Sunday is traditionally supposed to be a day of rest.
Apparently nobody involved with our current life in Moldova has been informed of this.
After yesterday's expedition around Chișinău, I could quite happily have spent today doing very little. The renovation, however, continues to generate decisions, shopping lists and things that need to be investigated, while family life produces another collection of tasks entirely. One practical difference I continue to appreciate in Moldova is that Sunday does not necessarily mean putting everything on hold. Shops, supermarkets, restaurants, shopping centres and many other businesses remain open, so if Saturday's list survives Saturday, there is still a reasonable chance of attacking it again the following morning.
And our list definitely survived Saturday.
Birthday season has arrived
The first part of the morning was devoted to birthdays. Viorica's birthday is tomorrow, but by one of those interesting pieces of family scheduling, her mother's and father's birthdays also fall during the same week. Three birthdays, three members of the same family, all compressed into a few days. September is therefore not an especially economical month around here.
Today we were concentrating on her mother's birthday and needed to find a few things before visiting the supermarket. There was no great drama involved, just the normal sequence of driving, stopping, looking, discussing and occasionally remembering something else that should have been on the list in the first place.
We did at least begin properly. Before tackling the serious work, we stopped at Andy's for a nice English breakfast. I am increasingly convinced that bacon, eggs and coffee constitute perfectly respectable logistical preparation for shopping, particularly when the shopping is likely to continue for several hours.
Andy's also happens to serve breakfast until midday at weekends, which fits our Sunday operating model considerably better than establishments that expect me to have completed breakfast by some unreasonable hour of the morning.
Breakfast finished, supermarket completed, we moved on to the next objective.
Furniture.
Welcome to CreatorMall
We have obviously been looking at a great deal of furniture recently. The apartment renovation is reaching the stage where decisions that were once theoretical are becoming very physical. Eventually rooms need beds, tables, chairs, sofas, cupboards and all the other objects required to turn a renovated building into somewhere people can actually live.
So we went to CreatorMall.
I knew it was a furniture shopping centre. What I had not properly appreciated was the scale of the place.
It is enormous.
CreatorMall describes itself as Moldova's largest furniture store. It opened in 2013 and today occupies around 6,000 square metres, bringing together dozens of brands and manufacturers under one roof. There are sofas, beds, dining tables, chairs, wardrobes, kitchens, carpets, curtains, lighting, mattresses and assorted interior items spread across a very large commercial space.
The photographs probably explain it better than I can. From some positions, the building looks less like a conventional furniture shop and more like an indoor neighbourhood in which every resident owns several sofas.
The variety was impressive. One section would be dominated by modern furniture in pale neutral colours and clean lines; a few metres further on there would be substantial classical wooden pieces, elaborate bedrooms and large upholstered sofas. Elsewhere were dining sets, carpets, mattresses and custom furniture. The shops flow into one another, so walking through the building becomes a continuous sequence of completely furnished imaginary homes.
For somebody renovating a property, this should theoretically be ideal. Instead of driving across Chișinău from one furniture shop to another, we could compare a substantial part of the local market without leaving the building. CreatorMall itself presents exactly that as one of its advantages: many manufacturers and product categories gathered together to save customers time.
There was only one problem.
It gave Viorica far too many options.
The paradox of choice arrives in our renovation
I watched the process develop with some amusement. A piece of furniture would look interesting, so we would stop. Then another one would look interesting. Then something completely different would introduce a possibility that had apparently not existed five minutes earlier. Colours changed. Styles changed. Materials changed. The imagined room changed with them.
My lovely bird gradually became lost in a forest of sofas, tables and bedroom furniture.
This is not really criticism. In fact, I understood the problem perfectly. When there are only three reasonable options, choosing between them is relatively straightforward. When there are thirty, the first decision is no longer simply whether you like something. You also have to wonder whether something even better is waiting fifty metres further into the building.
And at CreatorMall, fifty metres further into the building there is almost certainly another sofa.
We continued looking. There were things we liked, things we immediately rejected and things that produced the dangerous sentence, “Maybe we should think about this one.” After enough repetitions of that process, it became obvious that buying something simply because we happened to be standing beside it would be a bad idea.
So, after visiting what is officially the largest furniture store in Moldova, surrounded by thousands of square metres of things specifically designed to be purchased, we achieved something rather impressive.
We bought absolutely nothing.
I consider this a significant act of financial discipline.
Another part of Chișinău I had not seen
There was also a familiar element to today's experience. Since moving here, and especially since beginning the renovation, I keep discovering businesses and places in Chișinău that I simply did not know existed. Port Mall surprised me with its scale and modernity. The specialist cheese shop surprised me with its European selection. Yesterday I was comparing residential Internet connections running at several gigabits per second. Today I discovered that Moldova has an entire mall dedicated principally to furniture and home interiors.
CreatorMall itself is not new. It opened more than a decade ago, so this is not evidence that Chișinău suddenly acquired a giant furniture centre while I wasn't looking. It is evidence that I am still learning the city. Living somewhere is very different from visiting it, and renovating a home forces you to discover an entirely different layer of the local economy.
As a visitor, I looked for restaurants, parks, museums and interesting places. As somebody trying to finish a home, I now know where to investigate lighting, tiles, kitchens, doors, Internet connections, mattresses and approximately seventeen thousand varieties of sofa.
I am not sure this represents cultural integration, but it is certainly integration of some kind.
Sunday evening, decisions postponed
By the time we left, the apartment was no more furnished than it had been when we arrived. Nevertheless, the visit was useful. We now know what is available, we have a better idea of styles and price ranges, and we can return once we have narrowed the requirements instead of trying to design several rooms while standing in the middle of a furniture mall.
This is probably the sensible way to do it. Measure first. Decide what each room actually needs. Agree on dimensions, colours and broad style. Then return with enough constraints to reduce the number of possible answers.
Whether we will actually behave this rationally is another question.
For now, another Moldovan weekend is almost over. Saturday brought multi-gigabit Internet offers and a Georgian hat. Sunday brought an English breakfast, birthday shopping and six thousand square metres of furniture from which we successfully purchased nothing.
Tomorrow is Viorica's birthday.
I am hoping birthdays involve less decision-making than sofas.
Factual information about CreatorMall was checked against the mall's official published information. The descriptions of our visit, our shopping decisions, the renovation and the family birthday preparations are based on my own experience, and the final selection, interpretation, humour and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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