Nightpie's Travels...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people. |
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The first time I watched director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's latest film, named after the ancient tower, I did so without subtitles. I thought I remembered reading an article somewhere that said he had deliberately chosen to go without translations of the Arabic, Berber, Japanese, Spanish, and sign-language in order to highlight the barriers that separate us. If the audience struggles to understand, then they're more participants in the story than simple observers – or so the theory goes. Turns out, I never read such an article and somehow created it in my mind, mostly because I didn't notice the "Turn Subtitles On" button in the program on my computer I was using to watch the film. Oops. Believe me, the second time through (with subtitles) is much better.
This film and the story from which it derives its name are in some ways strikingly similar to my current situation. Yesterday, I went to the university in Taraclia, a city about a 5-minute taxi ride from my village center. I've lived in Copceac for a year-and-a-half, but it was only a week ago that I learned that there was a university nearby, and only yesterday, when I ventured there on my own, that I discovered an English Department there AND that from 1992-94 some woman from Kansas served as a Peace Corps Volunteer there! Am I speaking some different language? How was I never told about this? Granted, some of the blame lies with me because I never asked anyone, "Hey, is there a university in Taraclia?" Then again, I also never asked anyone, "Hey, is there an underground Olympic-sized swimming pool with an unlimited supply of chips and salsa in Taraclia?" Maybe I should.
More striking to me was a question I asked several of the students I met in one English class. "How many of you speak Gagauz?" Not a single hand went up. In Copceac, five minutes away, the primary language is Gagauz. But in Taraclia, nothing.
This was, of course, only one class and not a true cross-section of the Taraclia population, which I know has significant numbers who do speak Gagauz. Nonetheless, it was surprising to see that in such a small area, two villages should have as many languages. That would be like everyone in my hometown of Fredon speaking Spanish, and five minutes away in Newton everyone speaking Chinese. I guess I never cease to be amazed by the number of languages spoken in such a tiny area. Romania, Russian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Ukrainian, and some study English and/or German.
There are two large dogs at my new host family (which is great, BTW). One is a beautiful black German Shepard, Linda. She's well- mannered and can even open the front door if it isn't locked and come inside. Linda sits at the foot of the dinner table and we give her scraps. The other dog, quite frankly, scared the bejesus out of me. She's got a striking resemblance to Kujo and showed up from God knows where about 2 months ago and the family just adopted her.
Knowing that the way to a dogs heart is through its stomach, I've been tossing scraps of jerky anytime I pass by. I think the plan has worked, and now I only mildly fear for my life whenever I enter the gate.
[PS – DON'T send more jerky. I've got plenty.]
Now, I find myself in a nearly identical situation, but reversed. In Moldova, I have friends, I have important (albeit intermittent) work, I even have pointy-toed Moldovan shoes. It will not be without some sense of regret that I leave these behind. On the other hand, I'm getting pretty excited to be back in America. I'll see old friends, spend time with my family (including a niece due to arrive in July!), and begin down a new career path at business school. It's a mixed bag in wanting these next two months to fly by, and to creep along.
Either way, they will probably be busy months with 2-3 more Poosk seminars, a close-of-service conference, a grand birthday bash, visitors from Germany, more computer classes, moving to a new family, packing, finishing up the TV station project, and all the little details that go along with transitioning across seven time zones. I'll just try to enjoy the ride.
My apologies for somewhere on this blog erroneously reporting that this new law would take effect later in 2007. Somehow, I don't think I screwed up anyone's travel plans...
But what was "damn good," was the jar of strawberry jam I popped open for desert in order to anoint my ice cream with it. Strawberries are hard to come by just about anywhere in the middle of January, but not for me. [See Krista, all that hard work until the wee hours of the morning washing fruit and vegetables, cutting them, cooking them for hours, pouring steaming hot liquids into glass jars that had only recently been sterilized in boiling water, and then grunting with the strain of sealing the lids on top - it was all worth it! Oh wait, you're in America and gave your share to me! Sucka!]
In other canning news, I finished my first of five 3-liter jars of brinza. I'm a bit worried that I overdid it when i purchased 10kg, or was it 20kg? Well, however much it was, I probably should have purchased about half as much.
