Buffalo Expatriate

I finalized the agreement with my new landlord today about my new apartment near Arsenalna and guess what. He wants my roommate and I to pay in Euros. At first, he asked for 500 Euro, which he claimed was equal to or even less than the $650 the previous tenants were paying. But something about that exchange wasn’t right. I knew the Euro was getting closer to $1.50 so I went on x-rates.com and checked, and I was right. Either he was trying to screw us or he hasn’t checked the exchange rate in about six years. So we renegotiated to 480 Euros (split between my roommate and I)and I got him to cover all the major utilities (which weren’t covered before). What a joke. I told him that I don’t receive my stipend in Euros, I don’t ever deal in Euros on the streets. But he was adamant that I pay in Euros because the dollar was too unstable. I have yet to hear of this in Kyiv, and as we’re not signing a contract with the landlord, this system may have to change.

Either way, another bad sign that people are losing faith in the dollar around the world.

For those of you who haven’t seen Jay-Z flashin those 500s, you can see them at the 53 second mark…

The World Bank released a book yesterday, The International Migration of Women, showing that female migration increases and spurs development. This volume is the third publication under the Research Program on International Migration and Development, which the World Bank initiated to gain a more precise database of migration statistics. The study’s overview states that despite the significant amount of female migrants, the effects of their migration haven’t been studied intensively and that sex-disaggregated statistics are severely, if not completely, lacking.

Women make up almost half the migrant population in the world and their numbers are increasing, according to a new World Bank report released today.

“The fact that women now account for almost half the total migrant population is having enormous effects on development,” says Andrew Morrison, lead economist at the World Bank’s Gender Group. “Women are sending lots of money to their families back home, and evidence from rural Mexico shows that their migration leads to positive economic effects for the homes they leave behind.”

Between 1960 and 2005, the percentage of international migrants who are women increased by almost 3 percentage points from 46.7 percent to 49.6 percent, to a total number of approximately 95 million women, according to the new World Bank volume, The International Migration of Women, edited by economists Andrew R. Morrison, Maurice Schiff, and Mirja Sjöblom. -Press Release

Especially in the former USSR, female migrants make up 58% of all migrants.

The share of women migrating for employment rather than family reasons has increased over time, though their performance in host countries’ labor markets varies significantly according to country of origin,” Maurice Schiff, World Bank lead economist at the Development Research Group.

The report also includes recommendations, which the authors believe will spur more positive effects from female migration:

-Developing mechanisms to increase women’s ability to influence the allocation of household expenditure. This is especially important for migrant women sending remittances, since they are likely to want to spend more on children’s education;
-Expanding temporary migration opportunities for women through Mode IV [1], guest worker and other mechanisms; and
-Allocating significant resources to collecting and analyzing new sex-disaggregated migration statistics, which will inform next-generation migration policy

As someone who’s spent the better part of the last three months researching the darker sides of migration, this report is interesting and fairly uplifting. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was that people often hear about successful migration that allow people to send money home, and the idea of being trafficked becomes less of a reality in their minds. According to one of my interviews here in Ukraine, Ukrainians (and more likely people in general) tend to have this idea that “It will never happen to me.” Of course, this has little to do with the numbers being offered in the report. Just a reflection.

I also found it interesting that

The International Migration of Women also finds that increased border expenditures in the United States significantly deter migration by Mexican women, but not by Mexican men. This is likely because the cost of illegal migration is greater for women than for men because women are more vulnerable to abuse while migrating.

Good to see there is a starting point now on female migration research.

Fooled you! Thought I was going to talk about human trafficking, didn’t you? Actually I was forwarded this extensive article in the Washington Post about traffic (as in cars) in Kyiv, and the burden it’s placing on the people, infrastructure and environment.

