One of the things I am increasingly enjoying about living in Chișinău is how an entirely ordinary plan can unexpectedly turn into something much more interesting.
Saturday, 22 August 2026, was a good example.
Our original plan was remarkably simple: have a nice afternoon meal together.
That was it.
Instead, we ended up discovering a surprisingly good restaurant, eating considerably more food than two people had any reasonable need to order, walking across the road to help with the digestion, and finding ourselves watching the European Beach Rugby Championship.
Sometimes Chișinău seems determined to organise our weekends for us.
First, The Gray Goose Garden
We started the afternoon at The Gray Goose Garden, a restaurant on Strada Ghidighici in Chișinău.
I did not arrive with particularly strong expectations. It was simply somewhere we had decided to try.
That made what followed considerably more enjoyable.
The food was genuinely very good.
And then the plates arrived.
They were enormous.
I do not mean slightly larger than expected. We had simply ordered too much food for two people, partly because the portions were substantially more generous than we had anticipated.
There is a point during a meal when you look at the table and realise that enthusiasm during ordering has created a logistical problem for later.
We reached that point.
Fortunately, it was a very pleasant problem to have because the food itself was excellent. The restaurant describes its approach as combining classic techniques with more contemporary ideas, under chef Maxim Budeci, and offers seafood, meat and vegetarian dishes alongside a substantial drinks selection.
What mattered to us was considerably simpler: we enjoyed what was on the table.
Then came another surprise.
The final bill for the two of us was roughly €50.
For a very good afternoon meal, with portions large enough to make us question our ordering strategy, that felt like remarkably good value.
We definitely needed a walk
After that amount of food, immediately getting into the car did not seem like a particularly intelligent idea.
Fortunately, La Izvor Park was just across the way.
So we decided to walk.
There was no sightseeing plan and no particular destination. The objective was mainly digestive: walk around for a while, enjoy the afternoon and persuade our bodies that ordering all that food had not been a catastrophic error of judgement.
Then we noticed that something was happening.
There were people around the Orange Arena, the sand-sports stadium inside La Izvor Park.
We went to investigate.
And, once again, Moldova had a surprise waiting for us.
European rugby — across the road from lunch
It turned out that we had walked directly into the 2026 European Beach Rugby Championship.
Not a local exhibition match.
Not an amateur weekend tournament.
The European championship.
It was taking place in Chișinău on 22 and 23 August, with men's and women's national teams competing at the Orange Arena in La Izvor Park.
Sixteen national teams were involved: eight in the men's competition and eight in the women's competition.
And 22 August — the very afternoon when we happened to walk across from the restaurant — was the opening day.
We had not planned any of this.
We had gone out for lunch.
Rugby brought back another part of my life
For me, the discovery was particularly welcome because rugby is not entirely a random sport in my life.
I became interested in rugby while living in New Zealand.
It is difficult to spend meaningful time in New Zealand without becoming aware of the place rugby occupies in the country's culture. It is much more than another sport on television.
Eventually I became a fan myself.
So when I realised that what was happening in front of us was an international rugby competition, the decision was easy.
We went in.
There was no elaborate preparation, no tickets bought weeks earlier and no carefully selected seats.
We simply entered and watched a few matches.
And it was great fun.
Rugby, but compressed
Beach rugby is obviously rather different from the version of rugby I became accustomed to watching in New Zealand.
The matches are played on sand, with five players per side, and everything feels compressed.
The field is smaller. There are fewer players. Possession changes quickly. There is little time for a spectator's attention to wander because another attack is already developing.
For somebody encountering the beach version casually, it is immediately accessible as a spectator sport.
There is also something inherently entertaining about watching rugby played on sand. Running is harder, changes of direction look more physical, and the reduced playing area keeps the teams constantly engaged with one another.
We stayed for a few matches.
That was enough to turn what was supposed to be a walk after lunch into a proper afternoon out.
We didn't yet know what Moldova was about to achieve
There was also something we could not know while sitting there on Saturday.
The championship continued the following day.
And Moldova went on to have an extraordinary tournament.
The Moldovan women's national team won the European championship for the first time.
They had already been impressive during the group phase, winning their matches against Greece, Estonia and Bulgaria. They progressed through the knockout stage and eventually faced Poland in the final on Sunday.
Moldova won 7–4.
The men's national team also reached the European final. They ultimately lost a close match against Ukraine, 7–5, and finished as European vice-champions.
So the final Moldovan result from the weekend was quite remarkable:
European Beach Rugby Championship Chișinău · 22–23 August 2026 Moldova Women → European Champions → First European beach rugby title Moldova Men → European Vice-Champions Venue → Orange Arena → La Izvor Park → Chișinău
We had unknowingly walked into the opening day of what would become a historic weekend for Moldovan rugby.
And Moldova has been doing this for three years
Researching the event afterwards produced another interesting discovery.
This was not the first time Chișinău had hosted the championship.
It was the third consecutive year that the Orange Arena hosted the European Beach Rugby Championship.
The venue itself is relatively new. The Orange Arena opened in 2020 as Moldova's first dedicated beach-football stadium and has developed into a multipurpose sand-sports venue. It has permanent spectator seating and facilities for teams, officials and events.
That infrastructure is allowing Chișinău to host international competitions that I would not necessarily have associated with Moldova before moving here.
And that is becoming a recurring theme for me.
Another unexpected Chișinău afternoon
I have noticed something about our life here.
We keep stumbling into things.
Not because Chișinău is enormous. It isn't.
Perhaps the opposite is true.
The city is compact enough that things remain accessible. You can have lunch somewhere, walk into the park opposite and discover that an international sporting competition is taking place.
There is very little friction between deciding that something looks interesting and actually going to see it.
That is a quality of life which is difficult to measure.
When people compare cities, they normally compare salaries, rents, transport systems, airport connections, schools, crime statistics or the number of restaurants.
Those comparisons have their place.
But they miss something.
They miss the question of how easy it is to have a good day.
There was no complicated organisation behind our Saturday.
We went to a restaurant.
The food was unexpectedly good.
There was far too much of it.
The bill was about €50.
We walked across to the park because we needed to digest lunch.
There was a European rugby championship taking place.
I like rugby.
So we watched rugby.
That was our afternoon.
The kind of normality I was hoping to find
Perhaps what I like most about afternoons like this is precisely that they are not major life events.
Moving countries inevitably produces months dominated by major questions: residence permits, documents, property, money, bureaucracy and decisions about the future.
But eventually a new country has to stop being a project.
It has to become the place where you simply live.
Where you decide to try a restaurant on Saturday.
Where you eat too much.
Where you walk through a park afterwards.
Where you unexpectedly hear the familiar sounds of a sport you learned to appreciate on the other side of the world.
And where you sit down for a while and watch.
I am beginning to think that this is one of the things I like most about living here.
Where relevant, factual references were checked against the sources listed with this article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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