retiredmartin

March 2025. Moldova.

I’m not sure she’s actually found the little pin badge to stick in the wall chart yet, but Mrs RM has completed Europe.

Well, all apart from Belarus, and she’s not going there; it’s more dangerous than Maidenhead.

I guess it’s a bit like claiming to have finished the GBG without having ticked a temporarily closed Cumbrian gastropub, if that’s not a weird thing to compare Belarus with.

A bit like when Mrs RM was even more excited in Rousay than I was, I seemed to relish the crossing into Moldova after 20 minutes of border checks more than her.

That was the high point of a 3 hour minibus journey (£13) to the relentless suburbs of Chisinau (Cheese now), alternating between dirt tracks and EU funded dual carriageway.

Apart from, obviously, their 2018 World Cup qualifying results, all I really knew about Moldova was;

• it’s the poorest country in Europe (or was, before the Ukraine invasion).
• they have a weird train that was immortalised in their Eurovision entry
• Moldovan wine is popular in Bulgaria
• The craft beer scene is “embryonic”
• All payments must be made in cash or tractor parts
• Hardly anyone visits

Sound like my sort of place.

The bus drops us, cruelly, a mile from the centre outside a shopping centre.

The Art Rustique, one of only a handful of non-commercial hotels, tries to arrange a meeting time but the internet fails.

I need a wee. Salvation comes from Untappd, which tells me there’s an approved craft bar, the ones Stafford Paul won’t go in, 10 minutes away over crumbling pavements.

Alt Ceva is (again) brand new, and has all the words Mrs RM hates on beer boards.

But I let her choose two 0.3 litre tumblers (£1.71) while I nip to the loo, and return to find her sitting smugly in front of the TV screen, having paid on her phone.

A Pils and a Scwartz beer. What’s wrong with mango sours ?

Bobby Mango, who toasts my check-in, would have had the mango sour.

The telly turns out to be a video screen showing a DJ playing deep house,

rather than Janis Joplin or ELO. It’s oddly hypnotic.

In Chichester this place would be the Escapist and I’d have a jolly conversation with the bar staff about trade and sours and the chance of them putting on Bass.

Here, I just say “Multimesk” returning the glasses, hoping Moldova still speaks Romanian.

Back at Art Rustique the owner has given up on us and texted the 4 digit entry code and left the key on the desk.

If there’s any Untappd check-in here, I can’t see it.

It’s a spotless, well-equipped room we call home for 3 nights, longer than we’ve spent consecutively in Sheffield for a year.

But as Mrs RM searches for a WiFi code, I head for the pub.