass of Moldovan wine while in Moldova.  Moldova is world famous for their excellent wine and massive wine production so I had to get some here.  It was very good and I had twenty minutes sitting at the bar to talk to my dad on Telegram on my phone.

On the walk back to the apartment I had to pass through the flower sellers’ district which, oddly, was all completely open and busy as we approached midnight.  I got roped into one place and ended up buying roses for the girls.  They have never gotten flowers before so this is a great time to get them for them.

When I got back to the penthouse, Luciana was already very much asleep.  Liesl was still up and ate her pizza, as did Dominica and me, and Liesl loved the flowers, as well.  The pizza was pretty good.

Liesl and Luciana slept tonight down on the pull out couch in the living room with the balcony windows wide open as it was super hot in the penthouse.  Dominica and I slept upstairs in the master bedroom which was way too warm.

Today is the day, we begin the trip east to Moldova and the old USSR late tonight.  The plan is that we will leave home in Baita, Mures around eight thirty or nine o’clock this evening.  It is one hour up to Beclean.  We want to be there plenty early, no need to be rushing around at the last minute.  We are getting the eleven thirty train to Iosi just before midnight.  We have a sleeper compartment (or so we think… fingers crossed) and will be arriving in Iosi tomorrow morning around seven in the morning.  Then we have to switch from the Romanian train to the Moldovan train and take that across the border and for a few hours to Chisinau, the capital and largest city in Moldova.

We have an apartment rented there that looks really nice and is right downtown.  Chisinau is the greenest city in all of Europe and is supposed to be incredibly walkable.  Only twelve thousand tourists visit Moldova each year and we are four of them this year!  This is nearly as off the beaten path as you can get and still be around people and definitely as far off of it as you can get while still being in Europe.  Even Georgia and Armenia are less remote!

We do not know how long we are going to be in Moldova.  Probably about five days.  But we are playing it by ear and do not know exactly what the plans will be.  Moldova is very low cost so we are not in a panic to not be there for a while.  And they are second only to Romania for quality of Internet access in Europe.

No rain today.  I love rain but the sun is a nice change of pace.  No rain or sign of rain all day.  No wind and warm sun.  Windows are open and the crickets are going crazy.  Very quiet day.

Dominica spent the morning getting ready for the trip.  I slept in late because we know that there is an extremely high possibility that there will be no power outlet in our berth on the train which means that I will be stuck being awake all night as I will be without my CPAP for the trip.  So I am preparing for that possibility.  We are also sad to learn that there is no dining or drinks car on the Romanian overnight train so we have to bring all snacks and stuff with us as there will be nothing on the train at all,  not even what little bit Amtrak offers in the US.  That’s a disappointment, eating dinner on the train is always a treat and we have not gotten to do that in forever.

Around noon some of the girls’ friends came over and stayed until six.   So they were pretty busy all day.  We made sure that they stayed outside and they pretty much just camped out on the porch and played.  It worked out pretty well.

Once everyone left it was time to get loaded up in the car and drive up to Beclean so that we could catch our train.  It is over an hour to the train station and we did not want anything to go wrong.  So we left quite early.

The drive up was fine and we were to the train station with a lot of time to kill.  Both girls fell asleep in the car on the drive up, it was late and they were quite sleepy.  This will be good for the train later.

We parked the car at the train station and decided to just deal with food right there.  There were not many options, we looked around at what was there, and decided to go for a “fast food” place as they are called here.  It was a little sandwich stand right in front of the station.

It was a struggle to communicate but we found a vegetarian sandwich option which included French fries, cheese shreds, cabbage slaw, mayo, ketchup and mustard on massive, fluffy round bread that was warmed up for us.  The sandwiches were absolutely enormous and turned out to be about three dollars for four of them!  I got a can of beer as well, my driving is done for the foreseeable future so I get to relax and enjoy one!

We ate for about an hour.  Luciana pretty much did not want to try the sandwich at all.  Even though the ingredients were perfect for her, she was tired and cold and just wanted to nap in the car.  So we gave up and let her.  Liesl was a trooper and ate a bit of her sandwich but did not like it that much.  Dominica and I liked ours pretty well.  We certainly appreciated the price!

