Smokestacks and a Trolleybus

From my father's kitchen in Chisinau it is ninety minutes and one unrecognized border to Tiraspol, and I have finally done it: crossed into the country that officially does not exist. The first frame the place offered was perfect and I took it: a trolleybus older than my mother groaning past under working smokestacks.

Transnistria kept what everyone else dismantled: the industry, the iconography, the trolleybuses. Walking past that bus I had the sensation this whole region keeps giving me in miniature: the past here is not preserved, it is simply still employed.

Papa declined to come along, with commentary. More on the paperwork of nonexistent countries, and on everything else, in the coming days. This place will need several posts. It has been waiting fifty years; it can structure a week.