For spring break, my friends and I decided to go to Moldova. I had never really heard much about Moldova, or its capitol Chisinau, but it’s right next to Ukraine, so I figured I might as well check it out.
So, at seven in the morning, I got on a bus to Vinnytsia, another city where I would meet three of my friends. It seemed simple. From Vinnytsia, we would catch another bus to the border town of Yampil. We would cross to the Moldovan town of Soroca and catch yet another bus to the capital. It was as simple as traveling around in this area of Eastern Europe ever is, at least.
There was one confusion. My friends had spoken to a volunteer who had made the journey before. He said he walked across a bridge. The volunteers who live in Yampil, however, said they knew nothing of a bridge and mentioned a ferry. They had no idea where it was though. We figured it would be clear once we got to the border if we could walk across or would take a ferry.
Immediately when we set out from Vinnytsia the trip was anything but simple.
Normally volunteers keep a low profile on public transportation, but four American girls who are excited about a new adventure are bound to stand out. We hadn’t seen each other in a while and we laughed and joked loudly about our lives. Normally being loud would aggravate the people around you. Instead, the people on the bus, especially the driver, took a special interest in us.
We stopped at a small town and I asked how long we would be there; we were rather thirsty and wanted a minute to run inside and buy water. We were only there for three minutes, so we waited. The bus driver, however, thought we wanted to use a toilet. From that point on, he began pointing out every toilet on the road and asked if we wanted to stop. When we said no to the first, he thought that a squat toilet in the middle of the woods wasn’t good enough for us. He promised us a nicer toilet further down the road.
As we approached the gas station, he began singing the praises of the toilet. According to him, it was the nicest toilet we would see on the road and perhaps in all of Ukraine. He had actually stopped by the time I convinced him that we did not, in fact, want a bathroom.
Next he was concerned with what we would do once we got to Yampil. He offered to call us a taxi to take us to our destination. Not knowing if we were looking for a ferry or a bridge, we initially refused. Later we took him up on the offer and an amusing dialogue followed.
“To Chisinau,” we said in Ukrainian. “To the border.”
The driver responded with another city name that we hadn’t heard before.
“To Moldova, the border,” we repeated.
“Soroca?” he asked. My friend knew that was the city where the bus would take us to Chisinau, so we agreed and got into the taxi and headed toward Moldova.
We drove and drove. At one point, the road was so full of potholes that it made more sense to drive on the dirt path on the side of the road usually reserved for people and their goats. After about thirty minutes we arrived at the border. We could see Soroca across the river. It seemed like we had managed to find our way, until some strangers asked us where we were from. We told them we were American and they told us, simply, that we couldn’t cross the border there. Our taxi driver was the only person living in the area who didn’t know that foreigners can only cross back in Yampil, where we had just come from.
So, we piled back into the taxi and raced down the same road to a crossing only five minutes from where we started. We could cross at that border, but there was absolutely nothing on the Moldovan side. We didn’t know how we would get to Soroca, but we started crossing anyway.
I went first and handed my passport to the guard. After looking at every page, holding it up to the light, bending it and searching for my name and information, he asked the standard border crossing questions.
Satisfied with my answers, he gave my passport back and started the process again with my friend Meghan. While looking at the fourth passport, he seemed to have a realization.
“I need all your passports back,” he told us. This was a bad sign. We handed them back and he began looking at them again.
“What is your name?” he asked me.
“Kristen Wasik”
“What is this?” He pointed to my middle name.
“That’s my middle name. You don’t need it.” He had entered all our names as our first and middle names. I had become Kristen Michele. Still confused, he called someone for help. I could hear him explaining that he had a bunch of Americans and they had three names.
“Which names do you use?”
“The first and last.”
“Why do you have three names?” another guard asked.
“All Americans have three names.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Our parents pick them.”
“What are they for?”
“They are like the pobatkovy.” Ukrainians use a variation of their father’s name with ivna added to the end when they are speaking formally. For example, I would be Kristen Thomasivna to my students.
“So your father’s name is Michele?”
“No.”
“So where do the names come from?”
This conversation lasted for about half an hour. We left them with the explanation that it was simply an American tradition and they let us board the ferry.
The ferry itself was an adventure. It was less of a boat and more of a large concrete raft. The cars pulled right up to the edge and there was no railing preventing them from driving a little too far and ending up in the river. There were two railings on the side with benches running along them. A Ukrainian flag and a Moldovan flag waved on either side of a small shelter. It was attached to a cable that connected the two shores.
This baby took us from Ukraine to Moldova and back again.
As soon as we had run onto the raft, it waited for us while we had a cross-cultural moment at customs, the operator released the raft’s hold on the cable and we began to drift across the narrow river. It seemed as though the river’s current was the only thing pushing the raft from one side to the other. It took only a few minutes to reach the other side.
Once we got close to the Moldovan shore, a man with a large stick with a hook on the end grabbed the dock. All the young men on the ferry got out of their cars and grabbed onto the stick too. They pulled us to shore and the operator clamped the raft to the cables again.
Thankfully, the Moldovan customs booth had a computer that was able to scan our passports instead of having to enter the information manually. They didn’t seem too concerned about our extra names. It had taken a lot, but we had finally made it to Moldova.
Posted on March 29, 2011
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