Remember what I have mentioned about unpredictability? This Friday everything seemed to be “normal”. I walked around the village, shot the breeze with a couple people, had a meeting with the director of the school, went to tutoring, and had a nice dinner. After 8 o’clock I’m pretty much in the clear for unexpected adventures, and I like to talk with my host family, read a book, or pop in a movie; I live in a village and the discotech here isn’t really my thing (big room, no bar, big groups of 14 year olds). Anyways, it was about 10 pm, I had just finished going over my day’s language lesson and was looking forward to finishing Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. I heard the doorbell ring and could tell right away from the voices that it was my neighbor, Igor the bus driver. I first met him at the funeral party I went to on my site visit to Telenesti. He is a jovial sort of man that loves to ramble away in Russian forgetting that I only know Romanian. He is a classic repeater. Some people here will be talking to you, then when they can see that they’ve lost you, or a word has stumped you, they will try a different approach to the conversation, and hope that you know a synonym of the word they are trying to get across. This seems to be the most practical method, at least for me. However, there are others, the repeaters, that will repeat the word over, and over, and over, hoping that somehow after ten times of hearing the word, the meaning will suddenly make sense to you. The best part is that people won’t simply repeat the word, but they get louder each time. This seems to be a classic universal mistake, and at first it’s frustrating because you want to tell them that you aren’t deaf or stupid, you just haven’t learned the word yet in the four months you’ve been in the country. If I feel the situation at hand is informal enough, I will shout back at them “NU INTELEG ACEEA CUVENT”- I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WORD. Works like a charm, and you can see the wheels turning trying to come up with a new way to explain what they are talking about instead of writing you off as the linguistically challenged foreigner. Anyways, old Igor the bus driver, came over to tell me, against my host mothers wishes, that I was to go night fishing with him and his buddy Viscile. I had to get up early the next morning to help a family harvest grapes, but Igor the bus driver wouldn’t have it any other way, we were going fishing.
Twenty minutes later, sitting in the soft mud next to a large pond used to water the local cows, sheep, and goats, we had poles in hand and lines in the water. It’s been quite sometime since I’ve been fresh water fishing, and I was trying to explain that the kind of fishing I do back home is pretty far from what we were doing. Finally after freezing my tail off for about an hour and a half with nothing to show for it except a stomach full of fresh goat cheese and wine, we decided to pack it in. I’m pretty sure there aren’t even fish in the pond, but all in all I really enjoyed the camaraderie of sitting on the bank, listening to stories about Soviet times, and taking in the dark landscape only barely visible from the sliver of the moon peaking through the clouds and the orange glow of Igor the bus driver’s cigarette.
The next morning at 6:45 I was roused out of bed, again by Igor the bus driver. To make up for our fruitless labors the night before he came bearing gift of fish sandwiches. Nothing like waking up to the day with a cup of coffee, and rich, oily canned fish paste spread over a slice of bread. Surprisingly enough, that was the second time in ten days to have fish paste sandwiches for breakfast, and I am really starting to enjoy them.
After a couple hours working my magic with sheers on grape vines, the family I was helping decided to call it a day. I forgot to bring my camera, but I’m sure there will be more photo ops to see me in action, don’t worry. After saying goodbye and promising I would come back to help make wine, I walked to the main road near their farm, and instead of hitching back to my village, I found myself getting on a bus to Chisinau going the opposite direction. My host family would be gone all weekend, and I really didn’t feel like sitting at home by myself. An hour and a half later, after a nice cat nap induced by the warmth of 50 people in roughly the size of a cardboard box with no open windows, I made it into the capital. I picked the right weekend to go in because 3/4ths of PC Moldova was in town for the weekend. I spend the weekend bumping around the big city, grabbing snacks in the piata, enjoying the weather on the terrace of a local bar, and jamming out to a great cover band that our Safety and Security Officer for PC plays the harmonica in. Sunday morning, I was able to lethargically lounge around PC headquaters watching ESPN, trying to find the energy to make it to the auto Gara de Nord (North Bus Station) and head back home. Next weekend I’ll be back in the capital for two days of language lessons, and soon it will be Wine Fest in October kicked off with a 10K road race that I’m looking forward to. In the mean time, I’ve got a case of the Monday’s and I really need to get up and go to work. Multi ani si success aceasta saptamâna, paka paka.
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