People go to Chisinău, and that’s kinda it, and it’s really not representative of Moldova as a whole.
You cross the border from Romania, and you’re immediately struck by the road turning to cobbles, and the modern street lamps turning into gas lamps. Ox carts bearing peasants in home-sewn clothes trundle by under their burden of hay. A rusted old lada serves as a roadside goose coop. Wattle and daub houses stoop by the dusty road, old men in flat caps sat on a bench by the roses climbing the crumbling wall. It’s like the most remote and rural corners of Transylvania, and then some - it’s still 1924 out there.
The cities - unremarkable, Soviet slop with the usual fistful of monuments and bits of history - but the countryside is the most authentic time warp I have experienced in Europe, and I have been to most of Europe.