8 Martie

As I have said many times, Moldovans love to celebrate. The 8th of March was yet another holiday for us where we had big masas and did no work. Many of you probably don't know this but the 8th of March was International Women's Day. Moldova takes this holiday very seriously. The whole week the kids have vacation, there are concerts in the villages, and on the 8th we have a masa and give gifts to women. I think it is awesome that Moldovans celebrate women in this way yet it is a very condratictory holiday because the women work very hard all day preparing the masa and clean the table and dishes afterwards. But it is a start.

So the 8th of March is preceeded by another holiday, Marţişor. It is a holiday on the 1st of March celebrating spring. Nothing too exiting happens on this day except that people give eachother marţişoare. These are little red and white things you where on your shirt, like a pin. I ended the day with five pinned to me from some of the kids in my village. The kids like this day because it is the start of what we call spring break. The funny thing about March 1st this year is that as soon as it hit the sun came out and melted all the snow in one day and we have had beautiful weather ever since, spring is here!!!!!

March 1st our village had an "awesome" concert. And in awesome I mean the same "wonderfulness" that is at every other concert. If you have seen one concert you never need to go to another one because it is the exact same. My counterpart's daughter sings the same song (which I absolutley hate!), her son does the saem dance, and there are about 3 adults who sing about 10 Moldovan popular songs i.e. hora music. This type of music involves pipes, accordians, and what not that are played at amazing speed, or as my friend Amy as explained "frantic, spastic music that sounds like Moldovans were just given a bunch of instruments and told to just play them as fast as they can." When I I first got to Moldova I really liked the music, but now I can't say the same thing. When I hear it now for more than 2 minutes I want to gouge my eyes out. And for some reason at the concerts they play the music as loud as possible and some of the songs still have the original lyrics in them and you can't hear the person on stage at all, which sometimes is a good thing. So not only do I have to bear the same thing all the time but then I have to sit for two hours ina freezing cold autitorium. I think one of the criteria for a casa de cultura is that it can have no heat what so ever, that you have to wobble out of there with frozen toes.

I am usually pretty lucky that these concerts don't happen too often or that I happen to be in Chisinau for Peace Corps related activities. However, for the month of May, I have been to two already and it isn't even the middle of the month already. Our village held a second concert on the 7th to celebrate women. My counterpart of course guilted me into coming, she is very good at that. She told me it would start around 7pm. I of course showed up to the casa de cultura around 6:30, because that it was you do right? You show up early to get a seat. Well I know I should have learned by now that nothing in Moldova starts on time. But I figured there should be at least some type of preparations going on there. Boy was I wrong. There wasn't a single person there. Curious I walked to my counterparts hosue to find out what was going on. She informed me the concert wasn't goign to start until 8 or so. Umm, ok, only an hour late. So I hung out at her house until 8:30 or so before she woke her kids from their nap to get them ready for the concert. In short, the cocnert didn't start until 9:30, way after my last bus, which meant that I would be staying the night at my counterpart's house. The concert ended up lasting until 11:30pm! I wasn't too bummed about this becuase the concert ended up being very different than normal. It was like a talent show almost, though it could have been shorter and there was still lots of bad music being sung.

A couple of the boys dressed up as girls!