1. My first vacation.

    After seven months of confinement within the same set of sovereign borders, I had my first breath of non-Moldovan air on December 23rd.  I’m opting to briefly highlight some of the best or most interesting points of my travels…

    24/12: Arrival in Bucharest, Romania, after an overnight busride from Chisinau.  At the time, Bucharest felt like the greatest city I have ever experienced. I remember thinking, ‘What culture! What beauty!’  When I think back on it now, I can’t really quite define what I had in mind.  I think coming from Chisinau, Bucharest seemed like the metropolitan hotspot of the world, but really, it was just a nice city.  Very environmentally friendly and socially aware.  We mostly just wandered the streets.  Bucharest was more of just a waiting point before our real vacation begin with a train to Sofia, so we did some pretty touristy/’American’ things - ate McDonalds breakfast, went shopping at H&M, and saw Sherlock Holmes (a movie I’d never see otherwise, but it was the only movie shown at all the theaters and by 8pm we had nothing else to do while waiting for our 10:30pm train).  We also ran into a biker gang of Santa Clauses and a band of singing and dancing Romas doing some sort of Christmas carols.  One of the most exciting aspects of Bucharest was my ability to speak and understand all Romanian - none of Moldova’s colloquial Russified Romanian.

    25/12: After a very rough train ride comparable to the 10th circle of hell, we arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria.  I am generally a prepared traveler - I have maps, things to do, and important phrases prepared in advance.  I’m not sure what happened this time, but anyway, we arrived in a train station full of signs in an alphabet we didn’t understand and not an English speaker in sight.  But after circling around for ten minutes in a daze, we found three very helpful people back to back and eventually made it to our hostel.  To celebrate Christmas, we had a lovely meal of Chinese food and then did some more wandering.  There were Christmas lights and subway musicians playing Christmas music all around, but it didn’t really feel like Christmas being so far from home.  Fortunately, we were able to spend some time with some great people at the hostel that night, from Brazil, Spain, and Australia, to name a few.

    26/12-28/12: Time spent in Sofia.  I was a big fan of this city.  It had a lot of character, and the people were very friendly.  And the food was absolutely delicious - I must say I am hooked on Bulgarian cheese.  But what really made the experience was the hostel we stayed at.  Seeing different cities and historical sites is interesting, but for me, the best part of traveling is the people you meet.  Whether it’s a thirty second exchange at a restaurant or an overnight train ride together, the people I have come across in my travels have opened my eyes just a little bit more to the way other people live and experience life. 

    But yes, beyond that, my favorite part of my time in Sofia was in fact, not in Sofia.  We took a day trip to the Rila Monastery, the biggest and oldest Eastern Orthodox monastery in Bulgaria.  We drove up the mountain though pine trees covered in untouched snow with just a bit of fog rising off the top of the mountains as the sun peeked through the trees - it was breathtaking, as was the monastery itself. 

    More on this overnight train - Ashley and I went with our two Spanish friends we had met at the hostel.  At the train station, we met a guy from Argentina who was somewhat aimlessly wandering all over the world.  We boarded the train together and were told we had to pay 15 euro for a bed in addition to our ticket we had already paid for.  The people had no uniforms and said they had no way of providing receipts.  A little too sketchy for us. We said we would take a regular car and just sleep in a chair.  In this car, we met our 6th companion from Germany.  The six of us bonded throughout the night, playing games and talking about our travels.  And most of all, fighting against this mini form of corruption, or whatever you’d like to call it.  At the border, we were told we had to switch to a sleeper car because our car was being left being in Bulgaria.  But all the cheap beds were sold and we’d now have to pay 20 euro.  Ashley and I eventually found cheap beds and paid 10, but our Spanish and Argentinian friends refused and were kicked out at the border.  Such rebellion.  They eventually made it - we managed to run into all of them at different points in the enormous city of Istanbul.

    29/12-3/1: Oh Istanbul.  Where to begin.  I must admit that upon arrival, I was not a fan.  I think that most of this came from lack of sleep, but I was absolutely overwhelmed by the tourists.  Even when I am a tourist myself, I like to (pretentiously) think of myself more as a ‘traveler’ and I get a bit of a complex when I encounter masses of people buying things and speaking English and taking pictures.  But after a delicious falafel wrap, a shower, and a nap, I woke up feeling rejuvenated and ready to give Istanbul a second chance.  And that I did, and by the end, I fell in love with that too.

    It is truly a city seeped in history.  All the days of world history classes that I had mostly forgotten came running back to me as we walked through Ottoman mosques and Byzantine ruins.  I have never been in a mosque before, but the three I saw were all awe-inspiring.  We spent over an hour in the Hagia Sofia just walking around and taking it all in.  At the third mosque, Suleiman, we managed to watch prayer time.  Every day, five times a day, the call to prayer resonates throughout the city - you can hear it anywhere you are.  But now we experienced what happened after that, and a Sweden Muslim was kind enough to come over and translate and explain everything to us.  It was really a powerful experience as the passages of the Quran reverberated around the enormous mosque.

    And what is Istanbul without its markets and incessant sellers?  While the Turkish men were sometimes a pain - you can’t walk anywhere without being bothered to eat somewhere or buy something - I grew to like chatting and joking with them, even when they used such pickup lines as, ‘Excuse me, I have a question.  Are you from paradise?’ 

    So all in all, a wonderful vacation full of people and experiences I will carry with me forever.  Made even better by my wonderful Istanbul travel buddies:





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