Andy Is Where?!?!?!?!

I arrived in Istanbul on the 23th of January with friends. Within three days we had done a lot, including visiting the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, spending a day on the Asian city of the city, and other things. My friends quickly became bored with Istanbul, so as a result we decided to take the overnight train to Sofia, Bulgaria - we took a train from Istanbul to Sofia on the 27th of December, spent 15 hours on the train (including 4 hours at the border's between Turkey and Bulgaria), and arrived in Sofia the early afternoon of the 28th.

We return to Istanbul on the morning of the 31st to spend New Years plus one day in city of Constantine.

It's been an amazing trip up to now (I'm writing from Sofia now). When I get the chance, I'll write with full details and some great pictures.

Happy New Year.

Read This

If you are at all interested in the type of world in which people live in Moldova, read this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6211444.stm .

I myself know about ten kids with a mother or father or both abroad. Actually, the above article is about a village south of the capital where a girl in my TEFL group teaches. I think it's fairly indicative of the lives that most volunteers face in the villages.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone.

Finally, It Hits

In my first six months of Peace Corps service I have been very lucky in that my health has been flawless, even to the point of bragging about my health to other volunteers whenever they complained about their ills.

Then it hit.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing too serious, just a cold and not even a bad one. Considering I didn’t get a cold last winter, I figured I was due for one - it hit me first last Thursday during the day, came worse Friday, stayed neutral Saturday, worse Sunday, before starting to improve on Monday - the usual cold cycle. The surprise is not that I came down with a cold but the reasons that my host family came up with for my sickness.

Now, in general Moldovans are known for some of their . . . unconventional thoughts about health and the body. For example (and only one is needed), women are constantly told here that they should never, under no certain terms, sit on a cold floor; their ovaries will freeze. So when I told my host mom that I came down with a cold on Thursday and that it hit me during the day her reason for my sickness was clear: I worse shorts Thursday morning. That’s was it, and the other members of my host family quickly agreed that yes, she hit it on the head, completely ignoring a few key facts: 1) I wear shorts every morning, even when the temperature was in the teens here, and did not get sick then, 2) It wasn’t even cold Thursday morning, in the low 40's, and 3) The fact that I work in a school in which at one point two weeks ago forty kids were out with a cold on the same day didn’t factor into their thought process.

Interesting . . .

And then this last Sunday I was coming out of the outhouse not watching where I was going and my forehead head slammed right into a low overhang, giving me a pretty good scrape. That wasn’t fun.

Notes:
- I thing I forgot what the sun looks like, having seen it only twice in the last two weeks. It’s cloudy every day, which gets a little depressing after a while. In fact, when it broke through some clouds Sunday when I was walking to my bus in the center of Chisinau I stared at it like a prisoner just out of solitary confinement, momentarily shielding my eyes from this odd brightness descending from the sky.

- I spent the weekend of the ninth and tenth in Chisinau - two volunteers have a birthday on the ninth and tenth of December, so they decided to celebrate it out together by renting out a bar, playing music with some Moldovans (one American volunteer played the harmonica in a band with a group of Moldovans, playing some actually amazing covers of the Doors, Ray Charles, Elvis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others, all the songs done with a blues twist), and in-general having an amazing time. Also there were a ton of Americans who work at various NGO’s in the area - there was a guy actually from Minneapolis who words at an agency that specializes in human trafficking. It was one of the best evenings I’ve had in my time here, truly, just sitting around with others talking about life, sharing stories. It doesn’t get any better than that.

- Last weekend also, just for fun, I checked out the Billboard Top 40 songs on their website. I’ve heard only 2, and I’ve been away just six months (exactly 28 weeks, but who’s counting . . . .). I can imagine how weird things will be when I get home in two years and every song will be totally different. It will be just a part of the culture shock that I’m facing in about twenty months time - to give an example of just how tough it will be (I think), my tutor was in Iowa two years ago for two weeks and was showing me pictures of her trip. Just seeing the pictures, I was slightly taken back.

- I received my first SMS from this website - actually, I’ve received only one. But now I know that the website works . . . Lets get those messages coming, people, and don’t forget to identify yourselves so I know from whom I received a note.

- To answer a question that has been asked repeatedly (by one person, actually), my family does my laundry for me every three weeks. We actually have a machine, but I hesitate from calling it a ‘washing machine’ because there is a chance it’s just an agitator, but to be honest I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but have been told a few times that the two are not the same. Actually, my host sister cleans my clothes when she comes home from her studies in Chisinau. Then they dry the clothes outside on the line, which when the temperature hovers around 35 degrees can take about five days but takes only about 24 hours as long as the temperature stays above 45 or so.

