Travel to Transnistr-safe at the moment?
Day one is walking day, so fuel up at Coffee Molka, a quirky cafe that doubles as a coffee museum. This is where you can ogle antique presses and grinders while sipping coffee brewed over hot sand – an old Turkish method; make sure to ask for a demo (youtube.com). From here it's a short stroll over to the Army Museum, home to a moving exhibition on repression under the Soviets. The deportations and other crimes committed by Stalin in Moldova are documented in vivid detail through dioramas, collages and sometimes graphic videos.
Most people will have scarcely heard of the republic of Transdniestr, a tiny semi-autonomous region wedged between eastern Moldova and Ukraine. This predominantly Russian-speaking province (or an independent country, depending on your point of view) forcibly split from Moldova in 1992, touching off a civil war that cost up to 700 lives. The split was never formally recognised by the international community, resulting in the formation of one of the world's oddest political entities: a tiny land of scarcely half a million people, yet with its own government, border and currency. What's more, the postwar freeze left intact a fossilised piece of the former USSR. With a quick dash across the Moldovan–Transdniestran line, visitors can revel in hammers and sickles and busts of Lenin that feel straight out of the history books.