I noticed something this morning while dropping Viorica off on her way to work. It was nothing spectacular: no new shopping centre, no enormous construction project and certainly nothing that would normally justify stopping to take photographs. The pavement around one of the bus stops had been renovated. More importantly, the bus-stop area itself had been included in the work, and when I looked further along the avenue I realised that this was not an isolated patch. A much longer section of the pedestrian infrastructure was being replaced. This is one of those small changes that I probably would not have noticed as a visitor. Now that I live here and repeatedly drive along the same streets, however, I see Chișinău changing in increments. A road is resurfaced. A kerb disappears and comes back new. An old stretch of asphalt pavement is removed. A bus stop is rebuilt. A few days later, what had looked tired and unmistakably inherited from another era suddenly looks considerably mo...