Byl tri dnya v Moldove. Sorry - et's do this in English - it looks better. Russian in latin letters looks so wierd - even if it is a good way to hide the fact you can't do the grammar and spelling properly!

I'm sitting in Budapest airport waiting for my flight back to Heathrow after a few days in Moldova - which was good.

Second visit to Chisinau - and nothing much had changed from the last time I was there two years ago! It's nice to have constants in life...

Chisinau, if you haven't visited, is a really nice little city. Not huge (official population about 500,000 I think they told me) and it's peaceful but fun. Warm weather, everything very cheap, nice, very atractive people and a really international feel - it feels like people got stranded there from all over the USSR when things fell to pieces so you meet Ukrainians, Russians, Central Asians, Romanians, Bulgarians and so on. The mix of blood seems to have a good effect on the population - they have more than their fair share of very good-looking people - and if the students I met are anything to go by, they are pretty intelligent as well. They also seem rather straighforward and uncomplicated people - and very frustrated in some ways at their isolation. They find it difficult to go anywhere especially Western Europe, the USA and so on.

I would not ike to call it a forgotten country - but none of my colleagues had any idea where on Earth I was going for this trip. I'm glad they don't know - the last thing this place needs is to be shaged senseless by idiotic English stag nights like the Czechs and Latvians have been (after all, it's cheap here - accommodation, drink, food and other "commodities" required by the soon-to-be-wed Englishman who intends for himself and his mates to be thoroughly unfaithful right from before the beginning of their solemn and sacred union!

I was lucky enough this time to get a look at the countryside (not just the bit of lan between the airport and the city). Moldova is incredibly fertile and most of it is farmland. The good chernozem for grain and vegetables and fruit and the sandier, hilly soil for grapes.

We visited a place called Orhueil Vechi (Old Orhueil) which is an interesting limestone outcrop cut round by a river. The cliffs have lots of natural caves which were enlarged and inhabitted by monks - a whole underground monastery which is now abandoned. The whole place is amazing. It's been inhabited for a long time - long before the monks there was a Dacian settlement on the hill (we're talking thousands of years ago). The river is flanked by limestone cliffs on one side and fertile-looking farmland on the other so it's a great place to live - water, high, easilly - defended position, and actually you come on it so suddenly from the rolling countryside surrounding it that it comes as a bit of a surprise - I though at first that it was a quarry!

The limestone is full of fosilised shells which I dutifully filled my pockets with (as my son was not available to do this). The whole place is alive. On the hill top silence reins except for the constant noise of the breeze, and sounds of children and cows from the valley below, but in the valley by the river the noise is cacophonous - Moldovan countryside is far from peaceful. First you have grasshoppers or cicadas or something shrilling away constantly. Then you have tiny little frogs who seem to have swallowed loudspeakers. Add to that birds (lots of them - goldfinches in flashing little flocks, wagtails, sparrows and even a pair of lazy old ravens flopping through the sky and croaking to each other - how they stay in the air at that speed I don't know). Noisier than downtown Chisinau!

There are enormous balck dung beetles crawling through the grass everywhere and brilliant green lizards with blue throats flitting through the grass and herbs.

Herbs - not my area of speciality but there are lots and they grow in abundance. My personal favourite was a large patch of hemp growing by the side of the road. My colleague explained that it grows like a weed all over Moldova and he and his mates used to make full use of this when he was a teenager. Perhaps that's why Moldovans are so laid back...

The farmed land seems to be divided up into shared pasture for people's cattle and the fields are also divied up into what amount to large vegetable patches where babushki and dedushki plant onions, beans and other stuff on their strip and surround it with grape vines.

The whole place appeals to my peasant blood but will no doubt leave my other friends utterly cold and slightly disgusted that I could possibly show so much interest in so much dirt...

I've uploaded some photos - I hope you like them...
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