all about chisinau

We're through the moldovan side. Now we're waiting for Romania to let us in. According to my gps, we're not on a road. But the moldovan exit stamp says Cahul, and i've seen busses to there, so i assume it exists.
Chisinau was fun. We stayed in a huge old communist era hotel called Hotel Zaria that was quite affordable, and decorated like a polish grandmother's house. We managed to find it without too many problems, despite arriving at dusk and the lack of street lights in even quite major streets. We felt it was highly civilised, though, as we had a fridge, a tv that occasionally spoke english, and a 24 hour supermarket around the corner that provided most of our meals while we were there. We were so comfortable we decided to stay 2 nights.
The town was an interesting mix of crumbling communist and pre-communist era grand buildings and cars, and shiny new expensive shops and cars, particularly on the main street.
One entertaining sight- a bridal party standing next to a yellow taxi, apparently on the way to the wedding. It was amusing to think of the old crappy taxi being the wedding car, and even more so when all 6 people, all their finery and the taxi driver crammed in and drove off, all under the benevolent eye of a pair of polizia routiere in their own decrepit vehicle.
The fact that the national mobile network is called Moldcell also amused me regularly.
There was some sort of motor race happening this weekend. We didn't see any evidence of the race itself, but there was a huge stage on the main street with speakers so loud we could hear it from the hotel a kilometre or more away. We discovered it was also broadcast live on tv, so we could hear it in stereo. We didn't watch much, but there was a really interesting act fronted by a singer who wore a tshirt saying 'gypsy punk' and i decided that was the best description of the music too. If i can ever work out their name, i would attempt to buy their cd. It was excellent! And there was a glass flute!
And it was a whole lot better than the first act we were subjected to while still wandering around town, which had lyrics such as 'i'm made in Moldova, riggidiggidig...'