One of the things that we have found in Romania is that there are two different mayonnaise situations that go on here.  There is good mayo (Helman’s, McDonald’s and similar are available in stores here and lots of home made) and then there is another rash of awful mayos that are not really edible.  We seem to run into each at random when dealing with local brands or restaurants.  Sadly, these sandwiches had the latter.  The bad mayo is gross and the good mayo is, well, normal delicious mayo.  These sandwiches would like have been amazing with good mayo.  It makes all of the difference.

We killed as much time as we could get away with lingering over the sandwiches and beer sitting at a little plastic table outside but it was chilly and the girls were both napping in the car by that point and we wanted to move our luggage to the platform and be totally ready for the train.

The train ended up coming late.  It was supposed to pick us up at Beclean at 11:21 PM but it did not really arrive until about midnight.  We had gotten to the platform around 10:45 so we were standing out there for quite a long time.  We were cold and tired when we boarded our train.

It was time to get prepared and ready for bed the moment that we were onto our train.  This is the Romanian rail running from Beclean to Iasi where we will get off in the morning.  We are not at the initial starting point, we are assuming that the train has been running for many hours before picking us up, but we will ride it to the very end which is easy.

We were very thankful that our train had a single power outlet so I would be able to plug in my CPAP.  We were well prepared and had a power strip with us so we could charge lots of devices while we slept which is super important with how we travel.

Our room is a six bed berth but set up for just four beds, which is very comfortable.  The conductor has set it up with the two bottom bunks and the two top, but with the girls we switched it so that it was the two bottom and the two middle.  This way they are not up so high and we just lift them up and down.  This worked out quite well.

We were caught by surprised ten minutes or so after getting onto the train that suddenly all of the lights went out.  Our guess is that it was very late and that this was some sort of lights out policy to keep the people that get on the train late from keeping the others awake.  Except we had no night lights or reading lights working either, so our room was pitch dark except for the tiny bit of light coming in from time to time from the window.  We had Dominica’s phone’s flashlight and we had to use that to make the beds as we had had time to get settled into the room before it went dark.

We were off to sleep within half an hour, at most.  We had already eaten and were quite tired when we got onto the train.  No one wanted to be awake any more than necessary and the train trip tonight is not all that distant so we knew that we were going to have to be getting up in the morning earlier than we would like as it is.  It is going to be a short night.

The little girls and I all slept great.  I had a few issues from the power going off from time to time on the train which made for CPAP problems but it was not too bad and I found the beds very comfortable so was able to sleep well.  With the window open it was not too hot once we had relaxed.  Dominica, on the other hand, had issues sleeping and got almost no sleep all night, the bed being far too hard for her.

Overall the train was quite nice and we liked it a lot.  We did not like the early lights out policy or issue and we wished that there had been an option for a dining car, we always like getting to do that.  This is definitely a less expensive train option than we have done in the past for an overnight sleeper train.  But we love the idea of affordable, overnight, cross country Romanian train travel.  This is a huge vote towards Romania as a base of operations!

I awoke this morning to the suffocation of the CPAP losing power and taking my air away.  I hate waking up that way.  So I was quite awake, quite quickly.

There was actually no rain today.  This was our first sunny day in a long time.  So that the power (and Internet) were off was quite surprising as they have been up for weeks of continuous rain.

We gave it a little while this morning to see if the power would come back on, but it did not.  As I have mentioned previously, without power we lose running water so nothing to drink without going to the well and no flushing toilets or anything.  So we do not like to stay in the house for any length of time without power.

Since there was no power, I took the girls for a walk over to the playground in the village for a while.  We were the only ones there because all of the village kids were in school, of course.  So they played for a while and had a nice time.

Once we were sure that the outage was going to last for a while we got in the Ford Focus and went for a drive to the north.  It was still morning and a great day for a drive so this all worked out really well as far as the timing was concerned.  We have been needing to drive up to Beclean for a while because the “big” train station is there and we want to stop in there in person to discuss getting overnight sleeping accommodations on the train to Iosi.  This is too complex to do online and we want to figure out the logistics of dealing with the train there as we do not even know where the station (gara) is located.  Not something that we want to be trying to figure out when it is time to be taking a trip.

The drive up was really nice.  The countryside is beautiful that direction.  And it has few enough mountain turns that no one needed to take motion sickness medication today, which was a nice change of pace.

