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Sorry for my lack of blogidg lately. Sometimes its heard for me to sink into a routine and forget to regularly post new stories. I haven’t really put up any posts that actually update you on anything in a little while. And I have had some fun experiences. One of which was my trip to Moldova last week. I had been in Ukraine for over two months and if I was to stay in the country for the whole year I had to leave a neighboring country so that I could apply for and get my visa that would allow me to stay in Ukraine for an entire year. I had originally request that I could go to Poland to do this, but my boss had wishes for me to go to Moldova and the company was paying for my trip and I only would have four days for the entire process anyway so I didn’t have much of a choice. But I was ok because the few weeks before I had been feeling a touch of wanderlust and was craving to travel. I like life in Kyiv but I’m always thinking about the world outside. Wherever I go it seems that I am wondering about what life is like somewhere else, but this is and has always been my plight.
Last Wednesday I went to the train station at 7:30 in the morning so that I could catch the 8:00 train from Kiev to Chisinau. This train rout actually use to be one the most important train routs in the Soviet Union, because it connected Moscow, Kyiv and Chisinau: three “capitols” of their respective regions. And so I got on board for the second half of the Journey. For this trip I had a traveling companion named Navina. She is another missionary from a different region of Ukraine, and I met her for the first time about ten minutest before embarked on a fourteen-hour train ride. I was looking forward to going to traveling through the countryside and seeing what the real Ukraine looks like. I had been cooped up In its capitol city for two months and hadn’t seen much of the countryside at all. It felt good to see the rolling hills and the sleepy little villages as the train slowly made its way away from the concrete jungles of Kyiv. As we made our way I began to talk with my new friend Navina. We talked about music, school, and travel. She lived in Russia two years ago, and after going back to the states she wanted to come back to Eastern Europe. We talked for a couple hours to acquaint ourselves with one another enough so that we felt comfortable traveling with each other. That day I went between reading and being distracted from my reading to look out the window at the compelling imagery. Seeing all of this was a great contrast to the soviet apartment buildings, broken concrete and trash ridden streets all around Kiev. Out my window I saw picturesque villages and farmers with horse drawn carts, and shepherds herding their sheep. It was so intriguing to see such simple living in a capitalist driven world of technology and money. I felt me take in a deep breath and sigh as I embraced the fact that not everyone worries about twenty things at once. People like the shepherd I had passed most likely were only worried about losing a sheep, and dinner that evening. All I could think was how I wanted that, just to live life simply and peacefully, it sounds great! So on the train ride down these were the basic thoughts that were floating around in my brain. And as we approached the boarder between Ukraine and Moldova I got my passport out to get it ready to be stamped. We went through a small little village and stopped before crossing a bridge over a wide river, when Ukrainian boarder officers got on the train and took my passport to be stamped. I sat and waited patiently for her to return it, when in Russian, she asked for my transit papers from when I entered Ukraine two months ago, and I didn’t have these papers. I have never needed them before when leaving or entering a country before so I was a little suspicious of this. When I said I didn’t have them then she said that she would be kicking me off the train. This honestly scared me at first, I was imagining myself roaming the streets of this little Ukrainian village for the whole night and maybe even longer. But then when I was getting my bags together she said for me to stop, and so I stopped gathering my things and looked at her, and she looked at me. And it was awkward! And then I realized that if they had a problem with my transit papers then they would deport me, and here I was trying to leave. So it didn’t even make sense that they would kick me off the train while I’m still in Ukraine. So basically she was just expecting a bribe from me, and I wasn’t speaking vary much Russian, and I don’t speak much Russian, so I just pretended that I had no idea what was going on until she got tired of waiting and she just left. So that was good! And with Bribe avoided I made it into Moldova. When we entered Moldova, I could feel the difference between Ukraine and Moldova. Ukraine is a vary poor country but like many Ukrainians often joke, Moldova makes Ukrainians greatful for what they have. And this I could see as we went into the first village. It looked like they hadn’t been told that the Soviet Union was over. Not exactly, but it was extremely soviet, there was concrete buildings everywhere, big red soviet stars at the edge of the town standing tall and waiting to welcome us. After this is got some sleep, and I must say that sleeping on a train has got to be one of the best ways to sleep ever! Sure the beds aren’t vary comfortable, but the rhythm of the rails just rocks you like a baby. And I just have to say that even though it took 14 hours to go maybe four hundred miles I have decided that traveling by train is the best way to travel. Car is stressful, because you’re the one doing all the work, and in an airplane you’re totally cheating, because you can travel 1000 miles in a couple hours. But traveling by train is an honest way to travel. You know you’ve come along way, but you know exactly what lies between you and where you’re going. And so we arrived around midnight in Chisinau. We were met by a really nice guy named Victor, he took us to a hotel where we slept.

