I used to have a reoccurring dream that I was a Siamese twin. I don't think it would be that bad...
***********************************************************************************Happy holidays to everyone reading this, be it a Kyrgyzstani celebrating your Independence Day from the USSR, a Malaysian celebrating Merdeka Day, or a Moldovan celebrating National Language Day. August 31 here is the national holiday when Moldova switched over from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. Besides an all day concert going down in Chisinau, I’m not sure what the Moldovans are doing to celebrate. I spent the day recuperating from the four previous days of feasting, celebrating, and being gluttonous. I’ll go over some highlights mai tirzui, or “more later” for you Romanian challenged folks. I first want to start of this blog wishing students everywhere good luck with your semesters. It feels really strange for me not to be gearing up for classes, doing last minute scheduling changes, and getting psyched for football season.
Life here is going, for the most part, well. I have settled in nicely with my new host family. I thought it was going to be a difficult adjustment going from my PST host family with lots of kids around, to it simply being my new host mom and sister in Telenesti, but there is always extended family coming over and lots of surprise, at least for me, parties that my h. mom throws. The food here is pretty good, nothing fancy, lots of salami, potatoes, soup, bread, cheese, and cabbage, but I’m not hard to please and I’m sticking to my guns that I’ll try anything once (The PC medical office would probably cringe to hear me say that, sorry Illiana). Work has been a tad stagnant lately, and since my partner is having back problems I have been opening and closing the office. Remember the guy that came in a week or two ago that wanted to immigrate to Canada? Well he’s back, except this time he doesn’t have any forms for me to fill out. He is about 65 years old, skinny as a rail, and has a big, dark mustache, and the most important detail as of lately, shirtless. This dude is priceless. He comes barging up into my office wearing the biggest grin on his face and trousers up to his belly button, and shakes my hand. Before I could even ask why he wasn't wearing a shirt, he goes off into this whole spiel about how the floor that our offices are located on is a furnace in the summer, and a refrigerator in the winter. I’ve gotten used to his lack of attire now seeing that he has done this three or four times, and am becoming immune to the fact that I have a shirtless old man chilling in the chair pulled up to my desk either talking to me, or if I’m busy, reading a pamphlet about agriculture or economic development. Truth be told, I’m a little jealous, because it can get a little hot up there. Soon enough though I’ll be freezing my you-know-whats off dreaming of the warm, sunny days of August.
Tomorrow I go back to work, but like I said I have had the previous four days off, as well as today, so a nice five day stretch without seeing my scrawny-shirtless friend at the office (Picture the naked guy in the movie Waking Ned Divine, now put a black mustache on him, BINGO), anyways I’ll move off him and recount my holidays. Thursday was Moldova’s Independence Day. I knew that they gained their independence from the USSR in 1991, but whenever you have a limited vocabulary in a foreign language you take what you can get, so I asked multiple people about the holiday. I was pretty shocked that some gave me the wrong years- 1990, 1992, and one guy even told me they were celebrating their independence from Germany in 1945. Riiiggghhhtttt. There wasn’t much going on that day in the village, my host mother told me that there was a celebration in the center at 10am, and I made it down there for 10:20, which should have been either right on time here, or still early. Either the celebration never happened, or by an act of God it had occurred on time because I didn’t see any celebration, but I’m putting my money on the former because 20 minutes seems like a really short time to celebrate Independence Day.
Friday was, from what I gather, the closest thing to the birthday of the village. I knew we were going to be going down to the center for a concert that started at 9pm (in reality it was kicked off at 10:30). I was trying to get a nap in so I would be well rested for the festivities when my host mom knocked on my bedroom door around 2:30 and asked if she could put a table in my room. I thought she was just rearranging, nothing new because she has been cleaning and rearranging like a madwoman for days now (In retrospect I should have picked up on this foreshadowing because what does it mean when people get their houses clean as whistle?…Company). No sooner than she had deposited a table in my bedroom, I was seated at it with 15 guests staring at me probably wondering why I looked like I had just rolled out of bed. You know how your brain doesn’t function immediately after a nice slumber? I was doing my best at small talk, but the words just weren’t coming to me. It was a pretty awkward situation. But after seven and a half hours of eating and drinking, I was back to fine form. Actually we all were, you should have seen us all trying to make our way down to the center for the concert, it was a train wreck. The concert was held in front of my office building, and before the show got kicked off we went inside because my h. mom had to use the internet. The next thing I know, eight girls ranging in ages from 16 to 25 came barging in the office and start changing clothes. It was like Christmas came early, but before I could appreciate my surroundings, two guys came in and started talking to me about the girls and how they were the bands that were performing tonight. My American status definitely scored some celebrity points, and I was able to take in a lot of the concert backstage with the performers, mayor, and other VIPs-yeah, that’s how I roll. After the concert ended somewhere between 12 and 1, the girls wanted to know what I thought, if they would do well in America, if I wanted to go out and celebrate with them, etc. The 16 year olds, god this sounds awful, were really hott, but it weirded me out that their entire concert was a striptease and I’m sure many guys that night went to sleep with really impure, improper, and illegal thoughts conjured up from the temptresses tweens. I’m not sure mainstream America is quite ready for them. Give it two years and they’ll be breaking the hearts of every pimple-faced American boy.
