Saturday in Chisinau

Market, Museum and Streetflowers.

Today, Saturday April 16th, we first go to the main market - it's enormous, terribly crowded, like in Africa- and you can find anything you need. We buy a proper furcoated hat, getting the price down to half. Interesting and new to us is the department for pickles: next to the customary cucumber there's cabbage and watermelon(!) and other vegetables that we would never think of eating sauer.

Robert and I buy traditional lunch food: bread inbaked with potatoes and fresh cheese and herbs.

Then there are lots of plastic flowers!

Next we have a cafe latte in a very european café; then go to the national museum where they have an impressive collection, covering the whole history of this area, starting from 3000 years BC till the second world war. 

The museum looks like a French Loire castle and in the garden we find various stele's from befor Christ. Inside it is ever so beautiful, like a Viennese Palace:

The influence of the tartars was made visible through the new and different style of pottery

Here are female figurines dating back from 800 BC , a pendant from the same era and golden Dacian coins (Dacia being the rich civilisation that was plundered by the Romans when they invaded this region around 100 AD for their fertile soils and at the same time took away all the gold treasures- all this recounted on the column of Trajan in Rome

Then there were paintings and posters showing the way the people experience the supression...
the nuns thrown out of their monasteries by the Communists, beginning 20st century, and the victory over the Germans (and Rumanians) after the second world war...

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In the afternoon we went to the main street where women sell wild flowers and bought a bunch for the weekend.....