Through Transnistria

We stopped here for a day because it was on the way, and it is the day the journey started to feel like one.

The station is enormous, Soviet, and at ten in the morning completely empty — not quiet, empty, because four trains leave all day and the next one is in four hours. Outside it, a market selling everything: clothes, soap, screws, floppy drives, and more working Nokia 3310s than Nokia ever needed to reissue.

Breakfast at Nota Bene, which looked better on the menu than on the plate and had fast wifi and a socket at every table, so we stayed two hours anyway. The park, some acrobatics, the famous fountain. Craft beer at Smokehouse on the way back.

Then, waiting for the 23:30 to Kiev, the realisation of why the slow route had been the plan from home: the fast one goes through Transnistria. We read about it on the platform, which is the wrong place to read about it.

Every carriage has its own attendant. Ours was Natalya, who spoke no English at all — not one word — took my passport away to show a colleague, and came back still laughing.

We were the only passengers in the entire carriage. She made us tea, and pointed at the toilet paper with her arms crossed: нет.

Kolja met us outside a Soviet-era block and sent us up in the smallest lift either of us has stood in, taking the stairs himself.

Then the roof — the actual roof of a twelve-storey building, no rail, no hatch cover to speak of — where he jumped between buildings while we stood very still and looked at the city.

Saint Sophia's Cathedral, the Monastery of the Caves where people kiss the coffins for luck, the park, the cable car. Dinner at Pervak. Eurovision was in town, which explained the crowds on the main street.

Two days, and then an Uber to the station that cost almost nothing.

By now the ritual is familiar: the attendant's tea glass clinking on its saucer, the beds made for us, the stern instructions we half understand.

A full train, both of us in top bunks, asleep before we had finished talking about it.