The Glod!

The Romanian word “glod” which means “mud” is quite fitting and here can’t be called mud because it is very different. Moldovan glod is unlike any other, like most things here. I first discovered the glod my second or third week in Ialoveni after it rained. On my way to language class I liked to cut through the orchard because it was prettier, quieter, and quicker than walking the main road. The day after it rained I thought I would walk through as any normal day, the only difference would be a slightly muddy road. I was so wrong!!! About 100 yards down the “dirt” road I had about 2 inches of glod packed to the bottom of my tennis shoes. I thought it was strange for mud to that so I stopped walking, picked up a stick and scraped the mud off. But another 100 yards and I was walking two inches taller again. Well, the short cut ended up being the long way because I kept stopping to scrape the mud off my shoes. I thought then that maybe the orchard just had weird dirt that was a little sticky. Wrong again! When I reached the road our school was on I was met again with sticky mud. And from that point on the sticky, wet, slimy brown stuff would be known as glod and only glod. I don’t know what maybe the glod here so special, maybe it is the mixture of dirt, animal poop, and whatever else ends up on the roads. Or maybe it is the specialty of Moldovan dirt, the fact that it is so fertile it is said you could plant a shoe and grow a shoe tree, that accounts for its amazing stickiness. Whatever it is, I hate it. We had been luckyup until a few days ago with very little rain and not too much glod. But lately we’ve been getting just enough rain to keep it glod-y enough to make my jeans splattered with glod and my newly washed tennis shoes filthy again. And today we really got rain. The roads are horrible!!! Luckily, thanks to Colleen, I am sporting a hot pair of pink paisley rubber boots that have protected my feet from mud and water, though my jeans still got some splatter. This really makes me appreciate living back in the states with paved roads.