The next morning we went to the Ukrainian embassy where we got the Visa request forms and began to fill them out. And when we spoke to the desk worker he told us that we needed Xerox copy’s of our passports and passport photos taken for our visa. So now we had to go back into town and find a place to do all of this. It sound like a simple task but it was not. We have never been there before and we didn’t even know how to get back to our hotel. So we caught a random marshrutka (mini bus) and took a ride through town. The first one took us out of town and within 15 minutes we were standing on a hill overlooking the city and a bunch of the wine vineyards. And these distracted me, so I went for a walk into the field to look at the vineyards and take some pictures, while Navina stood by the road waiting for a marshrutka. And after about eight minutes she started yelling, and I was off in the field taking pictures. So I ran, and in doing so my shoes got covered in mud. And when I tried the board the buss the driver started yelling at me. So I got out and cleaned my shoes as he drove away. I never felt like more of a foreigner, in my life. So we waited for another marshrutka. This one took us where we wanted to go. And within an hour and a half we had what we came for. So we made the journey back to the Embassy. And when we arrived at the Embassy we saw that it was closed! We rung the bell and asked when it would be open, and they said it would be closed until Monday. We were disappointed, not upset but disappointed. I like to travel a lot, and being stuck in a foreign country is something that I have done before so I was pretty laid back about the whole thing. So we found our way back to our hotel and watched some Moldavian TV. After about ten minutes my cell phone rang saying that I had received an SMS. So I checked it and my phone said that I had five new messages from my boss back in Kyiv! The first one read: “go home and relax, sorry for the trouble,” or something like that. The next one said: “Go to the embassy as fast as you can, get a cab. You have 30 minutes ” The next text message said: “are you one your way?” And the one after that said: “are you there yet?” So I received all of these messages at the same time, and I had no way of telling when they had arrived. So we franticly grabbed all of our things and ran our the door. I hailed the first taxi I saw and we directed him to go to the embassy as fast as he could. And so we sped through the narrow streets. There were absolutely no traffic laws in this city. The only rule was not to crash. Quite exiting I must say! As we drove we were dodging everything from people to livestock, it was a rush that was for sure. This would be our third trip to the embassy that day so we were serous this time, we rang the bell and my suspicions that we were late were correct. But we weren’t leaving without visas this time. So we just sat outside the gate. And eventually a man came out and took our papers inside. We waited for an hour and after an hour he came out with our passports with no visa but with individual bills for us to pay for our passports. We were to go to a bank that had been closed for an hour to pay for the passports. So we just went back to the hotel. And when we got back I looked at the bills. My bill was for $165, which seems like a fair price considering that it’s for a year long multiple entry business visa. But Navina is a Canadian citizen so her visa would cost $440. We were shocked. We didn’t just that amount with us on the trip, so we could afford to pay for the visas and have a little left over. So we paid for the visas. But one really cools thing was the SDA Union Office spotted us $100 so that we could afford to eat and still pay the visas. So that was a total God hookup!
This is turning out to be quite long so I will wrap it up soon. But it was basically a really enjoyable trip for me. After we got our visas we just wandered about the city for a couple hours. Moldova was a fascinating place to go. Because it was once a part of Romania, but when the Soviet Union formed they took a small chunk out of Romania. And so for the past almost seventeen years these countries have been trying to make a switch to capitalism. You could imagine that this would be very difficult to go from on end to the opposite end of the spectrum. And I see the hardships in Ukraine all the time, but Ukraine has a good agricultural economy with valuable exports. But in Moldova they only have one (legal) export; wine. I’m told Moldavia was where the Soviet Union got all of its wine. But with only that as an export its difficult to build any kind of healthy economy. And it showed in its capitol city. It was bleak the downtown streets were cracked un repaired. The apartment buildings looked worse than most of the ones in Kyiv. There were lots of beggars everywhere, and most of them were old. On Sabbath we walked passed the edge of the center of town, and into the slums where it went from European looking to looking completely third world. Grant it in Ukraine there are parts of Ukraine that are like this too, I just haven’t seen much of them. Kyiv is a pretty nice city for the most part. The worst I’ve seen is just the concrete apartment blocks that seem to stretch on forever, which is its own kind of new experience for a westerner like me. But in Chisinau you could feel people longing for the old days of the Soviet Union. There’s something you would have never heard from Regan admit. People miss it. Moldova is considered to be the poorest country in all of Europe and you can tell. It was eye opening for me, we saw a place that our American eyes completely ignore. It was painful to see, but I’m glad I saw it, I want to learn more about this in Ukraine and all over the former Soviet Union.
On the train ride back we were in a sleeper car with two very drunk Moldavians. The one many who was supplying their little party had over nine bottles of wine in his single duffle bag. This was outrageous! I could see within 3 hours that these two men by “AA” standards were compete alcoholics but the nine bottles of wine should have given that away on the spot. Bottle after bottle they would open and drink until it was empty until around eleven o’clock when they both went to sleep. This was a great relief, but while they were awake I had fun listening to them tell their stories and brag about all of the languages they had studied. One man said he studied French, Italian, and Spanish. But he didn’t seem to be able to say the name of the language in its own language just in Russian. They also thought me some great and enlightening lessons about Russians verses Moldavians. He said that Russians are barbarians because they drink this terrible drink called Vodka, and that it made them into stupid alcoholics. But Moldavians on the other hand now they had real class they all hate Vodka and love Wine. And because they drink wine they grow strong and healthy and smarter. I smiled an nodded my head and said “Da” and “Harasho” while he went on explaining this. And right before this he said, “I like you! Your remind me of my son!” I was honored by this statement, until I remembered that this man was completely trashed. After this he went to be and left me to my reading. In the morning after I woke I saw that the trees and all of the hills had a nice thick layer of snow and when we arrived in Kyiv at one o’clock we saw that Kyiv had four inches of snow and was looking so beautiful! It was a great trip and by the end of it I had made a new friend, seen another country, gone on my first international train trip, learned to navigate a city I have never been to before, was educated about Moldavians superiority over Russians, and grew a little bit in the process. It was an adventure and I hope this Blog was not so long that it bored you to tears.