Can’t Stand D.C. Traffic? You Should See Kiev

Kiev’s problem is cars. The city’s increasingly well-off post-Soviet population has taken to automobiles with the intensity of the long-deprived. Ukraine’s booming economy is blast-forging the country’s first mass middle class, and by many locals’ count, perhaps 10 times more vehicles are now rumbling through this ancient city’s hilly streets than there were when the Soviet Union expired in 1991. In 2006, according to the Kiev Post, Ukraine climbed from 12th place to ninth place in Europe in terms of new car sales, which a leading Ukrainian newsmagazine reports grew 52 percent here from last September to this. About 60,000 new cars were registered in Kiev this October alone, according to the Unian news agency, bloating a total that Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry puts at 1.5 million — and the number is expected to grow by a million more by 2011.

Now Buffalo isn’t really known for bad traffic. I admit when I lived with Grandma and Grandpa P in Cheektowaga my first year at Canisius, I avoided the 33 like the plague from 7:30 to 9:00 am due to traffic, forcing me to go off-roading down Delavan (this was before it was repaired). However, I think compared with other cities, Buffalo is doing pretty well as far as commutes are concerned.

For Kyiv, this not only means obnoxious travel time (especially on the over-crowded marshrutkas), but as the article points out, its leading to a more closed-off society.

And all of this is a shame, given that Kiev has historically been considered the most pleasant of the former Soviet Union’s capitals — a walkable alternative to Moscow. In his book “Imperium,” about his travels through the declining Soviet Union, the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described Kiev as “the only large city of the former USSR whose streets serve not merely for hurrying home but for walking, for strolling.” Kiev’s main boulevard, Khreschatyk, he wrote, is something like a local Champs-Elys¿es, and he was impressed by Kiev’s downtown “crowds of people” out “to get some fresh air.”

A decade and a half later, the city that Kapuscinski liked no longer exists. Walking here can be dangerous because the sidewalks are covered with cars, both parked and moving. That ritual of city life — the promenade — has become an adventure in the sort of defensive, serpentine ambulation with which the pedestrian makes his way through a strip mall parking lot. And it doesn’t help that Ukrainian traffic cops know better than to stop expensive vehicles: It can be bad for their careers. Drive a Hummer or a Bentley here (Bentleys are common), and you can barrel through any red light and over any lawn or sidewalk…

Like survivors of a flash flood, residents (especially those who don’t own cars) are just coming to terms with the sudden change in their physical reality. Their neighbors in Europe have started dealing with the antisocial effects of urban car use and are banning, restricting or taxing driving in many downtown cores. But Ukraine, despite the aspirational rhetoric of some of its Western-looking politicians, isn’t Europe. In a macho culture that has embraced conspicuous consumption, the idea of people taking to bicycles like the burghers of Amsterdam is inconceivable. Just a little less so is the idea that, in a nondemocratic culture defined by elite prerogative, the newly affluent will use public transportation like wealthy Westerners. And a culture with an almost totally corrupt public life, no functioning justice system and a tendency toward political murder seems unlikely to make “green” choices when it comes to urban planning.

It’s quite the pessimistic article. I can attest that the traffic situation here is pretty ridiculous. Artyoma with its patchy reconstruction is a particular kind of basket case, and Khreshatik is constantly at a dead stop during rush hour. Kyiv may be bad, but Chennai and Bangalore in India make Kyiv look like East Aurora. Perhaps what the author worries about is that Kyiv will increasingly become more like these cities without proper awareness of what all this traffic is doing to the city, its residents and the environment.

Then come to this event on November 29th:

CONFLICT IN BURMA: LECTURE & DISCUSSION
MYO THANT, Buffalo State Master’s Candidate & Burmese Activist and Advocate, will speak

Recent headlines reveal the tragic human rights violations committed by the Burmese military dictatorship. Thousands of monks, students and citizens have held peaceful street protests and the military has responded by killing hundreds of protestors and imprisoning more than 4,000 activists. Yet many know little about the roots of this conflict, the history of Burma or the struggle of its people. Join us for this informative event.

Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
7pm-9pm
695 Elmwood, Buffalo NY 14222
Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo

Sponsored by: Western New York Peace Center, Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, Social Justice Committee of UU of Buffalo, and People United for Sustainable Housing

For more information about the event, call 716.894.2013 or email elea@wnypeace.org
For more information about Myo, click here.

