Romanian Travel

Travel notes from a late August maxi-taxi ride:

We speed along a two-lane "highway" in southern Moldova and I'm greeted with extensive fields of corn, wheat and sunflowers, which were probably cheery a month ago but now their heads are drooping, exhausted from the summer heat. I could be traveling through the farmland of southern Delaware on my way to my grandmother's house if not for the occasional one room churches of strictly Orthodox architecture.

I pass alternating patches of green with occasional flocks of grazing cows, sheep or goats of various colors. Some fields are chopped up mud, already prepared for fall. Perhaps crops were lost and the land ravaged by the devastating floods or "inundatie" of early summer. We slow as we pass through small villages and hamlets; the only things to break the flat roaming farmland that stretches to where the Carpathian Mountains meet the western sky.