Map of the underground streets at the winery. Famous for their "Str. Merlot" and "Str. Pinot Griot", etc.
One of the wine tasting rooms.
One of the many taverns in the winery.
Yours truly.
In the bus driving down an underground road.
Canning cucumbers for winter.
Buna ziua! I’m starting to notice signs of the summer winding down here in Moldova. For starters, I only have two more weeks of language classes before I have to take the training wheels off and go forth to spread peace and friendship, alone. Also, the delicious fruit is slowly starting to disappear. When I first arrived they were coming out of strawberry season, but the sweet and sour cherries, and the raspberries were in full bloom. After those started fading away the apricots and plums started up; I’m pretty sure I ate my weight in plums everyday from the tree in the backyard, but surprisingly I didn’t get sick from my 20 per day diet. Apples and pears were after the plums, and they might still be going on, but not to the same extent. Then came my favorite season of peaches and watermelon. I found out today though that we should be extremely careful with the watermelons because it’s really easy to get food poising from them, and that we should only buy them from trusted street vendors, Two things strike me as very odd about this recommendation; first, how the hell do you get food poisoning from a watermelon? If you know, please comment at the end of this blog. Second thing I don’t understand, and maybe this will come in time, but how on earth am I supposed to find a trustworthy watermelon vendor? Is this a trial-by-error type of deal and just hope that you don’t get sick, and if not, continue going there? All the street vendors I come across see a big “FOREIGNER” sign painted across my forehead and try to rip me off…is this trustworthy? I asked my host mother about where she buys her fruit, and I was told to just stop off at any stand on the side of the road. This slightly vindicates my skepticism. Now that the peaches have been turned into jam and juice for winter, I have to wait until September and October for the grapes to ripen. I’ve heard this is a great time to be in Moldova, because everyone is very proud of his or her house wine and want you to try it. I picture myself walking through my neighborhood, stopping off at friends’ houses, talking and drinking wine. Wine that fresh tastes more like Welch’s grape juice, and it’s deviously potent.As you can see from the pictures above, I went to the winery in my village yesterday. It’s hard to describe the grandeur of the place because the tour was only the tip of the iceberg. We met a group of Community Development trainees at the fabrica de vin and had to convince our bus driver to drive us on the tour, and because the winery is so big, and they don’t have a tour bus of their own, we had to pay extra for him to agree. Everything is done underground, fabrication, storage, bottling, etc. After driving five kilometers past hundreds of gigantic oak barrels, each containing 10,000 liters of wine, we made it to where all the bottles are stored. I was shocked at how cold and humid it was underground and was really glad I brought a long sleever with me. They said the humidity averages at 85% and the temperature is a constant 12-14 degrees Celsius all year round. Here’s a little caveat for you all: I don’t know why we decided to be such a hardheaded and rebellious culture, but we really should convert over to the metric system; it’s a lot simpler, and the entire world but us uses it.
We did wine tasting at the end of the tour, and needless to say I wasn’t feeling cold after that. It, er, I, got pretty toasty after nine or ten tasting mugs. I felt like a hobbit in Lord of the Rings whenever he orders a beer, and receives a pint, because I was walking around with a large, ceramic mug full of wine. Out of all the wines I tried, I really only liked a couple of them. All the whites were too sweet for my liking, and I’ve had a lot better homemade dry white wines here. I don’t think they broke out the good stuff for us, because on the tour our guide was showing us the vintages celebrities have ordered, and mentioned that the Queen of England orders somewhere around 1,000 to 5,000 bottles of a particular vintage from them every year. When the tour ended we were still about 3 or 4 kilometers away from where we came in, and our tour guide was no where to be found. The bus driver was lost, there was no signs or lights showing us the way out. Full of liquid confidence, I directed the bus driver out of the maze. Surprisingly enough, since I really had no clue where we were and just thought it was funny to be giving directions in Romanian, we ended up successfully making it out without having to turn around.
I ended up getting two bottles of champagne for my host family, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to “make a party” tonight at dinner. This sounds miserable actually because I’m still not up to par from yesterday, and I have a big language assessment tomorrow. C’est la vie, da?
More randomness from Moldova:
Yesterday after I was finishing up a run, I saw a woman herding her five large geese down the main road in town. Curious about this, I stayed back and watched her for about ten minutes waddle her birds down the road, and then up a trail to her house.
I got my hands on a bus schedule for my village after spending countless hours waiting for the bus each day. However, I still spend countless hours aimlessly waiting in the boiling sun for the bus to come. I waited for a trolleybus on Sunday for an hour and forty-six minutes before giving up and jamming myself into a ruteria. Right after we started moving, I saw my trolley out of the corner of my eye making its way down the street.
Everyday I come back from school sweating from my 30 minute walk in 90 degree heat. My host family and I usually bitch about how hot it is with each other, and my host mother always tells me how much better fall is because summer is too hot. We usually have these conversations over big bowls of hot borsht soup and boiling tea.
I almost had a heart attack this weekend when I decided to take four 5 year old girls to get ice cream. We had a mile walk down the main road and twice I was sure one of them was going to get hit by a car going 90 to nothing. I finally decided to play a game and told them to line up and that I was the pappa duck and they had to follow me down the road. To my surprise, it actually worked and I had four giggling little girls following me around for the entire walk, and an hour after we got home.
My outhouse dog is actually a good Moldovan dog. My neighbor's ducks got eaten by a fox, but not ours. They attribute this to the fact that the mutt barks at everything, even his own shadow.
There was a farmer who raised watermelons. He was doing pretty well but he was disturbed by some local kids who would sneak into his watermelon patch at night and eat watermelons. After some careful thought he came up with a clever idea that he thought would scare the kids away for sure. So he made up the sign and posted it in the field. The next day the kids show up and they see this sign. It says, “Warning, one of the watermelons in this field has been injected with cyanide.” So the kids run off, make up their own sign and post it next to the sign that the farmer made. The farmer shows up the next week and when he looks over the field he notices that no watermelons are missing but he notices a new sign next to his. He drives up to the sign which reads, “Now there are two.”
ReplyDeleteMyth: I have heard several people say that watermelon can produce cyanide after being sliced open, that is, that you should not
open one and leave in the fridge for too long (or purchase a half
watermelon that you don't know how long has been halved) because you could get intoxicated.
It certainly does not make sense that watermelons would produce cyanide--they do not contain cyanide, not even in the seeds which are certainly edible. They are roasted and salted for eating in China. In one study looking at the nutrient value, researchers found "The very high proportion of the unsaturated linoleic acid in edible watermelon seed could provide a nutritious new source of the fatty acid used in the reduction of cholesterol and the prevention of arteriosclerosis in humans. In addition, edible watermelon seeds contain significant amounts of the essential amino acids.
I know you can get dysentary from lettuce grown in areas where the ground water is polluted (it being a surface plant and 95% water), but I don't know about the watermelons. As long as you get a whole one which is ripe, I think you should be OK.
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