Never have 1600 lei in your wallet

because if you do, it will get stolen. It will, trust me.

So, the following story will be funny for a variety of reasons. First, i had just returned from the "criminal" state of Transnistria and had set foot in the "legimitate" Moldovan state. Secondly, the irony only oozes thicker when it comes to light that I was on my way to pay my language professor, who happened to be on the same fucking trolleybus when it happened and who i probably was talking to when my oh so dear green freitag wallet was liften from my back pocket (yes, i know ... berate me please).

so here's the story. i take the trolleybus because marshrutka's (maxi-taxis) are hot, sweaty, and usually crowded. Buses are usually crowded but have more ventilation, and i usually get on at an odd stop so i figured what the hell. Anyhow, I didn't have the 1 lei handy so i had to take out my wallet and pay. to compound things, some fucking mother -- yes, she is a fucking mother, as her goddamn i'm from chisinau but i think i'm from new york stroller blocked all of the extra space which forced me to navigate for awhile until i settled in. next to some padlo grabbed my wallet and over $120 bucksof (gotta love american words with the russian genitive plural ending).

so immediately after the guy gets off i realize that the motherfucker stole my wallet but that it was totally fruitless to do anything except sit back and be happy that my passport wasn't gone.

Pizdetc!

Anyhow, i insisted on going to the police station if only to see what one was like. Let me say, i never want to get arrested in Moldova. Dudes were like cuffed to chairs, looking very unhappy. Policeman looked underpaid, overworked, and generally unwilling to take shit. But i made the report in the hopes that the pizda who stole my shit might throw it in the street where some policeman or otherwise fine citizen might return it.

Fuck it, as Bobick men say is situations like this. It was only a wallet, a driver's license, two credit cards, a few insurance documents, and some random other shit that i probably won't miss.

Tiraspol (more blasts and a blast)...

so, i feel the need to start off with a brief description of my trip to tiraspol but let's just say that it was enlightening. two days in the country, two in the city. the country = exactly the same as moldova but with certain (i doff my cap to Jakob) "chaotic modes of domination" ...the need to pay protection, random hostility to "foreigners" (more discourse than reality..)....

anyhow, another bomb went off in tiraspol, and there was hell to pay on the border. controlled three times, seemingly without any valid reasoning... as if simply looking over passports can stop this (shit, just look at what the US did after 9/11). anyways, seems like they have taken a page out of our playbook: terror + memorials = political power ........ pizdetc!

it was a grenade, and this story is pretty interesting, if only because the custodian sought to explode it on the Nistru himself...

Grenade found in student campus in Tiraspol (Transdnestr)


At 10:00 a.m. on August 14, a grenade was found in the territory of a campus in Tiraspol. The RGD-5 fragmentation grenade was found in a refuse bin. As a REGNUM correspondent is told at Transdnestr police, the grenade was found by campus watchman Ivan Kosmina. At first he put the grenade to his wardrobe to explode it on the Dniestr River, but later he decided to report to the police about his find.

At present time, operative groups of the Transdnestr Interior Ministry and State Security Ministry, as well as sappers from the Defense Ministry led by a Defense Ministry’s sapper engineering battalion commander arrived to the scene.

As REGNUM reported earlier, the explosion in trolley bus on August 13 occurred as a result of RGD-5 grenade blast.

La Vacantsa......

SO i have been "on vacation" this past weekend in Cluj, Romania. Just visiting a colleague from Cornell, not really seeing all that many sights, doing that much, etc. I really am just enjoying doing nothing, sleeping late, not dealith with the devastating heat (it rained for two days here, and i actually found myself cold for once).

My time in Moldova is disappearing! I have less than two weeks left. I was originally planning on leaveing early and spending some time in Bucharest, but it looks like I'll only be able to spend a night there.

When I return to Transnistria, I have a few more research meetings, a few days in Tiraspol, then who knows.

I have to quickly spit out two version of one paper if i am to claim my trip to Belgrade. I should definitely do that, as it's one city where I have never been and definitely want to go.