Saturday, 26 September, was supposed to be one of those thoroughly mundane days: deal with a few things at the house, collect some photographs, sort out the Internet connection and eventually go home.
Of course, once a house renovation is involved, a list containing the words “a few things” should never be trusted.
We are still spending much of our time at Vita’s parents’ house while the work on our own place in central Chișinău continues. So the day began there with a suitably substantial breakfast before we set off for the city, about a thirty-minute drive away.
We had several jobs waiting for us. By the time we finally returned in the evening, the day had somehow accumulated a police stop, another meeting with the contractor, roughly a thousand old family photographs, one failed fibre installation, another Internet contract, Georgian lemonade, two enormous pieces of Napoleon cake and some salt-and-pepper dispensers that very nearly acquired new owners.
Not necessarily in that order.
A roadside interruption
We did not get very far before being stopped by the police.
Apparently the car had been flagged in connection with some speeding offences. The stop itself was slightly strange, although not particularly dramatic. When the officers approached, I simply started speaking English. It quickly became obvious that I was not Moldovan, and the discussion became considerably more complicated from there.
One of the officers spent quite a long time explaining Moldova’s system of fines, penalty points and the possibility of eventually losing the right to drive. Moldova does indeed operate a penalty-point system for traffic contraventions, including speeding, and accumulating enough points can ultimately result in the matter going before a court.
My situation, however, is not entirely standard because I drive using a German driving licence.
I tried to explain that a foreign-issued licence introduces a different administrative question from simply taking a Moldovan licence away from a Moldovan driver. The officer continued explaining that I could lose my licence and that something therefore had to be done.
At that point I deployed one of the more useful techniques available when confronted with a lengthy bureaucratic explanation in a country whose administrative language I do not speak:
the face that says, “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”
A few minutes later, we were allowed to continue.
I still need to understand precisely how any Moldovan penalty points or driving restrictions interact with a German-issued licence. A roadside conversation was certainly not the place where I was going to resolve that question.
Back to the renovation
Eventually we reached the house.
The contractor arrived shortly afterwards because we wanted to discuss yet more work outside. The interior renovation has already generated enough decisions, compromises and unexpected expenses, but the outside of the property also needs attention, and I would rather think about these things properly now than finish the house and immediately discover another collection of jobs waiting for us.
What should have been a relatively short conversation therefore became another couple of hours walking around, discussing what should be done, what should happen first and how the different pieces of work need to fit together.
This has become a familiar pattern during the renovation. Every completed job reveals another dependency. A wall affects drainage. Drainage affects the concrete outside. The concrete affects where other things can eventually be built. Something that initially looks independent usually is not.
By early afternoon we finally escaped.
Bringing the family photographs home
The next task was much more enjoyable: collecting the large batch of old family photographs I had left for digitisation.
There are roughly a thousand photographs in this particular batch, covering an extraordinary span of time. Some of the oldest images date from approximately the 1880s; others come from the twentieth century and continue into the much more recent past.
For me these are not simply old photographs.
They are part of the family-tree project I have returned to after many years. Every photograph is potentially another small piece of evidence: a face, a uniform, handwriting on the reverse, a house, a location, a wedding, a relationship between people, or sometimes merely a clue that only becomes meaningful when compared with something else.
Digitising them is therefore only the beginning. They still need to be cropped, rotated, identified, dated where possible and gradually connected with the people already in the family database. With such a large collection, that will be a project of its own.
But at least the originals were back with us and the digital copies now existed. That was one task successfully removed from Saturday’s list.
The fibre connection that was not coming
Then came the Internet.
We had already been waiting for more than two weeks for fibre Internet to be installed at the house. As someone who works with computers and infrastructure, having a proper fixed connection there is rather more important to me than it might be to somebody who only needs occasional access from a telephone.
So we went to find out why nothing had happened.
The answer was not what we expected.
They told us that they could not deploy fibre to our house.
After more than two weeks of waiting.
There was not much point arguing about it. We needed Internet, so we simply moved to the next provider.
That meant another visit, this time to StarNet. They told us that they could provide fibre to the property, and we were offered a 2.5 Gbps connection.
That sounded considerably better.
The less attractive part was familiar: approximately another two weeks of waiting.
At least this time we had confirmation that the infrastructure could actually reach the house.
By the time that was finished, it was already approaching 16:00. Our supposedly simple Saturday had disappeared remarkably efficiently.
A Georgian discovery
On the way back we stopped at a Georgian restaurant.
This turned out to be one of the better decisions of the day.
I ordered something I had never tried before: Zedazeni Tarragon Lemonade, a Georgian carbonated soft drink flavoured with tarragon. The Georgian name for this style of drink is often rendered as tarkhuna.
The bottle itself already looked interesting: a deep red-and-gold Zedazeni label, Georgian writing and a large illustration of tarragon leaves running down the front.
Then I tasted it.
Very, very, very nice.
It is difficult to compare with the ordinary lemon, orange or cola flavours that dominate most soft drinks. The tarragon gives it a distinctive herbal character, but it remains sweet and refreshing rather than tasting like somebody accidentally carbonated the contents of a spice cupboard.
I have found a new addition to the shopping list.
The table also had a magnificent pair of salt-and-pepper dispensers: two small hand-painted figures in traditional-looking Georgian clothes. One was a moustached man in red, the other a woman in blue with a tall white headdress.
I liked them very much.
Possibly too much.
For a brief moment I was extremely interested in the concept of relocating them from the restaurant to our house.
Bad Andreas.
They remained on the table.
And then came the Napoleon cake
We finished with Napoleon cake.
The important piece of information that nobody had supplied beforehand was the size of the portions.
One slice would comfortably have been enough for two people.
Naturally, we had ordered two.
What arrived looked less like an individual dessert and more like a small cream-and-pastry engineering project. The enormous piece of cake sat in the middle of the plate covered in layers of flaky pastry crumbs while we looked at it and reconsidered some of our earlier decisions.
We managed one.
The second came home with us.
One more visit to the house
After eating, we went back to the house again.
There was still organising to do: cleaning, moving things, deciding where things should be stored and generally trying to create some order while renovation work continues around us.
Anyone who has renovated a house while simultaneously trying to use it will recognise the problem. Nothing has a permanent place because the place where it should eventually live is either unfinished, occupied by tools or waiting for another piece of work to happen first.
Eventually we decided we had achieved enough for one Saturday.
On the way back to Vita’s parents we made one final stop at a local supermarket to buy some wine for what remained of the evening.
At approximately 19:00 we were finally home.
No dramatic achievement. No great milestone in the renovation. Just one of those days composed almost entirely of ordinary things: driving across Chișinău, dealing with police, discussing concrete and construction, collecting old photographs, chasing an Internet installation, eating far too much cake and discovering a Georgian soft drink that I will definitely be buying again.
And, in many ways, these are exactly the days worth recording.
Years from now, the renovation will be finished. The fibre connection will simply be there. The photographs will hopefully be catalogued and attached to names in the family tree. I will probably have forgotten the details of the conversation with the police.
But I suspect I will still remember the Saturday when we went out to deal with a collection of mundane jobs and came home with a thousand pieces of family history, an extra Napoleon cake and a newly discovered enthusiasm for tarragon lemonade.
External research was used only to clarify those factual details; the events, reactions, humour and conclusions described here remain my own.
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