We had to drive around town for a bit trying to find the station, it was not obvious at all.  We did discover a neat pedestrian farmer’s market area in the middle of the city, though, which was pretty cool.  Beclean is about an hour north of our house and is a city of just over ten thousand.  So not that large, but it has the feel of a real city with a nice downtown, apartment buildings, municipal works and such.

I left the family parked on the main street and did some walking around on my own to find the station.  Once I knew where it was, it was easy to drive to.  We parked and went inside.

The Beclean station is definitely bare and not nearly as fancy as even more remote stations in western Europe.  There was one woman working at a window and we were able to, after some effort, convey what we needed and eventually ended up with four second class sleeper compartment tickets for the train for tomorrow night.  So we will be returning to Beclean tomorrow and taking the train that leaves around eleven thirty at night and runs overnight to Iosi on the Moldovan border and arrives just before seven in the morning.  The girls are very excited as they cannot remember having taken overnight trains before, even though both of them have done it twice.  They loved doing it on the ferry and can’t wait to do it on a train, too.

We took the girls to the big central park in the city which is really excellent and let them play on the giant playground there for a while.  Everyone was out in the city today.  The streets, sidewalks, cafes and parks were all loaded with people.  The break from the rain and sent everyone outside, I am guessing.

The girls played for a while but Liesl could not get to the swings that she wanted to play on because there was just so many big kids there.

We got a late lunch at a little cafe near the park.  They did not have a lot of food options, so we got things like fries, onion rings, cheese, etc.  But they did have pastries so we got those for dessert and had some coffee.

After we ate we tried the playground again and this time Liesl managed to get some time on the big dish swing that she loves.  She and Luciana also discovered the exercise equipment in the park and used that for easily an hour.  They thought that that was great fun.

After the playground it was getting cooler as the sun got low and mosquitoes were out.  Time to get in the car and drive back to Baita.

It was six when we got home, still no power.  Iokab was across the street feeding the pigs so Liesl and I went over to consult him about the power situation.  He said that the power company had called and said that it was a planned outage for the day and that the power would be back on at seven this evening.  Just one more hour without electric, then I can get back to getting things done, in theory.

The little piglets are getting bigger.  They are six weeks old, now, almost.  They no longer live with their mother and they eat from the trough on their own.  They were so adorable.

Once the power came back on we got online and the girls watched their shows while Dominica worked on packing (she had been frantically working on that while the power was out just in case it did not come back on and we had to leave for Beclean tonight) so that we would be all ready for tomorrow and I got down to catching up on emails, posting, uploading pictures and such.

The Internet was back on when we got up this morning.  No sunlight today, it was heavily overcast when we woke up and by eleven it was a light rain and by a quarter after noon it was a downpour and very dark.  This is some of the longest running rain that I have ever encountered first hand.  I had always pictured it raining a lot in Romania and apparently I was correct.  No one has mentioned this as being abnormal in any way.  Being in the middle of the mountains I imagine that the rain just gets trapped in Transylvania and comes down here all spring.  It is no wonder that the region is so green and lush.

Luciana set herself up in the quiet front parlour and just chilled on the couch there all morning.  Liesl got started on school earlier than usual.  The rain makes everyone so much more productive.

The early part of the day was a good, productive school day but it did not last.  Liesl was feeling rain depression or something and by early afternoon she had had it.  She moped a lot today and kept whining for hours that she wanted to bake today and ended up getting in so much trouble because of it that even when Dominica was ready to bake with her she had to stop because Liesl was grounded from baking as punishment for her bad attitude about not getting to bake!  Then she had a full scale meltdown that went on for an hour.  It was a rough early afternoon.

We did have one girl come over to play today, but it was only for a bit at the end of the afternoon and did not last any longer than she was trapped by the storm. Once it let up, she was off home.

I had a lot of things going on today and we did not get to have dinner until nine thirty.  We ate and playing Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Scarlet Hand as a family but did not get to play for very long before at ten Liesl had a live broadcast science class about rockets to attend so we had to stop and get that set up on the projector.

Liesl’s class lasted about an hour and a half.  She really enjoyed it.  She is going to be trying some science course work from the same person who did the live class and will be doing that once her current semester of science stuff is complete.

I stayed for about half of the class and then went out to get some work done while everyone was busy watching that.  Luciana fell asleep by the time that the class was over.  Liesl was wide awake and talked Dominica into letting her play Scribblenauts Unlimited for a while before going to bed.