Tidbits and All That Jazz

I recently had the opportunity to travel to my good friend, Stephany’s village, Taraclia. This weekend was a special weekend, as she had other volunteers at her house as part of their Travel Club. Travel Club is a wonderful after school activity created by Moldovan Peace Corps Volunteers (Group 16, of course) to give students in Moldova a chance to travel around the country making new friendships and learning about their land. Even though this country is quite small, most of the students here have rarely ventured out of their village. They are very excited to be taken away somewhere for the weekend. They have a chance to meet other students, play games, team build, and learn new hobbies. So that is Travel Club. I do not have a Travel Club, but joined in on the fun and came to help Stephanie. I arrive on Friday afternoon and we have a great time playing basketball and this unknown game known as “The Belt Game.” It involves chasing people around and whacking them with a belt. Children at school play these games. It isn’t nearly as deadly as it sounds, but instead is extremely funny. We enjoyed fried potatoes with cheese for dinner and called it a night. The next day there were several activities for the students at the school. Steph taught hip-hop and the boys played basketball, table tennis, and volleyball. Later that afternoon we were to reconvene at the school where we would leave for a camp located outside of the village to spend the night. At the appointed time (rather 45 or so minutes later) we left the village for a camp. The camp has not been in use for about 10-15 years. Our plans…to cook chicken over the fire, play games and sleep in old cabins. We arrive after walking through an overgrown trail in the woods, with 20 students, and are greeted by an old wrinkly man and his two dogs. We immediately acknowledge his creepiness and make a mental note to avoid all interaction. The afternoon progresses with yet another round of The Belt Game and once it starts getting dark we begin the fire to grill the chicken. The students take over the grilling process so I appoint myself to cutting several loaves of bread. After dinner us volunteers are tired and while the students wander around the campfire we take the moment to escape to our cabin to sleep for the night. Now is the point of my story where I describe the cabins. Like I said, they have not been in use for 10-15 years. There are no glass in the windows, the walls are now comprised of cracked cement, the ceiling, when present, is worn. But, we were lucky to pick one that had all of its flooring. So that mean we got to sleep on 10-15 years worth of weathered dusty floor. But we were lucky to have the floor. We spread out our various sleeping devices, some with sleeping bags, others with plastic and blankets. One of the volunteers is terrified of someone coming into the cabin at night and killing us. It isn’t highly unlikely as we found out, through a student, about the past life of the man staying at the place. The words from the student go like this…The man was in a bar one night drunk and a fight broke out over a bottle of water. The man got mad and stabbed the other person, which happened to be his sister-in-law. I decided to not let the rest of the volunteers know, but by the end of the night it had already reached their ears. The children did not seem to be frightened so I was a little bit at ease. With a knife secured under Ryan’s pillow and Stephany clutching her flashlight, we attempted to sleep. I got about an hour of sleep that night until we all had to rise at 5.20 to pack up and meet the driver who would take us back to the village. We all arrive back in the village unharmed and unslept. Upon returning, we discuss our evening with Steph’s family and find out some interesting news. Apparently, the entire town knows about the killer that lives at the camp. Their word is that he didn’t kill just one person, but three…his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law. They don’t seem concerned that we slept under the supervision of a killer but gave the excuse that he served his time in prison so he is ok now. But not okay enough to have a job around people, so they placed him out in the woods to look over deserted cabins. The message to this story…when camping, make sure you know the people around you because it will be unlikely that anyone will hear your screams should you come into danger. And if you decide to grill, you can never have too much bread or packets of mayonnaise.

Most people in relationships, at one time or another go shopping together for clothes, a car, furniture, mother’s birthday present, etc. Never do they share in the conversation that I had at 8pm last night. “Hey, do you want to go to Radeni with me? I am buying a goat.” Having never actually witnessed the buying/selling process of farm animals and having the opportunity to ride in a car, I accepted the invitation. Radeni is a beautiful town situated on high hills covered with dense forests. However, it being 9.30 at night when we arrived, I saw lots of dark. The ride to Radeni, a mere 17 kilometers, jostled every bone out of place and back again. We made the farm animaltastic journey in a large boxy van. His friend came and picked me up and we all rode in the front bouncing around the poor roads. How poor? Think South Georgia back roads (of course, dirt). Now pour on golf ball size rocks. Add concrete in some places, not all, just sparingly. Now that is the road we were traveling on. The driver of the vehicle seems unmoved by the poor road conditions and we bounce along at high speeds. There were several moments where the road gave way to enormous pot holes and other times when we seemed to be traveling on our side. All the while, the driver continued on at his furious speeds. These are the times that an American driver would look at the road, decide it was impossible to pass, turn around, and go home. Nothing like this would be attempted in the states. Ok, we make it safely to some obscure house in the middle of no where at 10pm at night. We’re on a goat mission. My friend gets out to fetch his animal and his friend and I stay in the car to listen to such classic hits as “I’m Blue” and the Romanian version of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” I am always surprised and pleasantly discomforted at the music selection in this part of the world. We have the goat, it’s name is Greta, the customary food for us (because, our journey would make us utterly famished), and my friend stays in the back to tend his goat. Half the road’s conversation was filled with him talking to his goat until “Smack That” came on, in which the volume was increased and everyone proceeded to have a good time mumbling words that are lazy attempts at the lyrics. Greta is safe and comfortable in her new home with other various farm animals, turkeys, chickens, dogs, sheep, and three new little lambs born yesterday. Easter is coming, I’ll let you know how they taste.