One really has to plan when to eat canned foods. I've got my little section in the basement, and I'm trying to calculate how much I should have of my remaining stockpile each week until the end of my service. Eat too much too quickly, and they'll be nothing left for later. Eat too slowly, and I'll have to fill my suitcase with jars of fried peppers instead of presents for family and friends. Plus, since I'm only one person, I have to time the opening of jars so that I know I'll be around for a while - don't want the food to spoil. The equation looks something like this:
Brad's hunger x cans / (time left in Moldova - vacation days) = 817.44
I haven't figured out what the 817.44 means yet. Best suggestion gets a hunk of brinza...
Ten times last year, Judi Kinch, a geologist, got e-mail messages telling her that the next afternoon any electricity used at her Chicago apartment would be particularly expensive because hot, steamy weather was increasing demand for power. Each time, she and her husband would turn down the air-conditioners — sometimes shutting one of them off — and let the dinner dishes sit in the washer until prices fell back late at night.
Most people are not aware that electricity prices fluctuate widely throughout the day, let alone exactly how much they pay at the moment they flip a switch. But Ms. Kinch and her husband are among the 1,100 Chicago residents who belong to the Community Energy Cooperative, a pilot project to encourage energy conservation, and this puts them among the rare few who are able to save money by shifting their use of power.
Just as cellphone customers delay personal calls until they become free at night and on weekends, and just as millions of people fly at less popular times because air fares are lower, people who know the price of electricity at any given moment can cut back when prices are high and use more when prices are low. Participants in the Community Energy Cooperative program, for example, can check a Web site that tells them, hour by hour, how much their electricity costs; they get e-mail alerts when the price is set to rise above 20 cents a kilowatt- hour.
If just a fraction of all Americans had this information and could adjust their power use accordingly, the savings would be huge. Consumers would save nearly $23 billion a year if they shifted just 7 percent of their usage during peak periods to less costly times, research at Carnegie Mellon University indicates. That is the equivalent of the entire nation getting a free month of power every year.
Meters that can read prices every hour or less are widely used in factories, but are found in only a tiny number of homes, where most meters are read monthly. The handful of people who do use hourly meters not only cut their own bills, but also help everyone else by reducing the need for expensive generating stations that run just a few days, or hours, each year. Over the long run, such savings could mean less pollution, because the dirtiest plants could be used less or not at all.
The vast majority of utility customers know only the average price of the electricity they used in any given month. But wholesale prices for electricity are set a day in advance, usually on an hour-by-hour or quarter-hour basis. Power companies and utilities are keenly aware of the pricing roller coaster, but they typically blend the numbers into a single monthly bill for their customers.
For most Chicagoans, the average summer price last year was 8.25 cents a kilowatt-hour. Although Ms. Kinch and her husband at times paid as much as 36.5 cents a kilowatt-hour — the peak price on the humid afternoon of Aug. 2 — they paid less than their neighbors over all. On 38 days, some of their power cost less than a penny a kilowatt-hour.
Other consumers who know the hourly price of their electricity have actually been able to get paid by utilities for power they did not use. In New York City last July, for instance, when there was a blackout in Queens, residents of one building on Central Park West voluntarily cut their demand as much as 42 percent and sold the capacity back into the electricity market so that it could be used where it was more needed.
Certainly, such situations are a big exception. The fact that most people have no idea how much their power costs has emerged as a sticking point in the ongoing effort to restructure the nation's electricity business, which the federal government is moving from a system in which legal monopolies charge rates set by state regulators, toward a competitive system where the market sets the price.
But how does efficient pricing emerge in a business where access to information is so lopsided? A market, as defined by the courts, is a place where willing buyers and sellers who both have reasonable knowledge agree on a price; in the electricity markets, the advantage lies distinctly with those who make and distribute power.
Under either the traditional system of utility regulation, with prices set by government, or in the competitive business now in half the states, companies that generate and distribute power have little or no incentive to supply customers with hourly meters, which can cut into their profits. Meters that encourage people to reduce demand at peak hours will translate to less need for power plants — particularly ones that are only called into service during streaks of hot or cold weather. In states where rates are still regulated, utilities earn a virtually guaranteed profit on their generating stations. Even if a power plant runs only one hour a year, the utility earns a healthy return on its cost. In a competitive market, it is the spikes in demand that cause prices to soar for brief periods. Flattening out the peaks would be disastrous for some power plant owners, which could go bankrupt if the profit they get from peak prices were to ebb significantly.
