the transdniestran story

Yet another border, yet another blog post. It's becoming a habit to blog while waiting for my passport to be returned. I hope this time we don't need to bribe anyone to get out of the country...
So Transdniestr was great- a great big (ok, not that big, but biggish) open air museum to the communist era. Have a look at flickr for a pic of Sean and i in front of the great big bust of Lenin in front of Soviet House, which is the government building there. The train station appears to be brand spanking new, and definitely in the typical communist pattern (all international trains are suspended, of course, but the train station is still impressive).
Leaving Transdniestr, we were taken off the little minibus and informed that we could not leave until we had had our departure card stamped by the passport office in town, 40 mins or so back the way we had come, and, as it was 7pm on a friday, possibly not open all weekend. The border guard we spoke to on entry to this tin pot country had told up that we had to register at the passport office if we stayed more than 10 hours. We had stayed 3. No one really spoke any language we do (i just can't handle slavic languages) but one guard took us into a little room and managed to explain 'present, Chisinau OK' and we understood what was expected. Unfortunately, the 5 euro or so had left in transdniestran rubles was not acceptable, and nor was the larger amount we had in ukrainian hrivny. A 20euro note finally did the trick, and our passports were returned and we were allowed to rejoin our bus, which we were very glad to see had waited for us. And so we managed to escape and get to the comparative luxury and civilisation of Chisinau.