Day 257 - Hotel Codru Redux

Jim

One of the benefits of moving into Mr. Saitsky's house was having not only our own things around us but also the embassy-provided furmiture. When we moved out of our Hotel Codru suite, Jim moved into it. Until then, he had been in a normal room at the hotel where he slept on the mattress on the floor because the bed wasn't long enough for him not to have his feet hanging over the foot of the bed. So when he had the opportunity to move into the suite, he asked if the furniture could be removed and the embassy furniture moved into it instead. GSO David was initially reluctant to ask the hotel manager as he was certain the hotel wouldn't have space to store it, so he was surprised when the manager agreed. With the embassy furniture in place, Jim transformed the suite.

The ambassador also requested that the hotel furniture be removed and the furniture designated for her official residence be moved into it. That transformation was even more striking. With the furniture in place, she also requested that the china, silver, and crystal be delivered.

When we moved out of Mr. Saitsky's house, we had the embassy furniture moved to the suite that was available, the one below the one we had before, the one GSO David and his wife Susan had just moved out of. As there wasn't room for all of our own household effects, we packed them up and had them moved into one of the rooms in the annex building for temporary storage, just until we could move into the next house we were working to get ready.

Jack, Supervisor of the Cleared
American Guards,
 at our suite at the Hotel Codru

While we still had the Hotel Codru restaurant as an option for meals, we decided to follow Jim's example and transform our bathroom into a kitchen. We had a guest bathroom, so we didn't need more than the tub in the master bathroom. The sink was our water source. We took cheap bookcases from our household effects to cover the toilet and bidet and to serve as cupboards. A third bookcase, modified, became the food prep and cooking surface. Our stove was an electric wok and a sandwich maker, and our oven was a combination microwave and convection oven that I had bought in Germany.

With the wok, the sandwich maker, and the microwave oven, I cooked roasts with potatoes and vegetables for a main course and fruit pastry deserts with bread and sliced fruit sprinkled with sugar and spices cooked in the sandwich maker or cakes baked in the convection oven. A bottle of Moldovan wine completed the meal nicely.

Ambassador Mary Pendleton

We began inviting the craftsmen to our suite for dinner as well as after dinner drinks. With Jim's apartment just upstairs, we had plenty of room to expand.

The ambassador also turned her master bathroom into a kitchen which she used for cooking her own meals. When she hosted representational events in her house, however, she used the Hotel Codru's VIP kitchen staff to prepare and serve the meals. She was eager to use the crested china and crystal to show that she was the President's representative in Moldova.

But when the guests left, she was on her own to clean up. And that she did on her knees next to the bathtub as she had only that or the bathroom sink to wash the dishes.

I always had great respect for Ambassador Pendleton. She lacked the pomp and circumstances that characterized so many other ambassadors I worked for. She was approachable and lacked the oversized ego that I saw so often in the ambassador in Qatar. For example, when the Fluor Daniel staff and the embassy staff got together for a barbecue on the embassy grounds and one of the craftsman asked if she minded if she took a picture with him, she assumed he wanted her to take the picture. She held out her hand for his camera. That gave him the opportunity to put his arm around her to tell her he wanted her to be in the picture with him. She is a very classy lady.