topum

So I am back in London. Yeah, the New Year is way bigger in Moldova than Christmas when it comes to non-church stuff from what I have seen (and drank).

One of the towns not far from the village where we were based in Moldova is getting ready for some serious New Year celebrations in their central square where their Christmas market is. None other than Boney M themselves will be on stage singing jingle bells to the people on the 31st around midnight (among the busy line up of more "regionally famous" bands and singers). I understand they are still wildly popular in the former Soviet Union (one of their leading dudes even died in St Petersburg I was told).

You see, the mayor of this town is a twenty-something Israeli billionaire (yeah I know) who is married to a Russian popstar (this is Moldova, baby!) ten years his senior and who is currently under a house arrest because of the ongoing investigation into the theft of one billion dollars of EU loans from the Moldovan banking system (for Moldova it is huge) in which he apparently was heavily involved and some very damning phone recordings have been released to support it.

So to cheer up the people in the town he reigns over (probably one of the poorest towns in Europe, the country is the poorest in Europe after all) he decided to throw a really good party for them. I kinda get it I have to say. Everything is so completely fucked and there is no hope for even a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel whatsoever that "fuck this, let's drink and party" is not a bad choice at this stage.

Here is the mayor's wife, Russian pop diva Jasmin with Putin for no reason really except that a little bit of Putin is a must for any conversation these days and everything in the world apparently is because of him so I thought he should be here as well (everything is more fun with Putin!).



And here is Jasmin with her husband who is the mayor and apparently a huge Boney M fan:



Yeah, fur and leopard print are mandatory there if you want to "make it".

And to top it off, let's hear the first lady of our provincial town sing, shall we?



Still has quite a bit to go to touch Carla Bruni but then this is not Paris either.

So if Brexit and now the results of the world's most important election were not enough to make Vladimir Putin ecstatic, the world's least important election (I talked about it here) has just ended with the pro-Russian candidate beating the pro-EU candidate solidly (by ten percent of the votes). Igor Dodon (I took a picture of him here) is the president-elect of Moldova. He ran under the "Re-establish and strengthen our relations with Russia" slogan.

Well if that is not enough, then in Bulgaria, an actual EU member, the pro-Russian air force commander general Rumen Radev is now winning the election too.



And if that is not enough too, in Ukraine the very famous heavily pro-US former president of Georgia (a huge Putin's adversary) who was appointed by the new pro-west Ukrainian president the mayor of Odessa has resigned with much noise and heavy condemnations towards the Ukrainian new pro-west government, accusing it of corruption and everything else basically.

Seriously, it could not get better for Vladimir Putin. I bet he has the tears of the US protesters and media collected for him by the undercover KGB agents and flown to Moscow on fighter jets for him to bath in in his gold bath tub probably designed by the same Italian designer to the rich who gold leafed Donald Trump's penthouse.



We fucked up. Many people seem to have stopped voting for our message all over the world. I think I could agree with Seth MacFarlane quite a bit:



As much as I find the protests going on in the US ridiculous, I could still be this guy right now (the only protester in NYC who made sense to me):