This is a disclaimer for my mother. I know you internalize my struggles here, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your willingness to hear out my problems, and try to be there for me. However, I know that you can get worked up over some of the events and emotions going on with me right now, so you can either skip to the paragraph below this one, or you can read on, just understand that I’m having the time of my life right now, no matter all the ups and downs that come along with it. With that being said, I took a day trip to visit friends in the 2nd largest city in Moldova, Balti. I somehow managed to make it out of bed for 7 the morning after the concert and on a bus 30 minutes later for the hour ride north. It was really nice getting to see friends and we ran into several other PCVs. Balti is a really nice city, except they only speak Russian there so it was fun making my friend Dave order for me at restaurants (although slightly emasculating, but I was really impressed with his Russian skills). I ended up taking an “illegal” bus back at the end of the day. These are the vans that are parked kind of close to the bus station that are direct routes straight to Chisinau, and are considered illegal because they aren’t state owned and don’t pay the $5 entrance fee to get into the bus station. I’m pretty sure the mafia has this market cornered. I asked the driver how much it was to go only half the distance to Chisinau, dropping me off on the side of the highway in a village about ten miles from mine, since my village isn’t on the route. I could have sworn he said 15 lei, and considering that it cost me 20 lei to go from my village to Balti, I thought that was fair. Half way into the trip, one of the mafia minions started collecting the money, and that’s when I started running into problems. Instead of it being 15 lei, it was really 50 lei, and of course, I only had 30 some odd lei on me. Man! I hate getting yelled at in Russian and was pretty sure they were going to kick me out of the van right then and there in the middle of nowhere. But for some reason, the gods smiled down upon me and they didn’t kick me out, I was just yelled at in a strange language and given dirty looks for the rest of the trip. Once we got to the village I needed to get dropped off at, the crony collecting the money let me out, gave me some lovely parting obscenities detailing how I need to go back to America, and planted a fist firmly in my stomach. It’s a strange feeling to be doubled over trying to catch your breath on the side of a highway, in the pitch dark, nowhere close to your own village, with no money, in a foreign country. I had the choice of either walking back and arriving home around 5am, or try hitching it back with no money. The way it works here is that you give the same amount of money to the driver willing to pick you up, as you would have spent for a bus or rutiera. So to keep a short story short, I found a ride after only thirty minutes of waiting, and luckily the guys were very hospitable and said they wouldn’t have accepted money even if I had any.
Yesterday I thought I would be lounging and was really appreciating the fact that I was in bed at 10:30 in the morning drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book. That didn’t last long though and after an hour or so my phone started ringing and I was off to meet up with another PCV that lives in a village not too far from mine who was in my village for the day. I had never met her and she has been here for 18 months so I wanted to see what she thought about our raoin. The next thing I know I’m sitting at an internet café with the PCV and two Moldovans helping to plan a leadership conference for high schoolers this up coming Saturday. I’m not opposed to helping out because I really want to, I’m just afraid that me leading one of the groups will take away from the kids’ experience because I don’t feel fully capable with the language yet. We’ll see how it goes….
After that I made it home, and again wasn’t informed that we were having guests, and that we would be making a party in my room. I don't really mind that we have it thre, and it makes sense because I have by far the biggest room in the apartment. I just wish I had some kind of warning for these events. All in all it was a lot of fun, and it was kept really informal. One of the lady consultants that I work with at ACSA came over with her 20-year-old daughter, and we ate, drank, and talked for a good couple of hours. The lady I work with and my h. mom got pretty giggly by the end, and some of the stuff they were saying was cracking me up (If anyone wants to marry at 55 year old Moldovan woman, who has the heart of gold, and the teeth to match it, let me know). It was also nice to get to interact with a Moldovan around my age, and even though she was making fun of me most of the time about, well, everything, it was still nice to get to hang out.
September is almost upon us, and today is the first day I sought out a pair of sweatpants to wear around the crib. Its nicely chilly at night and in the morning, but I know that with this weather also comes rain. I’ve been dreading the winter, but I’ve always liked fall in the past so we’ll see what’s it’s like here. I’ll leave you all with a quote that I like about this time of the year, and it does a nice job describing my village.
“The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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