During the summer my family in a different village also washed my clothes for me and I paid them for it, about a dollar a pound. Here, however, my host family haven’t asked for any money, and I thought it was odd until when the TEFL Manager from the Peace Corps came out to my village just to check on things, and when we all talked a while my host mom said that they don’t ask me for money because they figure I help them enough around the house, in the field and what not, and they would feel odd asking for money.

- In my last entry I wrote about how my host family speaks the Ukranian dialect all the time - I had my numbers wrong on how it’s connected to Russian: it’s about 70 percent Ukranian and 30 percent Russian. And to tell you the truth? I’ve grown to despise it. I mean, I really don’t like it. While I realize that it’s the language of the home, the whole time they speak I just constantly think about how much more difficult it is for me to learn Russian without hearing it often enough. Usually at dinner I bring a book or something, and if they start to speak Ukranian I start to read. As for my comprehension of Ukranian? Enough words are the same with Russian or sound close enough that I can usually figure out the subject of the conversation. After that, I try to tune out.

- Off to Istanbul on Saturday, and I can’t state just how excited I am to go (which, I thing, goes without saying). My only fear I have now is having a problem getting to the airport. My original plan was to take off Friday after lessons at school, spend the night in Chisinau, and have a stress-free Saturday morning - my flight leaves at 12:00, meaning I have to be at the airport by 10:30.

However, the Friday before my school is celebrating "New Year," which will feature a big presentation by every class in the school that promises to be a good time. The first through seventh graders present in the day, and the older kids present at night, which I would have to miss if I had chosen to leave after school. The kids have been preparing themselves for two, three weeks, and I the more I think about it the more I thing there is no way I can miss it.

So the new plan is to get on the bus at 6:00 Saturday morning, which should get me into Chisinau between 8:00 and 8:30 AM, leaving me more than enough time to get to the airport (only fifteen or some minutes from the center). Assuming there isn’t a problem with the bus, all will be fine. Should a problem happen with the bus . . . well, assuming I get as far as the regional center it won’t be a problem too. And even if a problem happens before the regional center, I should be able to hitchhike my way to Chisinau. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.
As for what we will do there? Still not sure. One of the friends with whom I’m going has a host mom who runs one of the most successful businesses in Moldova, who does a lot of business in Turkey and has a lot of contacts there - one of her contacts is going to meet us at the airport, bring us to the city, and help set up with a place to stay during our time there. From what I’ve read and heard, there are a lot of cheap places in the center of the city within a half-mile of all landmarks and they are cheap, at the most ten dollars a night. During our time there I don’t think we really have any plans - I know my friend and I want to cross the famous Galata Bridge that connects Asia and Europe, but that will only kill one hour out of the eight days. I think we’ll spend a lot of time just wandering around the city, soaking in the sights of the place and seeing what we come across. And of course, we’ll be there for New Years, which promises to be a great time.

- Last Wednesday was the day of St. Andrei in the Orthodox Church. Because the Russian version of my name is "Andrei," it meant my dad did not pass without problems.
First, the day before all the kids told me what would happen in the evening, saying that they would take a gate, hide, and drink wine. I understood everything that they were talking about bud had no idea what they meant - the night, however, passed without incident.

However the next day I was in between classes writing in the grade books that the school keeps when my host mom came in and told me that, because it was my saint’s day, I needed to go to the store and buy coffee, sugar, something called ‘pechinei’ (basically little coffee biscuits), and half a liter of brandy so we could celebrate together. Not a problem. So between the next two lessons (the fourth and fifth of the day), I sat around with five or six other teachers drinking coffee, a little brandy, and these biscuits. Not a bad time.

- Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I meant by the term, "Andrew Scottovich." Well, the Scottovich is my patronymic name. Allow me to explain.

In my village (and in Russian culture in general), they don’t refer to people by their first and last names except in documents and things like that; instead, they refer to them by their first name and their patronymic name (the first name of their father plus ‘ovich’ for a man or ‘ionva’ for a woman), which is the most polite way to refer to someone. For example, my host mom is not Valentina Vdovchenko (her last name) except in official documents. Everyone in school and outside knows her as Valentina Nicholiovna, while my director is Vacheslav Ivanovich, my partner teacher is Galina Illyaionva, my tutor is Tatiana Andreevna, my vice-director is Stepan Densiovich, and so on.

- In closing, I finally figured out why my host brother doesn’t dance at all - it’s connected to the death of his father, who died last July. Not only was his death an absolute horror for the family, it delayed the wedding of my host-brother and his fiancee which was scheduled for last summer but now will happen this summer.