A phrase that I’m sure doesn’t ring a whole lot of bells for many back in the States, but is something I spent the better part of the weekend learning more about. Yesterday, Ukraine held a ceremony in remembrance of the victims of the Holodomor, an artificial famine that directly or indirectly killed millions of people in Ukraine.

The U.S. recognizes this event as genocide, as well as 25 other countries. The 1988 U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine stated the following:

There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.

Some argue that it was collectivization gone wrong rather than deliberate starvation. But the Commission asserts the following countering that belief:

The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions…

In 1931-1932, the official Soviet response to a drought-induced grain shortage outside Ukraine was to send aid to the areas affected and to make a series of concessions to the peasantry.

In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.

The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.

In the Fall of 1932 Stalin used the resulting “procurements crisis” in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further.

The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.

Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.

Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.

In January 1933, Stalin used the “laxity” of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.

Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: to intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.

While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin’s interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are parallelled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.

Attempts were made to prevent the starving from travelling to areas where food was more available.

From there, it states very bluntly that from these findings, the famine in Ukraine from 1932-1933 was genocide.

Russian officials claim this effort to have the Holodomor recognized as genocide only further divides the Russian and Ukrainian people, and that it is “offensive” to other nations that have fallen victim to famine. Some, even Ukrainians, feel that it is an over-politicized subject. However, evidence has come to light from more recently declassified Soviet documents from the 1932-1933 period, which show

…it was revealed that an elaborate paper trail of the 1932-33 famine and the Soviet authorities` involvement in it had been preserved in party and state archives. These documents are being slowly declassified, examined and published[2]. Historians can now give us a fairly accurate account of the catastrophe and ascertain the responsibility of Stalin and his collaborators.

As a result, scholars who previously hesitated to recognize the genocidal character of Stalin`s forced starvation of Ukrainian farmers, have reexamined the question and readjusted their interpretations. In his latest book, Nicolas Werth comes to the conclusion that thanks to recent studies based on the new documents, it is now “legitimate to qualify as genocide the cluster of actions undertaken by the Stalinist regime to punish the Ukrainian peasantry by famine and terror”[3]. -UNIAN

There was a solemn procession yesterday to Mykhailivska square, where President Yushchenko, among others, made a speech. I, unfortunately, did not make it to this part of the commemoration, however Ukrainiana has video from parts of the event. I was home at the apartment with Tanya during the ceremony. I actually was ready to jump out the door and see if I could catch part of it, but Tanya insisted I eat some more of the veggie mash we made together the night before and she lit a candle in the window and we watched the ceremony on tv. She wouldn’t speak much about it, so we just watched. Somehow, I felt this was a better way to spend the commemoration than being downtown. I also realized I’m going to have a harder time moving to my new apartment near Arsenalna than I thought I would have because Tanya has become more like family to me.

Later on, after a Fulbright get-together, I went to the square and looked at the memorial. There were fewer people as it was almost 11 pm, but nonetheless quite the crowd for it being so late. I sometimes prefer to see things like this when fewer people are around. It reminded me of being in Dachau in January 2006. There were almost no other visitors there that day, and it was frozen and quiet. My trip to Auschwitz was somewhat less effective on me as it was April and it was already starting to get crowded with tourists. Anyway, the photo at the beginning of this post was taken with my camera phone. Here are a couple others I took:

“Ukraine remembers! The Holodomor 1932-1933- the genocide of the Ukrainian people”

The Ukrainian trident in candles

Mykhailivska square alight with memorial candles

This is a link to a collection of photos from the famine that Ukrayinska Pravda has on their site. Ironic that in the same week, the U.S. enjoys a holiday where people eat insane amounts of food and enjoy the company of their family and friends and Ukraine remembers a time in the not-so-distant history when their relatives and countrymen were starved. I know what I’m truly thankful for this year…

I am now, officially, a contributor to The Human Trafficking Project- a blog dedicated to creating and raising awareness on human trafficking issues. So any future posts I have related to my research will end up there leaving me free to post to whatever level of randomness I desire here.

