Crocheting

Amazon.com amazes me. It literally sends stuff everywhere, even Moldova, a country that nobody knew about until I came here. Back in January I received a package from them with some origami books and a book on how to crochet (it only took 3 weeks to get here!). Since receiving the package I have set my knitting aside and have starting crocheting. I have only done two projects so far but have plans already for others.

My swimming pool adventures in Moldova

Not exercising for a week makes me very stir crazy and kind of depresses me a bit. With all this snow lately I haven’t wanted to run because it is way to cold and I don’t feel like running in my Yak Tracks. So I have decided to go to the public pool in Bălţi more often than the one time a weeks I was going before. I am curious what you think of when I say a public pool in Moldova. Do you worry about my health and picture skin infections galore? Well amazingly the pool is very clean, very chlorinated. And the process of getting into the pool is an interesting one.

First of all, living in Bălţi can be difficult at times because it is a mostly Russian speaking city and many times I run into people who don’t know a lick of Romanian. This happens at the pool. Luckily my tutor had told me ahead of time what to do and bring. First you have to go into the nurse and show her your stomach and palms. Why? Who knows. You also have to show you’re your soap and, what I didn’t know, was a sponge. Unfortunately I forgot the sponge but didn’t know it because I had no idea what in the world she was saying. And of course when someone doesn’t understand what you are saying you speak louder because of course by the time you get to yelling volume they will finally understand. Why is this? Why do we all do it? Again, who knows. So after the woman yelled at me someone came to my rescue and explained to me in Romanian. Once you are cleared by the nurse she and she has decided your stomach looks ok she hands you a piece of paper to take to the ticket window. You hand the woman there 12 lei (about $1) and the piece of paper. She then hands you a different piece of paper so you can check your coat, bags, and shoes. You are not allowed to wear your street shoes into the locker room and must bring a pair of indoor shoes to wear around the locker room and pool. It is quite a complicated process that involves a lot of Moldovans pushing and shoving.

SO once you finally get into the pool area you are lucky if you can find a lane that doesn’t have people just hanging out in the middle. Many times I can’t swim laps in straight lines because I am constantly dodging people. Sometimes the swim coaches are good about telling people to move out of the way but sometimes I do run into people while do the backstroke. What is funny though and amuses me every time is the way people react to my tattoos. It is not normal for people to have tattoos in Moldova, especially females with big stars on the back of their leg. All the girls that notice my tattoos open stare and point, it is hilarious how obvious they are about it. I can’t wait until summer when I wear tank tops and skirts everyday that show them off to everyone, I wonder what the reaction will be then.

Mexican Night!

Oh man! Things don’t get too much better than stuffing yourself with two huge burritos. Saturday night 4 of us volunteers got together to feast. We all met up in Bălţi to get the necessary ingredients before heading to Jeff’s house in a nearby village to begin the preparations. Of course Moldova isn’t really stocked with the key ingredients for Mexican cooking so we had to improvise. Since tortillas don’t exist we had to buy lavash bread which is fairly similar, and then since tortilla chips are very expensive we had to make our own by cutting the lavash bread into triangles and frying it. The salsa of course had to be made from scratch and the refried beans were just mashed up white beans reheated. It all turned out excellent though thanks to my mom sending me two packets of taco seasoning (way to go mom!). Jeff had invited two of his Moldovan friends to the feast also and they got their first taste of Mexican mancare (food).
We of course all ate too much but decided to work it off with some sledding. Oh my gosh, I love to sled! We had a tiny one person sled that we kept forcing two people onto. It made it way more fun trying to keep two people on it while trying to stay out of the ditch. We have been so lucky with snow lately. The snow we got Thursday has stuck around and we got a bunch more last night. Though unfortunately it is getting warmer outside and I am afraid by next week it will all be gone L. But I have had my wish of lots of snow and am now ready for warm weather, fresh fruits and veggies, and fields full of sunflowers!

The Simple Things in Life

It is amazing the way little, unimportant things can have the biggest impact. I have been in the worst mood all week and have actually considered coming home. It is funny because I had the best day ever since being in Moldova this past Monday. I started the day with passing out questionnaires to the kids at school so I could find out what type of activities to start, then I taught a group of kids to fold origami after school, and then I was invited to play volleyball with the girls at school the following day. I went home Monday with this amazing high knowing that I would finally start doing real things in my community. The high didn’t last long though. My counterpart smashed it Tuesday when I talked to her about starting clubs and that we needed someone else to work here all the time instead of me (I didn’t come here to make copies, type documents for teachers, and take money from kids all day, I am NOT a secretary!). She proceeded to tell me that there is no one else to do the job and that in more or less words this is what I will be doing for the next two years. If this turns out to be true, I am on the first plane home. So since finding out that I can’t do anything here that I want to do I have been in the worst mood. And it wasn’t until last night that my mood lifted.