His not dancing is something I first noticed during my first weekend here, when we all went to a BBQ in the forest and everyone started dancing the ‘hora’ (just everyone holding hands and going around in a circle - it’s the national dance of Moldova) except my host brother. I asked them why he didn’t dance, and his fiancee told me it was ‘because of his father’ who had died just a month earlier. I thought it was simply a mourning thing.

However, at school two weeks ago we had a dance on a Friday night and my brother and the said fiancee came. My host brother just sat and listened to music (what I usually do), and when I asked why he doesn’t dance at all, the fiancee told me that he promised his father, before he died, that he would not dance again until his wedding. A great memorial to a tragic event, I think.

Images From a Veranda

Here are pictures images from my veranda at home - four pictures of what I see out my back door. The first is the summer, the second is the moon, the third is the first day of snow, and the fouth is a day of heavy frost, complete with fog in the background.

More Random Notes

Rather than think of a story or anecdotes from the last week to kick things off, I thought I would simply write, bullet style, about the things that have taken place lately:

- It literature, in film, I had always heard about not only the beauty of a full moon but also of the impact it can have when there is no light. While I always thought this was true in America, there is no way to fully appreciate it unless you live in a place without any artificial light (i.e. a village in the middle of Moldova). In America the streetlights always shone too brightly to get a full grasp of the moon’s power, but it’s totally stunning to see just how amazingly the moon illuminates everything. Also, because we can see the Milky Way here it’s interesting to compare the brightness of the moon to the brightness of other lights in terms of just how many stars can be seen. It’s something that needs to be seen to be believed - it’s like a giant spotlight. . .

It’s really eerie at night sometimes because, as I’ve written about before, I live in a valley between two hillsides and at night, the valley tends to fill with a fog that only amplifies the moonlight. The brightness in the sky stays the same between 10:00 at night and 8:00 in the morning. It was tough to get used to at first, waking up and seeing brightness and expecting to need to wake up soon only to look at the clock and see it’s only 3:00 in the morning.

- In America there were a few shows that were scoffed at by the general public but which are huge here on Russian state TV, the Russian equivalents of "Skating With the Stars" and "But Can They Sing?" (which put celebrities on stage and had people judge their ability to belt out songs). My family here really likes them, stopping everything when they are song. The singing show is actually good for me to watch because they show the words on the bottom of the screen so I can hear the words said and see them at the same time. It’s great for my language. As for the quality of the programming itself . . . we’ll just not answer that and move on.

- My trip to Christmas that I’ve written about in the last entry came about in an interesting way in terms of the crowd going along. First it was just going to be a friend and I, a guy named Chris who is from Virginia. At our conference a few weeks ago I told another girl in out group (who studied Russian with me and is a pretty good friend) about our trip and asked her to teach me some Turkish (she speaks it, Arabic, Japanese, and some French) that we could use, mainly how to ask people if they spoke English, Russian, or Romanian. Turns out, her plans for the holidays fell through and she asked if we wouldn’t mind if she came along too. Because she knows the language, it took us about a millisecond to reply in the affirmative. Then another girl in our group learned about the trip and also asked if she could accompany us, which we also were quick to agree with. We’ll be there for eight days covering Christmas and New Years - should be a great time. I’m counting down the days.

- When speaking with other volunteers (those who have been here a year or more) over the summer I would always about the language issue at sight and at what point they felt comfortable. The usual reply was around November, and I think it’s safe to say that they were right in their prediction. What do I mean by comfort? That’s the real question. When I first heard about ‘comfort’ I thought it meant full comprehension, but from what I’ve heard that happens after about a year. Instead, it means that I have no trouble expressing myself in social situations, that my abilities have advanced to the point that I have no fear of meeting new people and expressing myself in most situations in general.

For example, three weeks ago I went to the birthday party of one of my students, and after a while her parents grabbed me and invited me to sit with them and their friends in another room to eat, drink, and talk. Had this situation occurred in August, when I first got here, I would have been terrified - this, however, was not problem because my skills have advanced to that baseline comfort level. Even when they asked me a question and I didn’t understand everything, I understood enough of their words to figure out what the point of the question and how to answer it fine.

I’ve been telling a lot of new volunteers that, as good a Peace Corps language training is (some of the best in the world), throughout training the language is always conducted in a controlled environment. Even for the final language test the testee always has a general idea of what will be asked. However, once a volunteer gets to site it’s a whole different world in terms of language and what is expected of the speaker. It’s no longer controlled, and it takes about three months for the volunteer to regain that control. And if you want to get a general idea of how much I can produce, just remember that every conversation I write about in this blog takes places in Russian, unless it’s reported otherwise or with another American.