My first post (other than my half-hearted introduction) is on the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. It was something we spent an entire morning on during the second day of the conference last week on assistance to trafficking victims. This is mostly because the CoE Convention provides considerable instruments for the protection of victims’ rights.

So, if you’re interested, it’s all there.

This has nothing to do with international politics, or being abroad, but I was going through my daily dose of headlines, and I came across this article on CNN highlighting the report “City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America,” which is published by CQ Press and saw Amherst right up there at number 4 of the safest cities in America. I don’t know if this is a drastic change from years past, but it was a first to me.

Rochester’s mayor was quoted in the article warning against such reports:

The mayor of 30th-ranked Rochester, New York — an ex-police chief himself — said the study’s authors should consider the harm that the report causes.

“What I take exception to is the use of these statistics and the damage they inflict on a number of these cities,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, chairman of the Criminal and Social Justice Committee for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Members of the FBI seem to agree:

“You’re not comparing apples and oranges; you’re comparing watermelons and grapes,” said Rob Casey, who heads the FBI section that puts out the Uniform Crime Report that provides the data for the Quitno report.

The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.

“These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region,” the FBI said. “Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.”

The defense given by Doug Goldenberg-Hart, acquisitions editor at CQ Press, for the report was basically, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Unfortunately, you have to purchase the report in order to see it in detail. I wonder where Kyiv would rank on the list if it went international? 10,987,546,334,235,356,234,999th probably.

Ok, so I can’t post a lot of them. To be honest, it looks like the ones Ben took were mostly of our group and our new friends, but here’s a few:

Here’s one of the few taken during the day time. This is Stasik- he was kind of the ringleader of the group of students we met. Total legend. In the background you can see part of Chisinau’s main strip.

This is a picture of that traditional dance we did with the students at the dorm. As you can see, Ben and I were wearing our jackets because we had planned and tried to leave around 6:30 to meet our friends back at the hotel, but everytime we tried to leave, someone would turn another Moldovan song on and we would find ourselves in yet another circle, dancing. I don’t regret it for a minute!

Here is just a handful of the students we were with on Monday. This is also during attempts to get back to the hotel, but of course we had to stop and take a half dozen group pictures or so. Two of our friends escorted us back to the hotel, helped us carry our bags to the restaurant, ate dinner with us, took the taxi with us to the bus station, bought us wine and champage to bring home (we probably should have been more embarrassed about the clanging noises our bag made getting on to the bus, but such is life), and saw us off as the bus left. They keep in touch with us often.

And finally, the traditional music we caught at the shashlik restuarant. They were playing for one table next to us so I’m assuming there was some sort of occassion. Our friends that came to the restaurant with us knew all the words and sang along, thus giving some authenticity to the Moldovanness of the songs.

See why I talked up my visit to Chisinau so much? I’ve also met with people who work in Moldova on issues of trafficking, and if that was the only impression I had of Moldova, it would have been pretty grim. The situation regarding human trafficking is particularly difficult, and the government has been slow to respond. But with any country, no matter how bad things are, whether it’s Moldova, Zimbabwe, Russia, wherever, you need to keep in mind that there are people, living life, making the best of what they have, and spreading joy to others.

Just very unfortunate things coming out of Russia, and literally spilling on to other countries. I was going to write a lengthy post on the oil spill that happened in the Black Sea last weekend during the storm on Sunday, but this post by Ukrainiana does a good job of explaining the situation and linking to pictures and articles on the spill. The articles in the New York Times and AP basically said zero about Ukraine. In fact, another Fulbrighter was so outraged by the complete lack of news on the impact to Ukraine, she drafted a letter to the NYT editor. An MSNBC article touches a little more on why the situation is complicated due to the location of the spill. The governing of the Kerch Strait was agreed upon in 2004, but now because a joint effort will be needed to clean up the straight and Russian state environmental officials are already suggesting building a dam to the island of Tuzla (which caused the dispute in the first place) in order to “contain” the damage, the environment will be the one to suffer.

