Sun with teeth

Walking through town
Edge of the park

Dude shoveling the snow in front of the "White House"

Going to the ATM

Dog looking miserably cold in front of the milk stand.

Shot of the main street in my village.

People are waiting at the designated hitchhiking spot on the edge of the village.

The road to Balti.

Behind the old wine factory. This path leads to my apartment building.

Pasture covered in snow. All the sheep went home for winter.

Peace.

We have one snow plow in town.

Dashing through the snow.

Road to the future.

Lumps of snow.

Typical moldovan house

Factory shot

Badass russian car

Snowmen are for suckers

Well, it’s official- It’s cold, and I don’t mean “Oh I’ll grab a jacket and a beanie” kind of cold. I went for a walk yesterday and was worried about every piece of unexposed skin getting frostbite. Last night it dipped down to about 0 degrees F, and tonight it’s supposed to get a lot colder. Something to look forward to I guess.

While walking yesterday (it started out as a run, but it was impossible to run in two and a half feet of powder) I got the urge to build a snowman. Being from the south, this was the first time I had ever attempted such a feat. In hindsight, it was a bad idea because I now feel completely worthless and couldn’t even shape a snowball larger than a softball. I’m going to blame my shortcomings on the unstickiness of the snow, rather than my intelligence. I must have watched too much Charlie Brown as a kid, because I even resorted to hiking up a large hill and trying to roll the snowball down to amass a larger ball. That didn’t work, and I felt about as confused as a baby in a stripe club because this was one method that I was sure would work seeing that in every cartoon the giant snowball eats up everyone in it’s path while rolling down the mountain. I'm going to try again in a couple days, but in the meantime I'm going to do a little research on how to build snowmen. For now, it's Moldova 1, Neal 0 (I just found a store in my village that sells fireworks ALL YEAR LONG, so I've got a feeling the score will even out soon enough).

I’m trying not to turn this blog post into a rant, but I’m getting tired of the short days as well. It gets dark at 4pm! Whoever came up with Daylights Savings Time was a real genius. I would much rather sun later in the day than in the morning when I don’t need it. For some reason, I feel like I’ve heard that it was implemented for farmers, but I can tell you without a doubt there is no farming going on here. It will be nice once the Winter Solstice is here, and the days will actually start getting longer instead of shorter.

I was supposed to go visit Vince’s village and stay with him and a couple of our friends for the weekend, but I’m snowed in. Earlier today I watched as several cars attempted to make their way down the main road in my village. It reminded me a lot like ping-pong and I’m really glad I didn’t own a car that was unfortunate enough to be parked alongside the road at that time. One car literally bounced its way down the entire road hitting about 10 parked cars in the process. After seeing the cars get crunched, I’m not willing to jeopardize my life by riding in a three-hour rutiera ride on icy roads to the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Next week the temperature is supposed to warm up, and my host mother told me that all the snow will turn into mud and it’s not going to be pretty. I was a little upset about this, mainly because I don’t want to be slugging through knee-deep mud everywhere, but also because it would be nice to have a white Christmas for the first time in my life. But then I realized that if the weather keeps up like this, and I get stuck in Moldova and can’t fly to Turkey on time, I would be pissed. Capital P. Melt that snow and ice, get the runway clear, I’m ready for a little break; besides, it doesn’t even feel like Christmas. I haven’t heard one Christmas carol or seen any decorations. Not that this is such a huge disappointment to me- it is actually quite nice to get away from the commercialization of holidays. I know this is a weird place to end the blog, but it’s getting quite nippy in here and I’m going to feed the fire. Take care.

Blizzard

Moldovan garden in the winter

Downtown Telenesti

Center of town

Small park near my work

My office building

Wild dog

House around the corner from me.

This is my street

In front of my apartment building

My apartment building's well

View from my window

As you can see, it's officially winter here now. A storm came through a day or two ago and the snow has yet to relent. Everyone seems frisky with the new weather, and I must admit it definitely makes the landscape more beautiful. I took a run in the blizzard yesterday, and let me assure you that's a lot easier said than done. The temperature is supposed to get down to -15 F this weekend so hopefully I won't be frozen solid and can put up another blog post. I'm making some chili right now so I am cutting this short and just putting up pictures.

What else can we deep fry?

Buna diminasta! I hope everyone is doing well and fully appreciating your central heating and fireplaces (or warm weather if you are fortunate enough). As I’m writing this, I am sitting here huddled in my room with two pairs of wool socks on, a beanie, sweats and long johns while drinking a cup of hot tea and I’m still cold. I would have a heater that Peace Corps supplies for us, except they gave me a monster that wants to burn down my apartment, so rather than start an electrical fire and set the place ablaze, I will wait for the soba (fireplace) we have on the 5th floor do it for me.

