Christmas #2

As I said before, Moldovans celebrate many holidays. Last Sunday was the Orthodox Christmas. Not being Orthodox I wasn’t sure what was going to take place. Would I have to go to church? Is there presents? Well, for most of the day nothing exciting happened. I sat around, in my pajama pants (when your are at home here you don’t wear “outside” clothes, you where pajamas, sweats, etc. and if you don’t leave the house at all that day you never have to change out of your pj’s) and read all day, taking breaks to play with my host brother and cousin. For Christmas #2 the kids do all their caroling. They walk around in groups from house to house with bags for candy, cookies, and money and sing carols…kind of like our Halloween but without costumes and it is in the middle of the day. Around 4pm we all got bundled up and went to my counterpart’s house for a big masa. There were other family members there and we all ate a ton and of course drank wine, champagne, and vodka (which luckily I didn’t have to drink). My host family left before me because my counterpart’s daughter wanted me to stay and play with her. So I left when another family left so I didn’t have to walk home alone. But we didn’t go straight home. We made as top at the disco bar, very random. And the even weirder thing of randomly stopping at the disco bar with a random couple was that their year and a half old son was with us (whom drank some wine at dinner also, just a bit but it was funny to watch him cheers and clank glasses with everyone). So anyways, we were just hanging out at the disco bar drinking a beer. Then they left and some girl I don’t know too well convinced me to stay there with her. So we danced a bit and drank sodas. Around 11 I decided I should go home because my host family had no idea I was there and I had left my counterpart’s 3 hours ago. The girls made me promise though that we could go out again to the disco another time. Weird. And another random thing was that two nights I was walking home with the mayor and a teacher and the teacher randomly invited me in to dinner. It was fun and she said she would teach me how to crochet. I love it here!