America’s daylight savings time began earlier than last year. I know this, because I saw the information online. Usually, everywhere has daylight savings time on the same day. This is not the case this year. After discovering that we (at least the USA) would be turning the clocks an hour ahead on Sunday night I asked my host family if they knew about this. They did not. After consulting the nightly news, in both Romania and Russia, nothing was said about the time change. I did not want to arrive at school an hour behind or ahead so I had to absolutely know for sure. I asked a neighbor, my host mom asked a neighbor, I asked a friend, he asked a friend or asked a friend. No one knew a thing. So this morning I woke up an hour ahead, as if the time had changed. I got ready and waited around to see if the children passed my house around 8.15 for 8.30 school. They did not. But why would they, it was actually 7.15. So, the conclusion to this rather longwinded story is that Moldova’s (and probably Romania’s and Russia’s) time did not bounce one hour ahead like in the USA. I don’t know how this works exactly. Maybe Mr. Bush thought that it would be fun to turn the clocks ahead of everyone else. I know it was something to do with saving electricity and the economy but that is as far as I desired to venture into the matter. Whatever it is, you folks in the USA are only 6 hours behind me. If you keep it up, maybe you will be on my time in a few months. After signing online I noticed that my country director had written an e-mail explaining the whole "time change" ordeal. I guess I should have paid more attention to my inbox. I could have avoided all my confusion. But then where would my weblog post be? Hmmmm.

“Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley. But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of, but one that will ultimately prove good for us.” - A.J. Cronin

The three of us arrive by taxi at 11.00 am, giving us a comfortable hour to find our bus, load on our luggage and get settled for the 30-hour bus ride. Fifteen minutes into our Prague bus search we realize that our bus isn’t parked in the designated bus area. We circumnavigate the bus station several times and come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t here and will arrive in a few minutes. I pace around nervously, thinking about a Christmas spent in a Chisinau hotel room and begin to panic with each passing minute. We decide to ask around, someone at the bus station has to know where the bus to Prague is, right? So one of us, me, stays with the mound of baggage while Steph branches out to talk to the lady selling bus tickets and Ryan seeks out to communicate with the locals. The diagnosis; the bus to Prague does not exist. Does not exist? How is this possible, since we obviously are clutching the tickets were purchased weeks ago in our glove bound hands? The hour…11.30. I am starting to panic and thinking about the options we have remaining, which are catching a bus the following day and traveling on Christmas. I am a diva and simply won’t allow this. Frantically, I race up to the ticket counter and explain the situation. “I have a ticket to Prague for a 12.00pm bus, which I cannot find. Some people say the bus doesn’t exist and I want to know for certain if the bus will be here,” I state. The ticket woman simply replies, “The bus will be behind this building.” “I know this, but it is not, and we have ten minutes before the bus is to depart for Prague and it is not here, can you tell me if it is here or if it exists at all, since I am clutching a ticket for the phantom bus and you are the one selling tickets for all the buses leaving here. Obviously, you would have this information,” I scream in desperation. “The bus will be in the back, I don’t know if there is one, but that is where it will be,” she replies indifferently. How can she not know if the bus exists? She sells tickets for buses! Grrr. I return back with no happy news. We wait a little longer…approximately 3 minutes, and I fill the silence with obscene remarks about the efficiencies of this country’s transportation. After a few minutes, a guy approaches us and asks, “Are you going to Prague? Give me your tickets and passports.” Hehehe, riiiight. I am giving no one my ticket that says I have a rightful spot on a bus leaving this country and my one item that says I am an American citizen. I allow him to gander at them but quickly snatch them back. He begins to tell us that the bus is waiting at the Chisinau Hotel (definitely not the South Bus Station) and leaves from there. This is after the woman who sold us the tickets, weeks ago, told us, adamantly, that we would be leaving from the SOUTH BUS STATION! So we are persuaded into his buddy’s car, give over our passports and tickets so they can refund our money, and head to the Chisinau Hotel at around 12.05. We are told the bus is waiting for us. All three of us our confused and frustrated, and our trip hasn’t even begun! Everything ends well, we arrive at the bus, which is waiting for us….sans passport and ticket. The guys in the car drive away and we begin to worry about our missing passports. Apparently, they drove to the ticket store to buy us new tickets to replace the bogus ones that we bought. What great guys, right? Steph is nice enough to offer to share some of her American chocolate from her mom’s Christmas package, but they drive off before we get the chance. We are securely on the bus, it is moving, we are 30-hours away from our destination and I am already burned out. Happy Holidays!