- Speaking about language, my skills have also progressed to the point that I understand if someone is speaking Ukranian or Russian. How can I tell? First, if my comprehension suddenly takes a dive I know something is going on. Also, not to sound negative, but when a person speaks Ukranian it sounds to me like they are speaking Russian after a few drinks. It just sounds different. Plus, I’ve picked up a few words in Ukranian that people say a lot, words like ‘to do,’ ‘to see,’ ‘how,’ and ‘what.’ And if I hear a word enough and can’t find it in the dictionary, it’s likely Ukranian. When that happens I just ask my tutor (who speaks Russian, Ukranian, and Moldovan) what it means. She is always helpful. I’ve also picked up enough to respond in Ukranian with my kids when they ask me something in Ukranian, which just caused a few of them to fall out of their chairs.

And speaking of tutor, she also told me that, it turns out, my host mom speaks with a pretty strong Ukranian accent. My tutor told me that her accent is as strong as mine (not sure if that’s a compliment . . . ) but people understand my host mom all the time, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

I’ve also learned that my village, in general, doesn’t speak Russian or Ukranian when in general conversation. They speak a dialect called хохлятский which is basically an odd combination of the two languages, 65% Russian, 30% Ukranian, and 5% Romanian with grammar from the three lazily thrown together - one of my students told me that she speaks only the dialect everywhere but at school (they also try to maintain that it’s it’s own language and get frustrated when I call it just a dialect. Sorry, the truth hurts kids). This revelation also helps explain a lot too - for example, my 7th graders are probably the worst kids I have in-terms of their English skills. When I told this to my host mom and told her that it seems to me that they don’t even speak Russian well, she said that I was right and that in lessons when she speaks ‘clean’ Russian they don’t understand her and that she has to switch to the dialect sometimes to get her point across.

- If you want to send me a text message on my phone, go to here and, in the number box, put in 825827. It would be great to hear from some of you, but keep in mind that I have no means of writing back. It would also be a great way to get updates on sports scores . . .

- And speaking of my host mom, last Friday she came into my room and asked me if I had any music for a ‘step.’ I had no idea what she meant. She said that her want to do a dance to a step and she wanted music they could dance to in an older style. So I went through all my music that could have possibly been that answer before stumbling on the correct song. The answer? "Give Me Some Lovin’", by the Spencer Davis Group.

- Finally, last Sunday was one of the most surreal, interesting days I’ve had here.
About three weeks ago my tutor told me that December 3rd was the "Day of the Volunteer" in Moldova and invited me to go with some students to Chisinau for an event that the philharmonic. At first she told me that there would ten students going along, but when the mini-bus pulled up to greet me it was filled with three kids. Not bad.

So we went to Chisinau and spent some time at the philharmonic, lounging about a visiting various booths with information about volunteer and volunteer opportunist in Moldova. There was Peace Corps things everywhere but ironically, noone for Peace Corps there. It was just my students and me, actually, as my tutor told me she had stuff to do and promptly split. Also, I use the term ‘concert’ loosely because here, they don’t totally sing. They always (at least, at the few concerts I’ve been to) just play music with the words already existing and someone on stage just softly ‘sings’ over the existing words. Very odd. Anyways, we spent a few hours in Chisinau and on the way back I had two amazing experiences:

1) There was fog everywhere on the roads, limiting visibility at times to about thirty yards in any direction. And on the way to my village you need to drive along what is basically the top of a hill, where the fog was especially thick. As we looked out the windows we could only see two precipices on each side because the fog in the valley was so thick that it wasn’t possible so see anything more - it was surreal to be driving along, look out both windows, and see only twenty yards of ground before a drop-off into fog. Not to sound too romantic but it was like standing at the edge of the world. Very cool.

2) On the way home we stopped at a village on the way to ours at a house. My tutor went in leaving five of us outside (the three kids, me, and our driver who was about 20 years old). She emerged a minutes later and beckoned us inside where, it turned out, there was a big feast going on. Why? Not really sure. But we were certainly welcomed with open arms, given food, wine, and honey (the man of the house is a beekeeper and gave us a big explanation of how the honey is made) with an openness that was amazing to behold.

I distinctly remembering how that would be seen in most American households - a family sitting around celebrating something and six people show up for dinner, unannounced. I think that, while the reception would be polite, it would not be done with the lack of pretense and sense of welcoming that we were treated to at this Moldovan family.