When you travel through Moldova, you are in another world, which are hard to describe.
When you leave a densely populated area, the transition happens almost immediately and right in front of you lies the quieter road and everything opens up both in front of you and around you.
The first thing you notice is the surroundings and there is no reason to doubt that you are in Moldova.
The landscape speaks for itself. The hilly landscape, the colors, and the very similar, but at the same time different landscape that meets your eyes.
There is a kind of peaceful atmosphere about it and you, if you drive yourself, find yourself in a kind of trance and almost forget where you are.
Suddenly you become alert because you either see a signpost, a church tower, or you spot a roadside stall.
And there.. right there either small houses or larger apartment blocks appear and the closer you get, the more you look around, not because you are lost, but because you just have to take all the impressions with you.
You are not only traveling between cities, towns, and villages.
The apartment blocks become houses, a crowded café is replaced by a roadside stall, a trolleybus gives way to a horse cart, a tractor, or somebody cycling home along the edge of the road.
Sometimes the distance between them is surprisingly short.
Yet what you see around you can change completely.
Different streets, different buildings, different people, different ways of living the day.
Very often it is not the things you expected to remember that you will look back at.
It is the small details, the ones you only noticed because you took the time to stop, look around, and take it all in.
Each place is different and in Chișinău, you notice it almost immediately.
The traffic, the apartment blocks, the trolleybuses, the people and traffic moving in every direction.
Shops, cafés, parks, offices, and busy streets all becoming part of the same picture.
The towns feel different because the distances are shorter and people seem to know each other more closely.
The streets are quieter and it does not take long time before you begin recognizing the same buildings, shops, and faces again.
And then there are the villages.
The roads become smaller, gardens appear behind gates, chickens wander through yards and somebody is working in a vegetable garden while a dog watches from the shade.
A tractor passes people greet each other from across the road and each place has its own calm way, but all of them are the same Moldova.
Every place has changed over time.
New buildings have build, roads have been widened, old shops have closed and new ones have opened.
Some places have grown quickly, while others look much as they did years ago.
But traces of the past are still there.
An old church, a railway station, a memorial stone beneath the trees, a house standing beside new buildings.
It is the older details that catch your attention and remind of that the place you are looking at today was not the same years ago.
The first impression you get, is rarely the whole story.
A street you hardly notice when you arrive may be the one you remember later, maybe years after, small café, a church, a park bench, a market stall, or a conversation with somebody you meet along the way.
The longer time you stay, the more details you notice.
Things that seemed ordinary at first suddenly become an important part of your experience and memory.
Maybe not because they seem special at first glance, but because you take the time to see, experience and take even the smallest details with you and consume the whole.
Moldova cannot be found in one single place.
It is connected through cities, towns and villages, through its people and the way Moldovan culture, traditions and everyday life, no matter of the City, the Town or the village are more tied together in a larger whole than most people can
understand, right away.
That is what makes Moldova being Moldova.
Uneori, totul începe cu ceva simplu...
Un drum înainte, un loc în depărtare și sentimentul că ceva te așteaptă - nu pentru a-ți fi arătat, ci pentru a fi descoperit.
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Sometimes, it begins with something simple...
A road ahead, a place in the distance and the feeling that something is
waiting - not to be shown, but to be discovered.