I was walking to the main road this morning to hitchhike to my village and was taking in the full beauty of the place- the green rye grass in the fields with horses briskly running around, the giant hill in front of me with tilled, dark earth and while doing this I managed to find the ONLY patch of ice on the road and did a very gracious skid with arms flailing almost taking out a baba walking in front of me. She turned around, looked me front head-to-toe and back, and muttered “Be careful boy”. Point well taken; I know out of everyone I would be the one to end up breaking an arm while walking. Soon enough it will be time to get the Yak-Traks out.

This weekend my raion mates and I threw a Deep South Bash in a Northern Village party for our fellow Ag’s and COD’s. Toumil, who lives in the next village over from me that has been here for 22 months now, has three houses on her host family’s compound where we were able to accommodate everyone. Friday night everyone came in and we rolled out a huge Tex-Mex feast that included tacos, quesadillas, salsa, wild rice, fried onions, pickles, and jalapenos that I am guessing was well received because there wasn’t a speck of food left over. After we spent the evening doing some taste testing of the local wine, we geared up and went to the village disco. After five hours of intermittent sleep I was woken up at 7 o’clock and got the day going. I must say we did a great job of wasting the day away by swapping stories and cracking jokes, and was finally forced to go heat up a gigantic pot of zama (soup) for lunch. Afterward, all the guys helped stack a tree’s worth of cutup firewood in a shed, with several wine pauses in the middle preempted by Toumil’s host father. There was a light snow and it was nice being able to help out one of the nicest Moldovans I have met here.

Saturday night I recruited some sous chefs to help me prepare enough jambalaya to feed a small army. I fully appreciate the hard work that Moldovan women put into getting food on the table, because I can tell you it isn’t easy when you have limited running water, two dull knives, and two burners on a stove. Lets just say I’m not exactly well versed in the kitchen, and have a lot more experience eating feasts than I do preparing them. While stirring the roux like crazy, I had to frantically call my mother to interrogate her on how much water to add to the rice. In the end the meal turned out fantastic if I do say so myself, and the food was practically wiped out in half an hour. Everyone got a little rowdy that night and Sunday morning there were some painful expressions of peoples’ faces. Hopefully it was well worth it.

All in all a great weekend spent with great people. I brought my camera with me, but the batteries were dead so I wasn’t able to take a single picture. I’m just going to have to commit this one to memory. I would like to say thank you to everyone that came, you guys have quickly become some of my best friends and it would have been really tough sticking it out here for this long if it weren’t for you. I had the chance to make new friends this weekend, and thoroughly enjoyed talking with Jami, one of the coolest ladies that I have met. To all the M22s, thank you for being our guiding lights and mentors, it won’t be the same without you when you all leave in April. To my 24’s, congrats on the half year mark and I look forward to the next year and a half with you, and to the future M25s, get ready, this is one hell of a ride and I can tell you we all are anxiously waiting your arrival. Thanks to everyone that helped prepare food and clean up this weekend. For the supervisors- you all were quite worthless, but did a great job of keeping the rest of us entertained. Drum bun si voi iti vadea in anul nou!

Mi-e dor de casa

As of December 8th I have surpassed the half-year mark for being in Peace Corps. The last thing I remember from home was leaving my family at the small security check-in at the Baton Rouge airport, trying to read a book but couldn’t concentrate, and so I resorted to pacing up and down the only two terminals because I couldn’t control my nerves while blaring “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi and “Leather So Soft” by Lil’ Wayne. Looking back, I had absolutely NO IDEA what I was getting myself into, and as much as people said not to form any expectations before starting my service, I did (I think this is a human tendency that I can’t be faulted for, except I do have a vivid imagination). I have commented on this topic before in other blog posts, but I have decided to revise my opinion about the passing of time. Many of my fellow volunteers in my group will remark how quickly the first six months have passed, and I can see where they are coming from, but my official stance on this matter is that it feels a lot longer, at least a year.

I was on the phone the other day with my friend Michael from back home and he asked me “So how long have you been there? A year?” At first I was kind of shocked that he didn’t remember that I only left in June, but then when I started thinking about it, a lot of crazy shit has happened between now and then that I wouldn’t have imagined being able to squeeze into six months. I’ve learned (well still in the process) a new language that I had never heard before except from the gypsy in the movie Children of Men and from a couple mumblings from the movie Borat, where the beginning of the movie was filmed in Romania and you can hear one of the guys saying “Imi pare rau Borat!”- I’m sorry Borat!. I have also lived with three different host families, made some great friendships, sat at many endless masas, fell through an outhouse, slaughtered several animals for a meal, danced in countless hora circles, lost a couple billion brain cells due to vin de casa (Moldovan house wine), read a plethora of books, watched more than a lifetime’s worth of movies (My latest conquest was The Godfather trilogy all in one day, I highly recommend this if you have the time), hitchhiked most of the country, harvested tons (literally) of fruits and vegetables by hand, and last but not least, have made a fool out of myself 4,623,899 times and counting.