But as awareness of "smart meters" grows, so does demand for them, not only from consumers and environmental groups but also from government bodies responding to public anger over rising power prices. In Illinois, for example, the legislature passed a law in December requiring the program Ms. Kinch joined four years ago to be expanded from 1,100 customers to 110,000. The law also required that Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility, hire a third party to run the program. It chose Comverge Inc., the largest provider of peak- load energy management systems in North America.
The smart metering programs are not new, but their continued rarity speaks in part to the success of power-generating companies in protecting their profit models. Some utilities did install meters in a small number of homes as early as three decades ago, pushed by the environmental movement and a spike in energy prices.
Today, the same set of circumstances seems to be prompting a revival of interest, and even the utility companies seem resigned to the eventuality of such programs. Anne R. Pramaggiore, the senior vice president for regulatory affairs at Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, said that in the past, interest in hourly meter was transitory.
"We really haven't dealt with these issues for 30 years," she said.
But a sustained effort to install more meters is likely now because of what Ms. Pramaggiore called a "fundamental change" in the energy markets. Rising fuel costs and environmental concerns are — once again — front and center. When consumers know the price of their electricity in advance and can tailor their use, even minor changes in behavior can lead to lower home utility bills and less reliance on marginal power plants, said Kathleen Spees, a graduate student in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.
"Small reductions in demand can produce very large savings," said Ms. Spees, who analyzed prices charged within the PJM Interconnection grid, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity for 51 million people from New Jersey to Illinois.
Consumers who cut back on power use at peak times can do more than just avoid high prices. They can make money, as people in the building on Central Park West learned last summer.
Peter Funk Jr., an energy partner at the law firm Duane Morris who lives in the 48-unit co-op, persuaded his neighbors three years ago to install a single meter to the Consolidated Edison system and then to operate their own internal metering system. That made the building big enough to qualify for hour-by-hour pricing. When the next day's prices are scheduled to soar, the building superintendent and a few residents get e-mail messages or phone calls. "We have an orderly plan all worked out to notify people" so they can reduce their power use during the designated times, Mr. Funk said. The residents save more than just the money on power not used during peak periods, when pricing has been as high as almost 50 cents a kilowatt-hour. During the blackout in July, when parts of Queens were without electricity for up to nine days, the building cut demand as much as 42 percent and sold the unused capacity for about $3,000. That money helps the building offer a valuable benefit: On most weekend mornings, electricity for residents is free.
My Commentary:It seems that this kind of measuring is not yet available everywhere, but it is worth a little research or at least a call to one's power company to see if such a program exists in your area... or better yet, to start a local campaign to create such a program if it does not already exist. Also, in a graph not displayed on this blog, the biggest range of prices, and thus the biggest opportunity to save, occurred in June, July, and August. Most other months were fairly flat in their hour by hour rates.
Moldovan Christmas, based on the Orthodox calendar, is Jan 7th. On January 5th, pigs throughout my village were slaughtered for the holiday feast. When I say slaughtered, I mean the pigs are brought out of their pens in the backyard, pinned to the ground by several men, and then a knife is inserted into their jugular and wiggled around a lot. The pigs squeal/scream (by no means a pleasant sound) and the blood drains onto the ground. It probably takes about two minutes for the pig to actually die. I saw my host-brother and neighbor do this with our pig, and shortly thereafter I heard the squeals of another pig further down the road. My tutor tells me that her mother's family also did the same.
I watched the whole slaughtering process [inside joke with DW], which I will now relay to you. The body is the lifted up on a makeshift table or grill, and a blowtorch is used to singe off all the hairs. It takes several rounds of torching, scraping off the skin with a knife, and rubbing water and salt over the body until the skin is removed. Then an incision is made along the spine and stomach of the pig, and several perpendicular cuts between those two create a grid- like pattern over the pigs body. Pulling at one section with one hand and cutting the connective tissue with the other, the sections of fat that surround the pig's body are removed. This fat is canned in salt and water, and is eaten throughout the year like you or I might put cheese on some bread. [I've tried this "sava" and am not a fan.]
Then the rest of the pig is cut up. Legs are chopped off, the spine is cut out with an ax, after which (in a pretty amazing way, I thought), the ribs just fall open revealing all the organs inside. At least where I was, the heart and lungs were fed to the dogs, but everything else was saved. The intestines took some doing because all the digestive juices - which looked like chunky mustard - had to be cleaned out. They did this by cutting it into 1-meter pieces and pouring water through it. Then more water was used to turn the intestine section inside-out and clean it again.
I've yet to see exactly how all this will be prepared, but I now know the first steps.