Travel Journal

My passport is a major attraction for the officers on duty this afternoon. One after the other they flip through the pages, curiously looking at the stamps I collected over the years. Sometimes they would whistle out of astonishment and move their lips while trying to decipher a faded country name letter by letter. Their own passports remain unstamped as they aren’t recognized anywhere on this planet. Today just the regular customers are being brought down the many stairs to the basement of the police station: bony, bruised and drunken men and women in stained clothes, blades of grass in their hair. They are made to stand upright in front of the officers who have a passion for verbal and physical abuse. Then the blond nurse in high heels, taller than all the men, is called to examine their level of inebriation before they are brought to one of the cells I found myself in this morning. By now it is late afternoon already and I still have no idea of what happened last night, as the officers prefer to mock me instead of giving serious answers. So far this counts as one of my most unpleasant travel experiences and I start to grow extremely worried about being held here for another night.

I left Chisinau the day before in the afternoon with the picture of the legless cripple at the bus station forever burned into my mind. He was lying on an iron bench near platform number five, the floor covered in cigarette butts, ash and a dozen dots of saliva and phlegm, the pants wet from urine, his hand clinging to a bottle. And I will never forget the endless line of old ladies near the market. Shoulder to shoulder they stood on the sidewalk, wearing similar coats and headscarves, like penguins trying to warm each other, before them a handful of vegetables, a loaf of cheese or some eggs for sale.

I arrived in Tiraspol in the evening. Under a grey sky I walked fast to make it to the hotel before the expected rain. It was two hours before sunset and the streets where empty. I passed a big park, the grass knee-high and no one there to sit on the benches, the rusty playground abandoned by the kids. The main boulevard was almost deserted as well. A capital city gone ghost town, overlooked by the president and his heroes painted on walls and banners. In the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic people grow vegetables on the narrow piece of public green that separates the road and the sidewalk, right in the center, just one block off the main street.
From the receptionist at the run-down hotel I received the first smile since my arrival in town. After a short rest in a room that seemed unchanged since Soviet times I hungrily left for the streets again, hoping to find some smiles and life in the barely lit town.