Happy Late Thanksgiving!I am late in writing this blog, but I wanted to speak of Thanksgiving. All the volunteers gathered in Chisinau to celebrate this totally American holiday and to have a few conferences. One Thanksgiving day we even played a little flag football. I joined in and tried to catch the ball a few times. I conclude that it was the throwers error and not mine in catching, so we will stick to that. The dinner, as usual, was FABULOUS and tasted just like America! I created a slideshow that played while everyone ate, and it was a success, if I say so myself. It only took me about an hour to track down the projector and another fifteen to twenty minutes to discover that the projector screen was in the same room as me and I just didn't know.Employees from the Embassy and even the Ambassador arrived to eat the fantastic meal prepared by some of the volunteers. I had turkey, homemade biscuits, stuffing with gravy, corn, and there was even green bean casserole! For dessert...you guessed it, pumpkin pie! I will have to remember next year to mail a big box of the french fried onion things and canned pumpkin. It was great!After the meal, there was the annual talent show. It was great, with even the Peace Corps staff joining in to encourage a few laughs. There was singing and dancing and harmonica playing.On Saturday, the volunteers attended a seminar on the bird flu. Conclusion: the bird flu is not in Moldova and if it gets out of hand, could kill millions. We learned about what we can do to prevent the spread of bird flu and how we can protect ourselves in the event of its appearance in Moldova. It was all kinds of informative.I hope every that is reading this had a great Thanksgiving and gained a couple of pounds!

She isn't really a fortune teller, she reads playing cards. I have been wanting to go to one of the ladies in the nearby city to have my cards read. My host mom talks about all the times she has gone, what they have said, and whether or not they turned out correct or not. So, this week we made an agreement to go track one down today. We arrive at a nine story apartment building. Don't think its like your Spring Creek apartment complex...more like Soviet style cinder tower (if you can imagine). We have to wait a few minutes on the stairs outside of the woman's apartment while a couple is in there. Once inside, and shoes off, we get down to business. My host mom gets her cards read and is told about the things her husband is or isn't doing while working abroad. Not that interesting. Now on to me! She hands me a card (the card that I am...I believe based on eye color) and I am supposed to hold it and think good thoughts while she shuffles the deck. Now the fun begins. She puts cards on the table in varying patterns and begins to tell me that I will have two men in my life. Both will be blonde, one with green eyes and the other will have blue. The green eyed man will not be good, he will begin to drink, leave and not tell me where he is going, and lie. So I should not be with him. The other, the blue eyed blonde, I will meet here in Moldova. He will be nice and he is the one meant for me. One of my friends, a blonde green eyed girl will also like him, but he will not like her. I will not be as crazy about him as he is with me, but I should just go with it and it will come step-by-step. I will know it is him because he will give me a present. After that (who knows how long), he will ask me to marry him and I must not refuse because he is the one I am supposed to be with. He will be slightly older than me, and of course, taller. He will leave with me to go live in USA when I go, completing all paperwork and everything. Also, blonde hair green eyed people in my life are not good, male and female. I should be very attentive when crossing the street, because that is the one bad thing hovering over my life. My host sister's is water. My host mom's is climbing trees (go figure). I don't think I believe I will meet my man in Moldova, seeing how unlikely it is that I will meet men here, and I already checked out the new volunteers. I think she mentioned me taking him back to my country and finding him here because she knew I was not from Moldova. Otherwise, I think the reading was very interesting and now I have a lot to think about. Oh yeah, she also said that I would have two children. Ha!

