See more images of Chisinau
Welcome to the Moldovan Connection website. This website is dedicated to bringing information about a little European country called Moldova to the outside world.
I started this website back in 1997 or 1998 (who will remember now?), when I was on a scholarship at St Bede's School in East Sussex, England. I was confronted with the fact that Moldova is virtually a non-existent country for the most of the [Western] world. People would either ask if it's in Africa (or Asia), or would simply assume that it's Russia. Some would just ask where it is (the best option of the three). So I had a big incentive to actually tell people about Moldova and its people - apparenty Moldova's greatest asset (in economic terms).
Initially this website was more of a testing range for me to try out different Internet technologies as I learned them. As most of the early websites, it was pestering with bright, shiny and useless animated GIF files, had a lot of frames and was done in Microsoft FrontPage editor. I have matured since then, started coding the pages myself, dropped the heavy graphics and frames, trying to focus on the content rather than appearance.
In the most recent move to liven up the website, I even dropped the pages with info about myself. You can only view my blog at the moment, which replaced my "Thoughts" page, liked by many visitors. However, I may restore a page with basic info about myself, as without it the whole website gets an impersonal feel, I think.
So, what is the real purpose of this website? In short: to give Western foreigners an idea about Moldova and its people. Like any country, Moldova is special in its own way. The real trick here is to convey the most truthful image without being too gloomy or too cheesy. I have noticed that while many other websites about Moldova seem to hide the sad truth behind the cliche (but not necessarily wrong) phrases like "Moldova is very beautiful, Moldovan people are very hospitable and Moldovan wine is very good", my website tended to show mostly the downsides. I try now to balance out any bias I might have, but it's not easy.
What I've always tried to do on this website, was to provide the foreigners with the information they would actually like to find about Moldova, not just simply a schoolboy's 1-page report on a Eastern European country called Moldova. I try to focus on what people should expect when coming to Moldova, what to be aware of. Describing the customs and traditions is still on my "to do" list, but, for example, some basic advice has been available for quite some time now.
What I really lack is feedback from the visitors to this website. But for this I need good traffic, and I haven't got to the point where I can promote my website effectively.