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After arriving back in Istanbul from Armenia, I spent another long weekend with my friend Kaya. This time I visited the underground Roman Cistern and a part of Topkapi Palace, in particular the Harem. By trying to visit something each time I am in Istanbul I hope to eventually see most of the city.

Romania, Moldova but not Ukraine

Odv
2004-09-15 10:55:30

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stated aim is to reinstate the Soviet Union. The capital, Tiraspol, is littered with portraits of Lenin and a statue of the man in front of the "House of the Soviets". The Soviet Union still lives on here.

Unlike the rest of Moldova, where the Latin alphabet, which was used before the war was reinstated, everything in the Transdniestr republic is still in Cyrillic.

Upon entering the "country" I was issued a little slip of paper, the size of a bus ticket, that apparently was valid as a day visa.

Tiraspol is also the closest I came to Odessa. The Ukrainian town which somehow beckoned me to visit it. Frustratingly the bus I took from Chisinau to Tiraspol was the Odessa bound bus!

In Tiraspol I was at only 110 km from Odessa. Without the visa restrictions I would have certainly made it there, at least on a day or 2-day trip from Chisinau. But time was running out for me, I needed to get back to Holland, while the time required to get the visa was simply too long to still manage.

Ukrainian consular bureaucracy aided by my illness won the battle of trying to keep me out of the country and managed to prevent me from spending any money there. A victory for Ukraine! Or is it?

Back in Chisinau it started to feel like home. My host, Virginia, had pointed out a little theater where they played movies in English (the only one in the city) so we went to see "The Butterfly Effect" there.

She also told me that O-Zone is a Moldovan band and I promptly purchased the CD in a local store. I am obviously listening to the CD as I am writing these lines. Their music is currently heard all over the world, but how many people know that they are from Moldova and how many people know where Moldova is?

Ten days after arriving in Moldova, still being ill and unfit for overland travel, I extracted myself from the region by air. I had been lucky to find a relatively cheap flight to Paris some days earlier, and arrived in Paris two days before a section of the airport there collapsed!

I was picked up by my parents who happened to be in France at the time, and drove back to Holland with them. There I immediately went to see my doctor, who prescribed some serious antibiotics that finally cleaned up my lungs from whatever it was that I had.

As this is the end of this particular trip (but fortunately still not the end of our travels), I would like to be a little melodramatic and philosophical.

There is a strange aspect to traveling, that hits me every time, it is a little like being born and dying at the same time. Sometimes I leave behind places that I know I might never ever visit again! Isn't that a bit like dying? But I also go to places that I have never seen before and that is a bit like being born again.

As I leave behind one place, where I have made new friends and had fun, I feel a sadness in my heart. At the same time there is the excitement of going somewhere new. These feelings come up at the same time or at least very shortly after each other and make my emotions go up and down like a roller coaster. This is by no means a bad thing, as it makes me feel very much alive.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people that we have had the pleasure to meet during our trips. You have touched our lives! You have helped give it meaning. You have been from all over the world and all kinds of nationalities. It has been a privilege to meet you, we hope that we may meet you again, someday in the future.

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