Arriving to Chisinau - First Impressions of Moldova

I'm about to jump on the train to Moldova. I'm in Bucharest right now, and this is the main way of getting there. But it's the least visited country in Europe. That guy's playing music. I have no idea what to expect. Let's do this. It's hot in here. I don't think there's anything to see to get in. I have to walk sideways. Oh, it's warm. This is my carriage for the next 12 hours. I'm right here. I'm not going to lie, it's pretty hot right now. Everyone's sweating, and I really hope it's not like this for the next 10 hours. 14. Okay, good to know. A train and a sauna. I just found a sign that this train was actually owned by the Deutsche Democratic Republic. It came from East Germany. Just down here. Yeah, check it. Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Welcome to Moldova. This is the least visited country in Europe. I'm in Chisinau now, the capital of Moldova. And I want to find out why. Why does no one come here? It's a tiny country, and there's no real tourism pool as far as I know. But I want to see exactly what makes up Chisinau. Check it out, this is our room. This is Hotel Chisinau. Luxury. Soviet luxury. Check it out, this is the lobby. And it feels proper Soviet. Eastern Bloc. It's just a grandiose building. And as a first first impression of Moldova, this is pretty nice. Now we're going to get out and see the rest of the city. Okay, we're doing a bit of a walking tour now. And I've just found out that this building just here is called the Cosmos Hotel. I don't know if you can see, but it's completely abandoned and it's unfinished. It's kind of a symbol of what the Soviets intended for Moldova. Because they were going to have that as a hotel where people could come to from out of Soviet Russia. And do wine tours in Moldova. But instead, it was never finished. It's still completely abandoned now, even 30 years later. And that's kind of the way it is in Moldova, I'm told. There's hardly any tourism here. They get about 10,000 tourists per year. Which, to give you context, North Korea gets 4,000 to 5,000 per year. So this isn't a great deal more. No one really visits here. Although, we are here now. I'm here with Young Pioneers Tours. The same company I did North Korea with. They've got another subsidiary called Soviet Wastelands. And they do tours to these sort of places. Which is why it's going to be very interesting to see. Okay, we just visited this church. And I saw something that normally I wouldn't film. But I had to film that. That's a new car. And they're blessing it right now. So they've got the two monks there in the family. Blessing their car. As far as I can see, that's what's happening here. You can see right now, guys, they're doing a loop and blessing around the car over here. I've never seen that before. Okay, so this is a statue of Tolstoy. The guy that wrote War and Peace. A famous book that I never got around to reading because it's huge. But yeah, he spent some time here in Chisinau. In Moldova. And said what a beautiful place it was. And apparently wrote a lot of War and Peace while he was here. But that was before the whole destruction of the city in World War II. Which I'm just told wiped out about 70%. And then it was rebuilt after with the old Soviet communist blocs. But before that, it was quite a quaint, beautiful place, apparently. So in 1945, when Moldova was part of the Second World War, the Soviets, when they eventually stopped working together with Germany as the Axis Powers, they pushed back the German forces through Moldova and through Romania. And in that sort of battle, in that movement, over 100,000 people died. Which is what this monument and this park is here to commemorate. I find these countries really interesting. Because besides being a place that most people don't get to, so you get to see somewhere that's more raw, more untouched, less of a touristy feeling. Besides that, I think you can see history. You can see a point in time. And you can see how things have been affected since. And how the government has had such an impact on the country. Here you can still see all the communist buildings from when it was Soviet Russia. And you can see the effect of time. It's like you're walking through time. I'm not sure if I expressed that exactly as I wanted to. But what I'm trying to say is when you come to countries like this, you can really see the history and you can feel it. Wow, okay, so this is really interesting. You can see here, this is a graveyard. So this person has a date, but the other three here, they all have their faces on the gravestone already, but no date. So that's how it works here. You get a portrait put on and then you add in the date later. I blurred out the faces because I'm not sure how. I don't think it's okay to show the faces of someone that's passed on someone's gravestone on the internet. But you can really see everyone's faces on the gravestone here. And they all get taken at the same time. And then every time you come to visit one of your relatives, you see your own face on