Zi de zi

Question: What happens when you leave thirty kilos of grapes scattered throughout your room for a month?

Back at site. Bittersweet. It’s nice to be back home, but PST was fun and it was good getting to go to school everyday and be with friends. My Romanian has gotten better, that’s for sure. I find myself not talking as much Romanian, or any language for that matter, some days as I would like when I’m in my village. It is quite easy to amble throughout the day getting by on basic Romanian without getting into any riveting conversations where I explore the depths of my newly acquired linguistic abilities. Sometimes I wish I lived in a smaller village. Take today for instance, I have learned a couple new words here and there (I’ve already forgotten them because I forgot to write them down), but I haven’t really needed to speak much.

Here’s what my day looked like:
7:00am- Woke up, ate breakfast with the fam, and bummed around the house for awhile and finished watching a movie.
9:00am- Went to work for a total of 20 minutes to say hello to my partners and make flash cards. They were speaking Russian to some people that came into the office so I was excluded from that convo.
10:00am- Met with the director of economic development for ten minutes about the grant I translated. Romanian was solely spoken so that was good. He taught me the word “cupici de casa”-house slippers.
10:20am- Went to the piața, bought some pimp cupici de casa. They even have a “P” on them. I was informed that these are necessary in the wintertime. I agree, I haven’t taken them off for hours.

10:30am until 4:00pm- Ate lunch with the fam, then spent four and a half hours scouring the internet, in English, for project ideas in agriculture. Came up with an idea to start seminars about financial planning for rural farmers, the need to collaborate with the mayor’s office with the importance of pastureland management (the mayor’s offices owns the pasture land, and because of poor management practices the land and the livestock are suffering) and developed further ideas about greenhouses and irrigation.
4:00pm till 5:00pm- Went to the gym, only said a couple sentences in Romanian because the dude there speaks Russian.
5:00pm till dinner: Talked even more English to my mom in the states and then found out how to type in Romanian on my Mac.
6:30- 7:30- Dinner. Talked about rabbits in Moldova, got a brilliant idea to start a rabbit farm in my village because the meat is very hard to come by here, and it’s farte scump when you can get it, somewhere around 30 dollars for a big rabbit, yikes!
8:00pm until 8:30- Received a call from a friend back home. More English was spoken.
8:30pm until 10:30- Helped my host mom insulate all the windows here for winter. The whole time we just talked about how cold it gets, how she won’t let me freeze to death, why we need fireplaces when we have gas, etc etc.
10:30- Writing a blog, and of course using more English, and realizing that I am never going to be fluent if I continue at this inadequate rate of Romanian usage. My flash card stack is getting to be as high as Mount Kilimanjaro though.

As you can see, some real captivating stuff, which is making me wonder why I’m writing this in the first place when I just posted something two days ago. I really just wanted to let everyone know about my grapes, err, raisins now in my room…

Fact: Fruit flies outnumber you 1,000,000,000,000 to 1. My host mother looks at them and says, “Oh my God, what are we going to do about these bugs?” and leaves it at that.