56. Circus

One interesting things about Chisinau is that 20 years ago they built a building totally dedicated to circuses. My host brother-in-law said that he use to go to the circus a lot as a child. It was very tall and a lot of acrobatics could be done very high in the air.

Unfortunately, the circus building has fallen into disrepair and hasn’t been used for more than a few years. So as you can see from the picture above, the circus took place in a tent in front of the old circus building.

I with my pre-service training host family (the family I stayed with my first two months of language and technical training) went to the circus in Chisinau. It was a circus from Kiev, Ukraine and was in Chisinau for a couple months. It was a pretty small circus, it was outside under a tent and they had clowns, muscular men who did some pretty interesting acrobatics, animal trainers with raccoons, monkeys, miniature horses, baboons, cats, dogs, llamas, lions, tigers and bears (o, my). While there was little speaking, when they did it was in Russian, but the clowns did speak English a little (mostly, “Ladies and gentlemen”).

It was the best circus I’ve been too so far. But the only one I’ve been to was 10 years ago at the Delaware County (Ohio) fairgrounds. The best part of this circus was watching my host sister and her daughter jump/react to things going on during the show.