Week 5 Day 6

Saturday’s excursion was to the Autonomous Region of Gagauzia, which was about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Chisinau. We met up at the American Councils building at 9:00 and left shortly after, and we saw some gorgeous scenery on the ride there:



We arrived at about 11:30 in Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia which has a population of about 20,000 people (it is very small). We visited the monument to World War II and also a statue of Lenin in the center of the city.

The World War II memorial.

After that, we visited a library that had a lot of books in both Russian and Gagauz—a language similar to Turkish and also dying out as fewer in younger generations continue to learn it. At the library, they had a shelf of classic western books in Gagauz, so it was pretty cool to try and interpreted the titles and just see which books were considered so popular that they were owned in the middle of a small region in Moldova, of all places...

They had about three copies of Oliver Twist.

We then walked to the Central Park which had an old orthodox cathedral in it, and one of the priests gave us a short background in Russian. We also got to look around inside for a bit, where a baptism was taking place.

The cathedral.

Next, we had a pretty generic (and short) lunch, before we walked back to the bus to visit a famous horse farm. Apparently, Gagauzia is famous for their horses, which are sold for a lot of money—for the farm we went to, about 20,000 euro each.

The owner of the farm gave us a little tour and took us around to see the horses (which we were also allowed to pet), and told us a little bit about each of them.

The main part of the farm.
A bunch of (wild?) horses rode by while we were looking around.

The owner also draws and paints horses in his free time, and he let us look around his workshop for a bit and even gave us some autographed copies of his drawings, which was really nice of him!

The drawing I chose.

When we went back to get on the bus, there was a very cute cat waiting for us, and all of us disobeyed Elliott’s rule about not petting cats we don’t know...


From there, we drove home and when I got back at about 7:30, my host mom was out at a concert with her friends, so I mostly just relaxed and read for a bit before going to bed.

It was definitely one of my favorite excursions we’ve done so far!

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