My first days, impressions, experiences

I arrived here, to my new home, Thursday afternoon. It has been an exhausting first week. No more English, no more Americans. It is tiring speaking Romanian and listening to it all day everyday, but let me tell you, I have improved so much in a few days. It is almost unbelievable how much better I can hear Romanian now than I could four days ago. So when I arrived I expected to be met by my new host mom who I met on my site visit, nope! She just left to work in Italy for two months. So it is me, my host brother, and my host dad(who was working in Moscow when I first visited). I was a little hesitant at first but host dad has turned out to be an amazing language tutor. He works with me very hard to make sure I understand and am speaking correctly. However, I just found out that he is leaving Sunday for Moscow for two months. What!?! Who am I supposed to live with? I asked him if I could still live there and he said yes that host aunt is going to come by and cook for me and host brother. Um, alright. Luckily she is very nice. Site is great though. I go to work every afternoon for about two hours and then return home to relax. I have so much free time! It is ridiculous. Though I can't get off my training schedule and still wake up at 7am every morning. I have decided to start running everyday to take up time and to stay in shape. The village is fun though. I have been meeting lots of people. It is very small with 2700 people. It takes me about 15 minutes to walk to work on unpaved roads with tons of ducks, geese, and turkeys everywhere. I love all the animals running around. My house is very warm, almost too warm at night, which is not the case for many volunteers. I am a very spoiled Peace Corps volunteer. I have hot running water(in a shower form), an indoor toilet, heat, and I am 15 minutes outside a big city. It is very different from those volunteers located in bushwack Africa. I think I have lots of work ahead of me. The kindergarten, school, mayors office, and my NGO all has projects they want me to do. I will be keeping busy. The great thing about my village is the lack of light in the nights. I can see so many stars and it is nice and dark when I sleep. However, I have made the mistake three times now of leaving work a little too late and having to walk home in the dark. Once I get off the main road I have to slowly creep home praying not to step in mud, cowpies, or holes. It is kind of an adventure, though hopefully next time I will remember my headlamp-which many Moldovans find very funny. Host dad laughs at me when he sees me wearing it on my head. Stay turned for more on my activities...

Goodbyes, a Ceremony, and Welcomings

I am now a volunteer!!!! I have been learning, teaching, struggling, succeeding, crying,and laughing the past two months for this moment. It was tough to say goodbye to my host family in Ialoveni. I left them on Wednesday morning to spend the day practising for our swearing-in ceremony on Thursday. It was sad, but luckily they only live two hours away and I can visit. Wednesday night we had a big dinner with all the trainees and quite a few current volunteers. We were warned not to show up to the ceremony hungover, if we were we would not be walking up on stage to swear-in. Luckily I was not tempted by the drink because I am trying to get over a cold that has just been wearing me out. Thursday we all woke early to dress in our best and head to the ceremony, we had to arrive at 9:30, the ceremony started at 11am. The ceremony was amazing. I wished my parents could be there to see me succeed in this and be proud, but my host mom was there so that helped. People from our group learned traditional dances and songs to perform on stage and four people gave speeches in Romanian and Russian. I didn't do any of these because the practices were after long Hubsite days and I always wanted to go home and hang out with my host family, especially towards the end of training when time was becoming precious. I instead took pictures of everyone performing. We were all called onto the stage though and swore-in in front of everybody, it was a bit emotional for me. I still can't believe I am doing this. After the ceremony we had a meal and then left for our sites. It was sad to leave everybody but it was nice to climb into a car, kick off my heels and rest for the hour and a half drive to Elizaveta, my home for the next two years. Besides, I will be back in Chisinau with everyone in less than a week for Thanksgiving.(I will post pictures later when I am in the city witha faster internet connection)

A Great Community Entry Activity

As an assignment for the technical portion of our training we had to have a big dinner in our village with the 7 of us trainees, our professors, and host moms. We all gathered in Anastasia's kitchen and learned how to make Coltunas(ravioli/dumplings). We stuffed them with cheese, potato, and sour cherries. Very delicious. A couple of the girls made sangria that turned out to be a deep violet color, almost unnaturally violet, that's what happens when you use homemade wine. I got to carve a pumpkin and we roasted the seeds. It was a great time, I wish all homework assignments could be like that!!! Us Americans sang oldies songs and our moms sang Moldovan songs. (I will upload pictures later, the connection here is very slow)

Halloween

I don't have much to say about this but I wanted to share some pictures. Americans love Halloween, for many of us it is our favorite holiday. Why? Because it is the one day we can dress up all crazy and be thought of as normal and we get to eat lots of sugar. Those of us here in Moldova didn't prepare for Halloween when we were packing our bags back in September, those extra sweaters and long johns beat out the costumes. It was a tough decision whether or not to bring the fish costume but in the end I would rather be warmer(I know, I know, I obviously don't have my priorities straight but oh well there is no going back in time). So in the end we all had to be very creative with what we had. I decided to just be a Greek goddess, it is very easy to just wrap a white sheet around you and put some leaves in your hair. Unfortunately, I hate to say this, but there were people much more creative than me. We had a walnut tree, a well, the current, the statue of liberty, Laura Bush, and much more. We made Halloween the best we could but it was tough without candy corn and "fun size" candy bars (who decided to name them fun size anyways? I don't think they are fun, it's more like a tease size).

Haram

Haram is village day. Last Friday was Ialoveni day. Anybody who works or goes to school in Ialoveni had the day off, however we did not. We begged and pleaded with our teachers but they didn't seem to care we were the only ones who would be doing any work that day. Fortunately during the day not too much was going on but towards the evening is when all the festivities started. Haram is a day when people celebrate and eat lots and dance lots. On Thursday night I came home to our table covered in pig parts in preparation for the next night (I ended up having to eat my dinner at the kitchen counter next to plates of pig guts, very appetizing). So on Friday after class I went home and made chocolate chip cookies for my family. Considering I had no measuring devices and a small old, portable oven they turned out very tasty. Around 5ish is when we all met in the center to party down. When we first arrived there was wrestling going on which a a traditional thing to do at celebrations. It was fun to watch guys without their shorts on wrestle. The winner of the whole thing got a sheep (never thought that would be a prize did you?) As it got darker out the music started up and we all danced non-stop for hours (well I guess we stopped when we had to use the bathroom). Speaking of bathrooms, there were port-a-potties there. Though, there was only two and they filled up rather quickly, so it was best to go behind a building. We all had tons of fun dancing the Hora (the traditional circle dance here) with a bunch of local kids, some we knew from around Ialoveni. Around 9 there were awesome fireworks. It reminded me of last summer at the lake with all the mortar shells we had(oh, homesickness). I know that my new site will have celebrations like this but I am very sad I am leaving Ialoveni, I love it here and I love my family here.

Third Times a Charm, Right?

Alright, so I tried to write this blog twice last Monday but twice the power went out, very frustrating. So I wanted to tell you all about our trip to the Milesti Mici wine cellar. We went a couple weeks ago. It was an interesting trip. We toured the largest wine cellar in the world, it holds a Guinness Book record for the most bottles in one cellar, about 2 million. Some of the wine dated back to the mid 80's and the bottles had the dust and cobwebs to prove how old they were. We got a short tour and two tiny tastes of wine (not worth the $12 I paid, which is a lot when we only get $2 a day). Thats all I have to sat about this, the pictures are cool though.