The Real Moldova

The true story behind "Moldova Travel Blog: My Last Country Before the World Ended." In the fiction, a burned-out travel blogger named Maria Torres chooses Moldova as the place to spend humanity's final six hours before an asteroid hits. I chose Moldova for the least romantic reason imaginable, it was the last box left on my map of Europe, and then, across one gloriously terrible first day, I personally invented the asteroid.

Why Moldova? Because I Was Out of Countries

Moldova is the least-visited country in Europe. So why go? Precisely because of that. I'd worked my way through most of the continent and had four countries left: Andorra (a logistical headache), Belarus (politically off the table), Cyprus (which I'm saving to pair with Athens), and Moldova. Since I was already heading for that corner of the world, Moldova won by elimination.

Which is, if you squint, exactly how Maria ends up there in the story, not out of love for the place, but because it's the one still unvisited. The least-visited country in Europe is, almost by definition, the place you go when you've run out of better reasons.

The flights were so infrequent that I had to choose between staying one night or four. I chose four, and booked a hotel advertising five stars, on the theory that if the city underwhelmed, at least the hotel would carry me. Reader, note the theory. We're going to test it.

The Worst First Day I've Had Anywhere

It started at the airport, where I was scammed by a taxi. A man announced he was a real taxi, I believed him, and I paid roughly double the going rate. I have seen this exact scam on multiple continents. I knew better. I was, apparently, out of practice at being suspicious, and Moldova charged me tuition for the refresher.

The drive in did not lift the mood. Chișinău, from the back of an overpriced cab, is a great deal of drab Soviet concrete, and somewhere around the third gray block I did the math on four nights and felt my stomach drop.

The hotel had more surprises. I was two hours early; they charged an eye-watering fee for early check-in, which I paid, because they'd promised a gym and I wanted to sweat off the taxi. The room was fine, in the way a five-star room should never merely be fine. The gym had the decency to exist and then, on inspection, revealed that half its machines were broken. The front desk assured me, with magnificent calm, that everything would be fixed within a week. Comfortably after my departure.

So I went looking for a real gym, and found one half a mile away with a five-dollar day pass. I arrived thrilled. The woman at the desk asked where my shoes were. On my feet, I said. No, my other shoes. Patrons are required to bring a second, indoor pair, for hygiene. I had never heard of this in my life. I ran back to the hotel, grabbed the free open-toe slippers, and returned in triumph. Not those, she said. Not open-toe. Actual shoes. Defeated, I found a mall and spent sixty dollars on a pair of sneakers, not to work out in, but purely to satisfy the rule that I own a qualifying second pair. I never wore them on the gym floor; I worked out in the shoes already on my feet. The sixty-dollar pair has been worn exactly once, in the shop, to check if they fit, and has never so much as touched a treadmill. I still own them. I will own them forever. At this point they are less footwear than a relic, a sixty-dollar receipt for the privilege of using a five-dollar gym.

That evening, things seemed to turn. I had a drink at a local pub and hit it off with the owner, a genuinely warm guy who invited me back that night for a concert and promised to wave me in for free. I showed up glowing with restored faith in Moldova, and was stopped at the door by the bouncer: a sixteen-year-old in full punk regalia, who demanded ten euros. The owner's getting me in free, I said. He was unmoved. He asked again. I informed him, with the grace of a man who had bought shoes that afternoon, that no concert in Moldova could possibly be worth ten euros. He did not blink. I turned around and marched back to my hotel, and somewhere on that walk I had the thought that became a story: that maybe, just a small one, nothing biblical, nothing dinosaur-grade, a modest asteroid could take out Moldova.

That thought is the whole piece. Petty, exhausted, and entirely unearned by a country whose only crime that day was a teenager with a clipboard, but that's where the end of the world came from. Maria gets an asteroid, a soulmate, and a reason to finally stop running. I got a door charge and some shoes. I handed her the asteroid. It was the least I could do.

Then Moldova Started to Marinate

Here's the part the first day didn't predict: Moldova grew on me. It just needed a few days to work.

The hotel atoned for a fraction of its sins at breakfast, which was, improbably, spectacular, a menu of hot entrées from which the free breakfast let you choose any three. Any three. I am not built to resist a rule like that, so more than once I ate a full English breakfast flanked by pancakes and a bagel, like a man preparing to hibernate.

Beyond breakfast, Moldovan food struggled to introduce itself, there's no loud, obvious local cuisine the way there is a few borders over. I had a baked chicken dish that photographed better than it ate, and another plate that arrived looking like oversized chicken dinosaurs mounting a defense around a single heroic tree of broccoli. I have the photos. I don't have the explanations.

The Wine, and the Cellar I Never Got Into

Moldova is quietly, almost secretively, a serious wine country, the kind of thing wine people know and the rest of us don't. Its crown jewel is Cricova, a vast underground wine city, and in the story it's exactly where Maria and Marina go to spend the end of the world.

Here's my favorite irony of the entire trip: when I was actually there, Cricova was closed. For mold remediation. The single most cinematic location in the fiction, the emotional climax, the cathedral of the whole thing, is the one place the real me never got into, because the famous wine cellar had a mold problem. I gave Maria the grand descent I never got to make.

I made do with several smaller wineries around the capital instead. The wine was good, not great, but the culture around it is genuinely lovely, and it's the thing I'd most readily defend about the place.

The Parks (Where Moldova Actually Won Me Over)

If one thing turned the trip, it was the parks. I didn't expect it, you think of London for parks, not Chișinău, but the city is full of them, green and genuinely pretty, and the nicest I found was Valea Morilor. I watched a couple play chess on a board the size of a patio, lifting pieces they had to walk around. In another park stood a grand statue of Ștefan cel Mare, Stephen the Great, the medieval prince Moldovans revere for winning battles and building churches by the dozen, holding his cross and looking far more certain of things than I felt.

(Here's a real connection I only clocked later: Valea Morilor is exactly where Maria and Marina go to watch the sky in the story. The park that pulled me back from writing Moldova off is the one I later handed my characters for the end of the world.)

Would I Go Back?

No. I'll be honest: I wouldn't. Not every country has to earn a second visit to be worth the first.

But I owe Moldova this much, it pulled me back from the worst opening day I've had anywhere, and it did it without even trying, just by quietly being better on day three than it was on day one. I came in ready to write the place off by dinner. I left with a decent wine education, an unreasonable breakfast strategy, a statue I liked, and the shoes.

Here's the part that isn't a joke. The asteroid came from a bad day, but Maria, the blogger who's seen seventy-three countries and is known by no one, didn't. I know her from the inside. I went to Moldova because it was one of the last boxes left on a map I've spent years filling in, and there's a specific loneliness in being the person who's nearly finished seeing everything and still isn't sure what he went looking for. The asteroid I invented for a laugh. That feeling I gave her for free, because I've carried it myself.

Those shoes are still in my closet. The asteroid made it into a story. We're square, Moldova and I.