The time passing slowly does not mean that I haven’t enjoyed myself. I would like to reiterate that I really like what I am doing here and I love this country and it’s people. However complacent I am with my life here, I do get a kink in my stomach when I start thinking about home and the people and things I miss. I guess it would be out of fashion if I didn’t make a list of these for you, so here it goes, just remember that this is in no particular order:

* Gas station chicken salad sandwiches.
* Amstel Light
* Driving my car
* The LSU lakes and the calming effect they had over me
* Fishing
* Reliable technology
* School
* Football games
* Late nights at Louie’s
* Cranking down the AC at night
* The ability to choose what I want to eat and when to eat it
* The exuberant amount of food choices there are
* Whole Foods
* Hot showers with steady water pressure
* Not killing animals that I eat
* A wardrobe that included more than the same six shirts and two pairs of pants
* Riding my bicycle
* Good coffee
* Road trips
* Spontaneous trips to the gas station, WalMart, the movies, and Counter Culture
* Sarcasm
and of course, hands down without a doubt, My friends and family.

Wow, remind me not to do that again. I’ve been staring at the wall for a good fifteen minutes now thinking about people from home and how much I would like to be with them right now. Moving on….I’m co-hosting a party this weekend and when I told my host mother that there will be 20 to 25 PCVs in the village, she almost fell out of her chair laughing. I couldn’t help but join her because we turn some heads when there are two of us much less a herd walking down the street. I can’t wait to see people and get to hang out. December has been shaping up to be a really good month. I’ve got the party this weekend, going to see my friends at Vince’s new apartment in his village next weekend, and then it’s Christmas after that and I’m off to Turkey for a trip that I have been anticipating since I’ve gotten here. No new pictures to post, sorry folks the mundane landscape has gotten pretty drab and not very exciting to take pictures of. I should be able to get some good ones this weekend. Păce.

Peanut butter cookies

Hello world. I’m sitting in the Peace Corps lounge right now craving a cup of coffee, but I know that if I buy a single packet, the store clerk won’t give me change for the large bill I have in my wallet. This is actually quite a common occurrence here that can be quite amusing and frustrating at the same time. In Moldova the currency is the Moldovan lei, with about 11:1 ($ to lei) ratio, and they have 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 lei bills, plus coins but they are made of plastic and are practically worthless and I don’t mess around with them. For some reason, the ATM at the bank in my village loves to give me 200 and 500 lei bills, which no one likes to accept. I tried buying some bananas and eggs the other day (my post workout ritual meal here in Moldova) and tried paying with a 500. The lady looked at me like I was insane. So I tried a 200, same “You are crazy if you think I will accept this” look. I had to go around to three different shops asking if they could break the bill. Frustrating.

Life is good here. It finally started getting cold again which caught me by surprise this morning. On the bus ride here I was pretty sure that I had frostbite in my toes and made sure to keep wiggling them to stay warm. I’m not sure if this actually helps, but I’m going to keep doing it hoping that it does something. Work has been good, nothing too exciting going on right now. We did find out that my organization is going to continually be funded by the government and USAID, which is always good seeing that my partners and I would be out of a job if it wasn’t it. I let the cat out of the bag to my partners and told them that I wanted to move to a small village so I can be in the proximity to farmers and the land. It seemed to shock them that I want to move to a smaller village, and give up amenities such as indoor plumbing, hot water, a shower, etc, but when I explained that I thought I would be living in a hut for the two years, and wanted that, they seemed enthusiastic to find me a place to live. So for the next two weeks I will be traveling to several villages, making masas, and seeing if anything catches my fancy. I’ve got a pretty good idea that it will involve lots of food and festivities, and seeing that it is custom here to get your guests nice and liquored up (you have failed as a host if your guests don’t stumble out the door) it should be interesting.

This is actually something new with work. At the beginning of every month I have to type the action plans that each of the ten local consultants submit to us, compile this data in a master spreadsheet, and send it to the main office in the capital. This work is delegated to me because I can type a thousand times faster than they can, and it’s a way to keep me occupied and makes me feel like I am contributing. I asked my partner why the consultants don’t send these to us in the electronic form, saving me a day’s worth of work. This turned into an organic discussion and for the next couple months I will be spending a couple days with each of the consultants in their villages teaching them computer skills for a day, and then the next day they will be teaching me about their areas of expertise in agriculture. Win-win-win, 20 days spent getting in touch with the people. Alright peeps, I’ve got to go out and shake some more hands, kiss some more babies.