Disco!

You know, I believe I have painted a very one-sided picture of Moldova in my recent posts, and for that I am sorry. All I have been showing are hunched over babushkas in the villages and crumbling buildings in the city. But there is another side, a brighter side of wealth and luxury, to Moldova. It's a world of people who live in 4 story mansions, who wear furs and silk and eat at the finest restaurants. There are boutique stores that sell 500 dollar shoes and there are people who are chauffeured in their own tinted-window BMW's. Now, of course, these people only represent 1% of the population, but the point is the beautiful people do live here in Moldova.

And every weekend, the beautiful people go to the hot number one dancespot in town: People. Here, everyone shows off his or her finery and struts to the thumping beats of Europop techno and chortles over cognac and champagne. Ah, it is the life I tell you! I make it a point to go every weekend, where I ogle the half-naked dancing girls perched high above us on the dancestage and try to tell the barstaff how to make a martini in my broken Russian. (So far, all I've managed to get is a glass of vermouth with an olive in it and a shot of gin on the side, but I will not give up hope!)

So, if you ever find yourself in Moldova, come to People nightclub and play like your some haute couture dilettante! And if I see you there, the vermouth shots are on me!

Disco Inferno!

Yes, women in Moldova really are this beautiful!

The color this season is: Legs

And then soup at dawn! Mm, soup...

Abandon Hope, All Ye...

More Chisinau Architecture

You know, I cannot in fact make an aesthetic judgment about the apartment buildings of Chisinau. This is embarrassing for me, I must confess, since as an artist I consider myself to be a good judge of beauty. That I cannot make a judgment AT ALL about the aesthetic quality of Chisinau architecture, that it defies any attempt I make to subsume it under a category like "good" or "bad" or "ugly" or "interesting" is puzzling for me. Perhaps the architecture appeals to a sensibility that lies beyond my capacities for grasping, or perhaps too far below. Nevertheless, I want to share with you these monolithic sights of Chisinau's skyline. Then you can determine if Chisinau Architecture is beautiful for yourselves.

My apartment block - with store (closeby, but...)

One half of the "City Gates"

Chisinau and Pearls

Chisinau Architecture

I love the rural Moldovan countryside, as my recent posts show. I mean, sure, I've seen the Himalayas, the Grand Canyon, islands with white sandy beaches in Thailand and the Philippines, and these places are breathtaking. But the Moldovan countryside maintains a gentle beauty that is somehow more calming and heartwarming.

On the whole, on the other hand, the capital city of Chisinau lacks beauty.

It is perhaps a testament to something dark in human nature that, while nature almost always renders beauty in its creations, we manage to not only annihilate the beauty that nature has given us but replace it with boxy, corrupt, polluting ugliness. I remember once taking a speedboat down a river and Borneo and witnessing the hectares upon hectares of deforestation, the remnants of the forest’s burnt, black fingers of charred saplings digging to the sky. Why do we do this to the place we live?

I would venture that most of Chisinau, unfortunately, reflects the human trend to stain the world. Shoddily built apartment buildings rising from beside cracked streets and random bits of demolished concrete. But, there are points of architecture in this city that nevertheless rise from the norm and have grown beautiful.

There are all these old buildings edged with finely crafted details of faces, flowers shields, etc. that I suppose were built by the Soviet Union to beautify the city. They have, unfortunately, since fallen into disrepair (Soviet architecture tended to be temporary at best). But, at least in my opinion, this is where the beauty comes in. The state of crumbling these buildings have fallen to is aesthetic in its tragic tones. There is something organic about these buildings now; they are like living things that are nearing the end of their lives. They manifest the beauty that old people have, faces etched with wrinkles and lines, eyes sagging with the weight of time yet still glistening with history and experience. These buildings are beautiful in the way only the elderly can be.

Sometimes, I wander downtown just looking for places where buildings are falling apart and then just stop and look for minutes on end. I'm sure the people here think I'm crazy for looking at an old wall. They want everything glitzy and new. And I am sure these buildings will be gone soon, replaced with plain, clean, boring cubes of concrete and glass. These old buildings will die, and be forgotten; and maybe this is how nature reclaims the beauty we have stolen despite our best attempts.

Autumn in Moldova

I have been lucky this year to have an actual autumn in Moldova. The last two years I just experienced long, bitter winters. I love autumn. Autumn is like those precious minutes you spend curled under covers thinking about your past or the point of it all just before sleep smothers your reflections.

Moldovan autumns are significant, because even in mild years the winters are long, cold, and dismal. Everything is grey and lifeless for months upon months. For the farmers, this means that the livestock must have their provisions well accounted for beforehand. Thus, at the end of the summer, farmers plant their fields full of corn. When the corn is ready, it is cut down, dried, and harvested – ears and all – for the animals. But in the aftermath of the Soviet system, where farmers’ fields are often located far from where their houses are, getting the corn stalks home is something of an event. The streets are gorged with slow, tired horses pulling ancient, beleaguered carts overpiled high with stacks of cornstalks, bringing the corn home.

It really is the rustic quality of Moldova that makes it special. Of course, the Moldovans themselves are embarrassed of their “backwardness.” (or I should say, “those other Moldovans’ backwardness.” It’s always the Romanian speakers’ fault if you are a Russian speaker, or the country-dweller’s fault if you live in the city. Moldovans have many systems of meaningless social divisions in place to keep themselves for accepting accountability for their own country’s pitfalls.) Like people in most “undeveloped” countries, Moldovans dream of the over-industrialized modernity of the 1^st world. As a result, they (or those that can afford it) dwell in ugly crumbling apartment blocks or monolithic houses sequestered behind 10 meter walls without any room left for a garden; spend their free time shopping in pathetically small, ugly, and overpriced shopping malls; or drive past the ubiquitous busses and maxi-taxis in their BMW’s. I don’t mean to disparage people the right to be comfortable in life. But when nature has already supplied you with beauty and peace, and the greater part of your society continues to live in harmony with it, why would you not find your comfort there, rather than in the crumbling, ugly concrete blocks of urban disorder? There’s a reason why those of us from more modernized countries strive to escape to places like Mexico, India, Africa, or even Moldova: we know that we’ve lost something, something that still happens when you have to spend a day riding on the back of a horsecart riding slowly amongst the fading fields of autumn.

A Medieval cross at Orhei Veci

A village scene

A village well

Taking the cornstalks home

Soroca, Northern Moldova

An Austro-Hungarian fort

Taking a ferry across the Nistru from Ukraine.

Sunset over the fields

Ratus Pictures

I was trying to "fix" my blog and wound up deleting several posts! These are re-posts of the deleted Ratus pictures. More reposts to come!

The rural landscape of Moldova