About Moldova, what's the ratio of Russian vs Romanian? Did you actually speak Romanian before? I was thinking that if Romanian is widely spoken in Moldova and you knew the language, it might have been more difficult to immerse yourself into Russian as you'd have an "easy way out".
I didn't know Romanian beforehand though, so going with Russian was easy enough. I did work with some other Americans who learned Romanian and didn't have the easiest time in Moldova just speaking Romanian. They would often run into people who only spoke Russian and they had no way to communicate. As a Russian speaker in my two years this happened very rarely to me and then it was usually only people from villages and young kids (even then they were familiar with Russian and I picked up enough Romanian to communicate).
It's a very interesting dynamic in the country between the two languages. It's not as controversial a topic as some people would have you believe. People definitely like hearing Romanian more (for the Romanian speakers), but they are ok with Russian too. I got yelled at one time by a drunk guy on the bus for speaking Russian, but literally everyone else on the bus defended me and the guy I was talking too. They all knew we were Americans based on accent haha. Overall though, it's not that hard to immerse yourself in Russian in Moldova in the bigger cities, but if you already knew Romanian you would have to be disciplined because it is still widely spoken.
Over the last two years I've been immersed in Tagalog, with the help of one introductory book (basic vocab and grammar). Tagalog is easier than French so far because people speak mixed English and Tagalog (Taglish) all the time. I can follow conversations 50% of the time due to context and the odd English word. That's letting me learn organically without really trying. Next step is I need to spend a few minutes per day going over phrases from the http://tatoeba.org/ database.
EDIT: I use French because "Canada", and I use Tagalog because of family.