This post isn’t just about what’s spilling out of Russia, but also what’s being prevented from going in Russia. I received a notice today from the OSCE/ODIHR that they will NOT being deploying an observer mission to the Duma elections in December. This is bad news bears. In Ukraine, anyway, the OSCE/ODIHR provided long-term and short-term observers that were highly professional in their monitoring of the September elections. They are one of, if not THE, major international election observer groups, especially in the former USSR. Their presence is important to preventing sneaky activity before and during the election. Part of the reason they’re not conducting the mission is because they’ve already been prevented from the long-term observing that is necessary to make full use of the short-term observing.

“We have not received a single visa for the 70 observers,” OSCE spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said. “We have tried everything. … But we sadly now have to conclude that it is not possible.”…

Gunnarsdottir said that even if visas were to be granted now, it was too late to conduct a “meaningful” observation of the election. Candidates have already registered, the media campaign was under way and there was too little time to get observers in place, she said. -AP

I got a bad feeling this would happen when I saw an article a couple weeks back stating Russia was going to cut back on the amount of election observers. Here again, you see alot of double talk on the part of Russian officials:

Russia’s top election official denied it has refused the visas and said they were waiting in Warsaw at the headquarters of the election monitoring office, the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

“All the necessary documents including visas are already in Warsaw, at ODIHR headquarters, so I don’t understand what could have prompted such a decision,” Vladimir Churov said at a news conference at the Russian Embassy in Berlin.

There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy, and Russian Embassy officials in Warsaw were not available to comment…

Peskov said that visas were “a rather technical issue” and referred questions to the Russia’s foreign ministry, insisting the decision over whether to send election monitors rested with the OSCE and not Moscow.-AP

Yeah, visas are only “technical issues” that are absolutely necessary to enter Russia, you know, technically. But a couple of weeks ago when Russia first issued its decision to cut down on observers:

The Kremlin warned foreigners on Wednesday not to interfere in Russia’s parliamentary elections after it cut sharply the number of Western observers permitted to view the polls, drawing criticism from the United States.

“No country will accept any attempts from abroad to try to influence it,” Kremlin deputy spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a news conference. “It’s a matter of sovereignty of the country.” -Reuters

No country will accept attempts from abroad to try to influence it? Yea, just like no country would ever shut off a gas supply to get what it wants, right? Sorry to bring it back to Ukraine, but for the last two elections, there have been OSCE observers, American observers, Russian observers, Labor Group observers, and I think Ukraine still was able to decide for itself who’s in power now without these “attempts from abroad to try to influence it.” I’m starting to think the actions of Ukraine have more of an influence over Russia’s actions than they care to admit, and that Russia is more threatened by Ukraine’s growing democracy than democracy in the West. Remember in my post about Nashi, the leader of the group spoke of the closeness of Ukrainians to Russians rather than Ukrainians to Americans? Just a theory, but that may be why democracy in Ukraine is so threatening to the powers that be in Russia because Russians can identify with Ukrainians and if their democracy shines (or at least polishes up), it will feel that much closer to Russians. Either way, the lack of an OSCE observer mission in December is a pretty big red flag (no pun intended) for democracy in Russia.

Leaving the central avtovokzal in Kyiv on Friday, I was kind of expecting this to be a typical sort of Eastern European backpacking experience with the normally cranky border patrol, rude hotel and restaurant staff, and people who couldn’t give a damn whether or not you needed help. Chisinau turned out to be one of the most affordable, friendly, and welcoming places I’ve ever traveled to. Not to mention it is cheap as hell, most importantly the fantastic champagne and home-made wine. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures right now. The only person with a working camera on the trip was my friend Ben (five of us studying in Ukraine went all together), and as soon as he sends me pictures, I’ll post them. Above is a generic one from the official site of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve traveled to some great, friendly cities in Eastern Europe, but I was not expecting much from Moldova. This is a small country of between three and four million people, and is considered the poorest country in Europe with a negative population growth estimate. Not to mention they are still dealing with the issue of the breakaway region of Transnistria, which separated from Moldova in a rather bloody battle in 1992 and is a hotbed of clandestine criminal activity due to various reasons. We actually took a bus that passed through Transnistria, and had to deal with the internationally unrecognized border security at about 3am. They, of course, dragged us off the bus once they saw we were foreign/Western, which actually worked out well as we got a bathroom break while they checked through our passports. Surprisingly, a young woman working at the crossing spoke English and politely explained to us that we needed to pay 3 hryvnia ($0.60)to pass. We understood the man before, but we were warned to be careful of using our Russian at the Transnistrian border. In the end, they let us go. Unfortunately, because it was still dark, we weren’t able to see much of the region, and we passed through it quite quickly.