There is something about snow that seems to make everything all better. I left work yesterday night in the foulest mood after the guy that was supposed to take over came an hour late, so I didn’t leave until 7pm. But as I walked outside I saw that the ground was blanketed in white and that the snow was still coming down strong I immediately became giddy. I love the snow so much! And guess what?! It was still snowing when I woke up this morning! But that is not the end of the story. After I got home and we ate dinner (which was a yummy Italian pasta dish) our power went out. This was a problem for my host mom who had just made a bunch of dough to bake bread in the electric oven. I was a bit sad there would be no fresh baked bread but felt a hundred times better when she started making placienta on the gas stove.(If you don’t remember placienta is a pastry type thing that I am totally in love with and it can either be baked or fried). Oh I was in heaven! Snow and Placienta all in the same night!

My mood has dipped a bit today after coming to work again to just sit and stare at a computer all day but I just make myself look outside at the snow, and now sun, and I immediately feel better. And I keep thinking of the Mexican masa me and some other volunteers are planning to prepare tomorrow night. Food always makes me feel better!

Origami = Instant Friends

Do you remember back in elementry school and middle school when you used to make those paper fortune tellers? The one with the colors on the outside and numbers on the inside. Well for some reason I thought about them last week and decided to make one. As I began to fold the paper that would be my future fortune teller the group of kids huddled around me grew. They were all wondering what the crazy American was up to now. When I finished folding they all were amazed by the way and it moved. They were confused when I started writting colors, numbers and fortunes on the thing. They thought I was defacing the beuaty of the paper sculpture. But it was when I showed them how to use that I went down in history, well theirs anyways. I will forever be remembered as the Amercian that folded paper. Ever since showing a couple kids how to make and use them last week I have had the most friends ever! (Granted they are all around 10 y.o., it still counts as friends). I have new kids coming up to me every day asking how to make them. It is awesome!

Bălţi Crazy Creative Soldiers

I mentioned about 2 months back that I was coaching an Odyssey of the Mind team yet I don’t think I ever really explained anything about it. OM is an international program designed to let youth think outside of the box and be creative. It is all in English and an excellent opportunity for children and teens that live in countries that don’t promote and offer creative outlets for them. In countries such as Moldova students in schools, from what I have noticed, aren’t encouraged to be creative like we are in the States. They aren’t given the opportunities such as drama classes and don’t do interesting class projects like we are used to. When I first started meeting with my team it always took the first half hour of our sessions to coax them out of their shells. You could tell they weren’t used to just letting go and being goofy and creative. Of course now they are all totally crazy and it is hard to get them to be serious, but hat is the way it should be at this age in their lives.
So, OM is a competition for youth from about age 6 to about age 21 or so. Kids and teens form teams of 5-7 in their age group. Every winter, around November, they are presented with 5 long term problems that change every year. They have to choose one problem that they would like to solve over the next three months to present at the national competition in February. This year one problem consisted of building a machine that would transport an object from one place to another, another was making a pop up book. Our team chose the problem “Around the World in 8 Minutes.” For their problem they had to have a traveler which visited 3 locations. One of the locations had to be either the North or South Pole, the second location had to be a known place on Earth, and the third location an unknown location that only the people living there would know it existed. The traveler has to have a reason for visiting each location and the skit can only be 8 minutes. The hard part for us as coaches is that we cannot give any ideas. We can only encourage them to be creative and ask questions.
My group came up with the story that there was a creature whose planet blew up and he was the only survivor. He “led a nomadic lifestyle traveling around the galaxy in search of a creature like himself.” He spotted the South Pole and went there hoping to find someone. He came across some scientists who told him to go to Morocco, our second location. When he got to Morocco he met with the head of a community and in exchange for a totem he wore around his neck the head of the community gave him a map to Hawaii where there was a volcano. The creature had to enter the volcano which contained the gates of Hell. In hell, our third unknown location, he had to make a deal with the devil to get his girlfriend back. The devil, who was a girl, was fat and wanted to be thin again so the creature had to help the devil workout and become thin before his girlfriend was freed. After the girlfriend was freed the devil begged them to stay in hell with her and they agreed because they had no planet to go back to. The end.
Their story was really funny the way they acted it out and hopefully, if I can, I will post the video of it here. The competition was last Saturday in Chisinau. The problem that our team chose was very popular and we had to compete against 16 teams in our age category. We scored really well on our problem but only came in 8th place because along with the long term problem there is also a spontaneous problem portion of the competition. For the spontaneous problem the team goes into a room of judges and has to solve a problem on the spot. The problem presented this year was really hard and dumb and our team scored really low on it affecting our overall score and placing us 8th. The kids had fun though and really enjoyed the experience. The bummer part about not winning is that we cannot go to Germany for the international competition. Oh well, there is always next year!
P.S. Our team name was the Bălţi Crazy Creative Soldiers