Day 2: Chișinău

We were tired after all yesterday's travelling, so I accidentally slept through my 8am alarm this morning and didn't get up until after 9. Oops! Luckily breakfast was still served in the hotel until 10, so we still had the opportunity to try and make the most of it. It turned out to be a somewhat strange selection, including cucumber, frankfurters and slices of fish. Thankfully there were also pastries, cheese and pancakes!

When booking a hotel I'd tried to choose one within a kilometre of the train station, but unfortunately I'd gone for a kilometre on the opposite side of the station to where the actual city centre was, so we had a bit of a walk first off. We took a shortcut through a park, just opposite the hotel.

We started by walking past the imaginatively-named Lake 3 (above), before passing the very pretty Lake 2 (below). Lake 1 was off our route so we haven't seen that yet!

It was a really lovely park, so a nice start to the morning. We passed some trees decorated as giraffes, which was rather unusual. Maybe we'll have some pictures of actual giraffes for the blog when we visit Tanzania later in the year!

As we emerged from the park and walked down the next street, we passed this pretty Armenian church.

The church we were looking for was a different one: the Ciuflea Monastery.

I'd read that this was one of the most attractive buildings in Chișinău and it was definitely really pretty.

I loved the combination of blue towers and golden domes.

As expected, a lot of the other architecture in Chișinău is not very pretty. A lot of the city was destroyed by a combination of war and earthquakes in the 1940s, and the rebuilding in the 1950s was very Soviet. 

We were heading to the train station, as we'd seen a place to exchange money there when we'd arrived last night. We didn't currently have any Moldovan currency on us and I wasn't sure how much we'd be able to use our cards to pay here.

Happily the exchange booth at the station was open and we were able to exchange 50 Euros for around 900 Moldovan lei. Armed with our cash, we set off back towards the city centre.

This statue was celebrating the liberation of Moldova from German fascists. Like lots of things here, the inscription was written in both Romanian and Russian.

We popped into a bookshop we passed on our route, initially looking to see whether there were any Romanian books Tim wanted to buy. It turned out that the bookshop was pretty much 50:50 split between books in Romanian and Russian, so I ended up with a couple of Russian Agatha Christies too. They were unbelievably cheap; around £4 each!

We were soon on Chișinău's main street.

The buildings became a bit grander here.

We passed the national theatre...

...and found the Nativity Cathedral.

There was a nice park here and it looked like this part of the city would be really lovely in summer.

The cathedral originally dates from 1830.

The belltower was reconstructed in 1997, having been damaged during the Second World War and then demolished by the Communists.

Across the road from the cathedral is a large government building.

This part of town is also home to Moldova's triumphal arch.

It's not quite as impressive as the Arc de Triomphe which we saw in Paris a few weeks ago! It was built in 1840 to commemorate the victory of Russia over the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish war.

A little further down the road we found a park named after Stephen the Great.

My knowledge of Stephen the Great is a bit limited, but it was a very nice park! Across the road from it we found the Presidential Palace, which is enormous.

We also found the Moldovan parliament building

We were hungry by this point so we had spaghetti bolognese for lunch at a restaurant in the park, before carrying on towards one more park.

This is Valea Morilor, the biggest park in the centre of Chișinău. We walked all the way around what was really quite a large lake.

The reason for coming here was not so much to see the park, but to see this.

In a slightly obscure spot on the far side of the park is one of Europe's few undemolished Lenin statues.

It was really cool to see it and overall Chișinău has been a fun place to explore today. It's definitely not a city where you step outside and think "wow, everything is so beautiful!" but it's an interesting place and there's been more to see than you might expect for a place that doesn't even have a guidebook