The other disadvantage of crossing through Transnistria is that our passports don’t get stamped with a Moldovan entry stamp. In fact, the crossing from Transnistria into the rest of Moldova was just a guy standing between two temporary gates. He didn’t even check the passports of people who had fallen asleep. This however led to a couple of group members being stopped by Moldovan police in Chisinau who hassled them about not having an entry stamp in their passports, and eventually had to go down to the police station to sort it out. And by sort it out, I mean sit around and occassionally speak to an officer when he felt like it only to argue with him that the fact that they can’t get stamps crossing through Transnistria wasn’t their fault. Luckily between the two, they spoke Russian and Moldovan (Romanian) so eventually, they just let them go (Moldovan or Romanian is the official language of Moldova, but just about everyone speaks Russian and the issue seems less political than it is in Ukraine).

We stayed at the Hotel Zarea not too far from the center. It was only 130 lei each per night, which is ridiculously cheap for a decent hotel. Hostels in Krakow cost more. The women who worked at the desk were really nice. They almost had a heart attack when I walked out of the hotel without a jacket Sunday morning to hit up the market down the street for some juice. “I’m from Buffalo” doesn’t provide a Moldovan with the kind of reassurance that doing ridiculous things in freezing weather is natural to me than it would to an American.

Over Saturday, Sunday and Monday, we enjoyed Chisinau’s finest wine, quiche, champagne, shashlik, and beer. OK, well that’s a lie. Chisinau is kind of a cheap beer, but the rest was great. We ate just about everywhere we went, but we always started the night at the same shashlik restaurant with this kind of traditional decor and menu. I think we essentially depleted their supply of pork shashlik and domashne vino (homemade wine). On Monday, we went there right before catching the bus back to Kyiv, and a traditional Moldovan band came out and played.

Sunday night was actually quite lively in the bars and restaurants. Eventually we made it back to a place we had gone to the night before called Avtobus, where there’s a gutted marshrutka that’s used as a bar and they serve beer in these gumball machines with taps on them. Sunday, however, we managed to make friends with the people we were sharing a table with (often in Eastern Europe, as long as a seat is open at a table, even if there’s another party taking up the rest of the table, you can usually ask and sit with them). They turned out to be a group of students studying to be veterinarians in Chisinau. Absolutely hilarious group of guys. I suddenly felt a little more like I was in Buffalo when the next day, we ran into them on the streets and as we were talking, at least three other people stopped and said hello to all of us.

As we all sat down for drinks, one of them helped my friend Ben to get our return tickets, and another helped my friend Sam to find a decent internet place. The others sat with me and conversed over a beer before everyone came back and we all went to the dorm for a little birthday party where they proceeded to shower us with wine, sweets, and snacks. We even got to do some traditional Moldovan dancing, which despite their protests, is reminiscent of Turkish dancing (the Moldovan national hero is known for having fended off multiple Turkish invasions).

Even the taxi drivers are nice. Monday morning, when I finally had to actually do some business with a colleague of mine from the IOM Mission to Moldova, I took a taxi to where we were meeting, and the driver proceeded to tell me about the lack of patriotism in Moldova. He told me how much he liked living there and had actually lived abroad in Norway for a bit as a translator, but wants to stay in Moldova. He kind of demonized migration, but at the rate Moldova is losing people, I can understand why he’s upset.

Anyway, hopefully within the next cople of days, I can post the pictures from the trip. Chisinau now has a special place in my heart, and if you’re out this way, I would highly recommend stopping in for a visit.