Dirty South

Dirty South

Just like their cultural counterparts in the states, good ol boys in the Peace Corps like to exemplify their manliness. I don’t know much about what they do at site, since I don’t hang out with them much, but when they are all in Chis together, riled up about bein near each other, they play football, plot to buy an x-box for the PC lounge, drink a bunch and pop their collars. When the play football they most often split the teams into North and South teams, that is anyone living north of Chisinau is on the North team; anyone south-South. The boys on the South team always declare they are the Dirty South. The North team derides them as such.

Oddly, though, Moldovans of the south (my gazdas, students and teachers etc) all claim the south of Moldova is dirty also. “It’s dirty, and the houses are smaller and they are all one color. Not like here, where there is water and forests and beautiful homes and fences,” describes Maria. Apparently she went down south once for a relative’s wedding and what she encountered was a mass of mud hovels, less refined even, than our mud and stucco structures.

“It’s just dirty,” says a neighbor baba, shaking her head, “the roads are dusty. More dusty than here.” As our roads just got a bit flatter and whiter thanks to the mayor campaign, I don’t want to disagree, but a gust of wind to my eyes keeps me skeptical.

“It’s really flat and boring looking,” said a kid whose exploration outside of Glodeni I doubt.

So guess what I expected on my first foray south of this civil border. All this blinding newness started on a 2 lei ruitiera ride to the South Gara—Chis is big enough to have three major bus stations. The North, The Central, and surprise surprise, The South. The North Gara is where I catch my buses home, It’s large and hectic. There’s a small army of bearded women selling nickel worths of chocolate, baby wipes, fans, icons, bags of weird puffed sugar cereal. Dozens of dogs roam around getting kicked by men, fed by women, half of them with nipples big as raspberries and flapping a good three inches below the rib cage. Probably 50 men shout destinations at you as you walk from one end (entrance) to the other (my stop). It’s also rumored that the smokestack domineering the north face of the north gara belongs to Chisinau’s biggest WW2 people-incinerator. It’s a wholly unappealing place. Also, it’s a 12 minute walk from PC—just long enough to be super annoying and needing to be taken into schedule account and just too short to make a taxi or rutiera ride worthwhile (money 1+ waiting time).

The Central Gara is worse. The same, minus smoke stack, but multiplied in every other way by 3.

The South Gara is situated on a hill. I have ridden by it dozens of times going to and from Ialoveni, where training was the last 2 summers. The hill gives it an advantage. It’s breezy, and has a nice view. It’s also half the size of the North Gara in terms of buses, but twice the size in terms of little shops and bars. Also, the ticket sales booths are not outside in the elements and people, but in a bright warehouse of a building, complete with digital screens stating time and temperature and other useful facts. The bus drivers all insist on buying tickets from these—a sure sign of civilization in comparison to the teeth picking apathy of most Northern busmen. That is, they’d rather charge you an extra 3 lei and pocket the difference by forcing you NOT to buy an official ticket. See my rant on the Dick Driver of Balti’s gara.

After buying tickets and sitting in, shock, the seats assigned to us, the bus leaves, shock, on time and, shock, does not stop at random spots on the way out of the gara to pick up the snobs who refuse to wait at the actual, assigned place.

We’re off. An hour in smoke starts curling out of the dashboard. Driver pulls over. All men jump out to smoke as well. Driver opens dash, fiddles around. He turns the engine. Still smoking. Open dash. Use tools. Replace a wire. Close dash. Start engine. All good. All the men jump back on and we’re off.

Only other breakdown I’ve yet experienced resulted in nothing happening for two hours and then the whole of our bus getting on with another. We were going straight north.

So, in that first hour I must point out we went up and down three steep hills with switchbacks. My 4 hour ride northwest has one such.

After that, yes, the landscape does pan out, but that may also just be because our route runs parallel to the Prut river the whole way, and therefore we are always in flood plain. The Prut flows pretty straight south until the land reaches close to sea level a couple dozen miles inland from the Black Sea, when it starts looping around like kitten string. Eventually these meanderings widen to marshes and join the southern mouth of the Danube as it empties out in an industrialized delta at Galati, Romania. In fact, the place I’m going is Giurgiulesti—home to the border crossing to Galati and the Ukrainian counterpart. My colleague there says there’s a hill (hm… hills. There’s a bunch of them. All made of sandstone you know. Make for some psychedelic collapse inducing ravines. Soft enough for birds to hollow out eyries, you know. Full of life and noise and color they are) where you can see both Ukraine and Romania at the same time. Cool.

This phenomenon, not unlike that place out west in the states where you can put your hand on four states, means there’s constant international traffic coming through the little town of Giurgiulesti.

The roads, therefore, are pretty well maintained. In all other respects, the little town does nothing to take advantage of its place and acts only as a conductor of traffic and housing encampment for the customs workers. Yet the people take care of their town in the same visible ways Balatina does. The houses are primary color stucco. Arcades of grapevines shade all driveways. In fact, there is a concerted effort I’ve noticed in the south of people planting flowers in front of their fences, so the road, already in better condition, is full of prettier things to look at.

The only change in architecture is actually only in one of the dozen villages between Cantemir and Giurgiulesti. In this one, I can’t remember what it’s called, the houses are structured like long houses. Three or 4 rooms strung together in a line with a veranda along one side. All the verandas were sporting drying clothes. Same colors on the outside. Same mud bricks on the inside.

On the tree thing, there are trees in the south. They do not, however, as predicted, congregate in beautiful woods so cherished by Moldovans and lauded in Moldovan textbooks.

All in all, a pretty normal mix of half accurate accusations. The South is dirty, but so is the North. Why can’t we all just get along?