An icicle and a view of the Piata Centrale in Chisinau (the clothing lane to be precise...)

My street on Wednesday (no snow and today--lots of it)...

The flyer promises to teach me to speak English like an American in just one week, should I go?

10 Feb...A visit to the Market and a lesson in customer service Moldovan style...today I ran my big shopping errand to the Piata Centrale (or central open-air market). I have been to a lot of markets in my life in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Turkey...even India but the market in Chisinau is a wholly different animal. First, they do very little haggling here--prices are generally set. It makes it easier and that part I like. Second, the market is organized into little rows (or as I call them lanes) and on each row they are a series of stalls selling similar items like cleaning supplies, clothing, vegetables, or meat and fish (I avoid that area because although I am told the meat is fresh and it certainly is kept chilled, the odor is overpowering).

So, anyway, my venture to the market today was for cleaning supplies--a mop, glass cleaner, bathroom cleaner--pretty simple stuff (you track a lot of grime in with the snow--oh, did I mention that we just had about six inches fall). So I went up and down the aisles until I found the places where the mops where and then I proceeded to look at one. This is my only complaint about the market--you look at a mop an the two women with NO other customers in their stall, ignore you. You ask "cit costa" how much, and they still ignore you, the mop falls and they look at you and shrug your shoulders. Needless to say, a frustrating experience and one repeated as I made my way to several stalls (well, only at the first did the mop actually fall). Finally, I came to a stall where the woman wanted to actually SELL her mop and I bought it happily. I wish I could say that this element of customer service was limited either to me or just to the market, but other Americans and even Moldovans have the same experience. And it is not just at the market.

Even at the little supermarket up the block from me, I watched a Moldovan man basically "cuss-out" the cashier because she was so nasty to him--it did no good, she actually laughed at him. From my own experience, she is a nasty one and I always try to avoid her line. She rings up your groceries in a huge hurry throwing them in the bag as she goes (once she broke my eggs) and then demands your money immediately and hmms and sighs until you give it to her and then gets frustrated if it isn't exact change and rattles on at you--this is one time when language ignorance is bliss (but I am fluent in hmm-ing and sighing). I am grateful that there is a supermarket at all and I will say that in the upscale places like restaurants and finer retail establishments, generally, the service is as good as anywhere in the States.

I don't know what exactly explains this way of doing things, other than it is a residual of the old Soviet way of doing things--clerks in the store had no reason to be proactive or friendly, they did you a service by letting you buy something (that is, if there were things to buy). It is certainly not the case that my contacts at the universities are aloof or distant, quite the contrary and my students are warm and friendly. I am reading some essays from students that are applying for scholarships to come to the states for a year and maybe there is some insight in them. All of them talk about how important friends and family are and that loyalty to them is the most important thing in their lives--maybe when I am at the market, I am not one of their own--so there is no loyalty...who knows, but there are days when I wish the market economy would open wider and bring about some understanding of what it means to get "repeat" customers.