Instead of pondering what does your holiday reading say about you, how about finding reading that says something about your holiday?
En route to Moldova I have been reading 'The Geography Of Bliss'. One grumpy man's search for the World's happiest country as the tag line has it.
After asking the Dutch, Swiss and Icelanders why they were so happy (tolerance, chocolate and a lack of envy, wild drunkeness at the weekends and a tolerance of creative risks being the answers), the author decided to head to the Worlds unhappiest country... Moldova. I reached this chapter a couple of days before my own arrival and finished it the day I crossed the border into Europe's least wealthy and least happy country.
Now finding out you were about to head into the World's least happy land might make some people depressed themselves. But the fact is that the two countries that always help Moldova make up the world's most miserable trio are apparently Romania and Ukraine... my other destiniations on this break. My week in Romania had not been that miserable. Perhaps Bonnie Tyler singalongs and lots of bad jokes made Romania seem happier than it is!
Chisinau the capital is a leafy place with lovely graceful 19th Centry architecture in it's own part of the city grid and the grandiose former headquarters of the Moldovan Soviet Communist Party firmly in another. I came across some happy old people dancing to an accordion. As I sat and had lunch in a cafe with two other backpackers I met on the train, most people who strolled past us on their Sunday walk had a smile on their face.
The reasons for the unhappiness in Moldova (the lack of trust between people and the lack of perceived control over their own destiny) were not I suppose something I was likely to encounter on a 24 hour flit through the capital though.
En route to Moldova I have been reading 'The Geography Of Bliss'. One grumpy man's search for the World's happiest country as the tag line has it.
After asking the Dutch, Swiss and Icelanders why they were so happy (tolerance, chocolate and a lack of envy, wild drunkeness at the weekends and a tolerance of creative risks being the answers), the author decided to head to the Worlds unhappiest country... Moldova. I reached this chapter a couple of days before my own arrival and finished it the day I crossed the border into Europe's least wealthy and least happy country.
Now finding out you were about to head into the World's least happy land might make some people depressed themselves. But the fact is that the two countries that always help Moldova make up the world's most miserable trio are apparently Romania and Ukraine... my other destiniations on this break. My week in Romania had not been that miserable. Perhaps Bonnie Tyler singalongs and lots of bad jokes made Romania seem happier than it is!
Chisinau the capital is a leafy place with lovely graceful 19th Centry architecture in it's own part of the city grid and the grandiose former headquarters of the Moldovan Soviet Communist Party firmly in another. I came across some happy old people dancing to an accordion. As I sat and had lunch in a cafe with two other backpackers I met on the train, most people who strolled past us on their Sunday walk had a smile on their face.
The reasons for the unhappiness in Moldova (the lack of trust between people and the lack of perceived control over their own destiny) were not I suppose something I was likely to encounter on a 24 hour flit through the capital though.
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