Last year I handed out candy for Halloween and that was the extent of my sharing this American holiday with the students at my school. This year, I was bent on doing something different…larger, if you will. So, with my fellow English teachers we came up with a great contest of sorts. Every class in the school would decorate their door to celebrate Halloween. They would also create a mask and a presentation for the mask which would be held after school as an assembly. Six judges would rate the classes according to the three categories, door, mask and presentation. Because of other events happening next week, our contest was pushed up to today, giving the students two days to prepare. I was a little worried about what would come out of it, but the other teachers assured me it would be just fine. Students leave everything till the last minute anyway, so why plan it for a week in advance? So today we celebrated Halloween. I dressed up as a pirate, with a painted on beard, black eye, and even missing teeth. Everyone at the school loved it and children would peek in during the breaks to check me out. I would smile my toothless smile and say “arrr.” It was very entertaining. The students’ doors were AMAZING! They did such a great job and were so freakin’ creative! One of the classes went as far as setting up their room as a sort of haunted house, without any prompting from others! Above is a picture from their room. I almost got teary eyed seeing how the students enthusiastically celebrated an unknown holiday. Other students decorated their room as a crime scene with police tape, blood and chalk outlines. The presentation went well and was done entirely in English. I did read the final scores off in Romanian, so no one would be confused. And of course, afterwards there was a disco. And, of course, I danced. Overall, it was great and I was proud and honored that my school would embrace Halloween with such energy and excitement. Some students came to school with made up bloody faces and others yelled out “Happy Halloween!” to me. It was really really great. I am excited for next year (although I will not be here) when the celebration will be bigger and better. The students are already planning for it!!!

This is the time of year when families pick their grapes and start producing home-made wine. I have never tasted as delicious of wine as I have here in Moldova. The flavor is fresh and goes down easy. I would venture to say it is a little bit more potent than the supermarket variety. If you are lucky, you will be a guest at a house where the wine is completely natural. This means that nothing was added to the grapes in the process of making wine. No water, no sugar…just grapes. My host family makes natural wine, and I am quick to point out to guests that what they are drinking is straight from the earth. No wine in America that you find in the supermarket or wine store can claim theirs is homemade. So we head to our garden in the back and begin filling buckets upon buckets with grapes. I ask if there is a special process or selection and they tell me “no, everything.” So everything goes into the wine. The small grapes, the withered grapes, the stems, the bunches, it all goes in. Of course, we don’t fill our buckets with the grape leaves, because that would just be silly. In about two hours, the grape vines in the garden are barren. All the grapes get sent through this sifter type device that is a wooden box sitting on top of the enormous wooden wine barrel. As we dump the grapes in, my host dad begins cranking the sifter, which mashes the grapes, coaxing out all the juices. I get the honors of climbing on top of the shed to collect the grapes from the vines on top of the shed and surrounding the house. This requires several positions, sitting, kneeling, squatting, standing, lunging, as the vines are low and tangley. By this time, my hands are covered in grape particles and grape juices. I am quite certain my hair is matted down with grapeness and the bees have named me their queen by the looks of all of them swarming around me. After the barrel is full of squished grape bunches it is covered and allowed to sit and marinate and ferment a bit. Within three or so days, depending on the weather, you have wine. But it is “new wine” which means it is not fully fermented and still contains a little bit of bacteria. As volunteers, we are not encouraged to drink “new wine” unless we want to be ill and camp out in the outhouse. But as the wine was pouring out of the barrel and into the barrel where it will finish fermenting, I couldn’t help but take a taste. “New wine” is very tasty and resembles grape juice with a kick. I had a glass and savored it. Hours later and I still feel fine. I escaped the clutches of the “new wine” monster. Now I will have to wait a few weeks and/or months to taste this year’s wine. Happy Drinking!

Enough said.

Crunchy Peanut ButterTazo Tea - the Green Tea Zen kindMore beads (like the ones you bought Jen...they are great!)Toe Socks (they are great to wear with flip flops when it is semi-cold outside)That is all for now! :)

I am starting my second year of teaching in a little less than two weeks. Here is a list of things that would make my second year as a teacher and volunteer that much greater. Spanish books (to teach myself Spanish over winter)Teeth Whitener (the strips)Crystal Light On the Go (they orange ones)TwizzlersMarshmallowsMarkersStickersCandlesLip GlossFun school supplies (to give to students) cute pens, pencils, notebooks, pencil casesWorld MapSocksYarn - sparkly heather grey...if possible :)Christmas decorations (takes three to six weeks to mail, so plan ahead)Starbucks Coffee (ground, not whole bean) - Sumatra or SulawesiSocks - booty style...below the ankle, that isBath and Body Works stuff - body cream, spray, antibacterial soap (w/o water)... Tropical Passionfruit, Crisp Citrus Herb, Fall/Winter scentsEXERCISE DVDS!!! I have advanced Tae Bo, but would like more Tae Bo, Yoga, Dance...a variety. I am going to start an afterschool program for girls in 8-12 grade to do aerobics everyday after school and teach them a little about nutrition and their health needs. I NEED DVDS so they have a variety of exercises and don't get burned out on the one I have. Thanks!- this list could and will change