the gravestone as well with your birth date, but not your death date. All right, guys, so I was thinking about getting a tattoo while I'm here. And I think I've found just the right place. I just need to call that number and get a tattoo. Well, if I actually did that, that would be a good video. So we've just been walking around the military museum, learning about a lot of things that happened to Moldova. I can't really regurgitate it all. But what you can know is that even after the Soviet Union fell, there was still war here and in Transnistria, which if some of you haven't heard of Transnistria, it's a disputed region that most of the UN don't recognize as a country. But we're going to go there. We're going there after Moldova. So I'll give you some more information then. But for right now, I'd say if you do come to Moldova, then make sure to come to this museum, because it's hugely interesting and you'll learn a lot about, like I said, you can see history and you'll learn a lot about Moldova's history here. All right, guys, I just came to one of these sort of buffet-style things. So I got this, two meat, beavery salad, and this for about three euros. Yeah. We're on the way back to the hotel now. And one of the noticeable things is in all the underpasses, it's all just falling apart, graffiti everywhere. And the infrastructure hasn't really been looked after at all by the government in here, apparently in the last 30 years. Whoa, it's dark in here. I'm using my phone to be able to see myself right now, but you would not want to walk back here. Yeah, from what I've heard, there's been no real investment back into the country from the government, and that's why a lot of things like that are falling apart and a lot of the infrastructure they have here was actually just built by the Soviets. They haven't really reinvested a lot. But it's also one of the lowest GDP countries in Europe, so I don't think they have an abundance of money. I don't really know about that side of it, but, yeah, a lot of it is falling apart. Next up, we're in the Krakova wine area, which has the largest wine cellar in the world, I think. It's one of the main things that Moldova is famous for and is the main real tourism pool here. It's what people come for. They come to see this giant wine cellar and try the wine, which is exactly what we're doing right now. Right, so the cellars are so huge that you need one of these cars to get around. So we're going down for a 30-minute tour around, and we're just going to be driving through the giant wine cellar. They gave us blankets, and you can feel how cold it is as soon as you come in. It's like the Kringon's. Hi, guys, so I'm Bernadette. Yeah. And our underground city is a city like any others, with streets, boulevards, traffic signs, traffic lights. You'll see everything during our tour. But the names of the streets are a little unusual. As you saw, the first street is Cabernet. We are on the street Dionysus now. Also, you'll see streets like Kodruk, Petasca, Chardonnay, Sevignon, and so on. So this whole wine cellar extends for 200 kilometers, and there's 2 million bottles of wine here. We're going to do our best to drink some. Is it rosé? What is it? Cheers, guys. Cheers. So people can pay to keep their wine here indefinitely, and they pay per year to have a whole collection of wine. This one is Vladimir Putin. You see right here, that's all Putin's wine. John Kerry's. Angela Merkel back here. Interesting. Okay, so we just learned about the history of it. All right. So we just learned about the history of it, but now is the actual part we were all waiting for, the wine tasting. Okay, this is the last one. I've already had three already, but I forgot to film that. So, cheers. Really interesting. Good wine. And something to see when you're in Moldova. Right, now we're going back to Chisinau, and then I'll give you my first impressions of Moldova. So what did I think of Moldova and Kizhinov? I've said that, I think, differently a few times in this video, Chisinau, Kizhinov, but I think it's Kizhinov. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, I would say it's kind of underrated. People don't come here, and everyone I've spoken to has said there is nothing to see, really, in Moldova, and there's no real sights or attractions or whatever. But like I've shown you in this video, there's more than you'd think. There's more than initially meets the eye. And the food has been good, the wine's been great, and it's really affordable as well for Europe. So if you do get the chance, if you're going to go to Romania, or we're going to Ukraine next, actually we're going to Transnistria next, so check back for that. And then Ukraine after, but you can come the other way. So if you're in this sort of region, then I'd say check out Moldova, check out Kizhinov, Chisinau, for a few days, because why not? It's another country, it's somewhere completely different from the rest of Europe, and it was really interesting. I'm going to leave it there, say thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.