"What do you think of our clothes?"

A young journalist laboring to make conversation in English with me as he accompanied me to his newsroom for a consultation today asked this question.

Well, I fumbled for an answer that was both honest and understandable to a speaker of, as he told me, "intermediate level" English. Well, people seem to pay a lot of attention to their clothing.... er...fashionable. I thought about shocking and wild. He told me that Moldovans spend a large percentage of their income on clothing. Another reporter here, with more English, put it this way: "Oh, the foreign men, they like our women very much."

Moldova has become unfortunately well known as a center of trafficked women, which may be the real proof of this.