Back in Business, II
There's no way for me to summarize the last six weeks in any way that would be 1) Painless for me to write, or 2)Painless for you to read. So, alas, here are some of the high/low-lights:
- I can't even begin to describe how totally bored I was here without my computer. There were times that made my bus trip to Moscow look like a amusement park in comparison. Totally brutal. I would come home from school, eat lunch, go for my daily walk around our lake, and then arrive home at 4:30, wondering just how I would be able to kill the six hours between my arrival and my time going to sleep. I did a lot of crossword puzzles, read a book every two days or so, and . . . . that's about it. I watched TV some but my host mom commandeered the remote between 5:30 and 6:30 every day so she could watch Russian soap operas, which were really good language skills for a year ago but now, because my comprehension is almost total, I've come to realize that I just can't stand them. They're amazingly stupid. I couldn't take it anymore. So as I told my parents when my new power cord finally got here last Friday, I felt like I had received a new life. I immediately proceeded to download eighteen podcasts.
- I spent the last two weekends in Chisinau, and they were some of the best weekends I've had in a while. First, two weeks ago we all went to a bar where a cover band of The Doors played. They're Moldovan, and they are amazing. A volunteer actually used to play with them but he left last summer (he was the harmonica player, which they substituted in place of the organ. Fear not, though, as a new harmonica player is in place). It was great. Then last weekend, we celebrated three birthdays together and about thirty of us volunteers all celebrated in a bar together. When there is a mass of us together, there is this energy, this atmosphere, that can't be accurately described or replicated. I was there with a Moldovan girl and I asked her about a dozen times if Moldovan people would do what we were (dancing without music, singing loudly to any and all music played), and she said that as a rule, people absolutely would not behave as we behaved. Of course, as a lot of Moldovans have found, it can be rather refreshing to be around us because we're just so different. She loved it.
- In spite of last weekend, the absolute best thing I've done in a really, really long time happened when three weeks ago when I called some friends whom I haven't talked to in a long, long time. First, my buddy and I called one friend of ours who was a volunteer here last year but left last summer (he just couldn't take it anymore). We talked to him for an hour and a half, which thanks to the Internet cost a grand total of $1.60. Then I called two other friends, one of whom I hadn't talked to since March 15th of this year and the other of which I hadn't spoken to since June 3rd, 2006, the day before I flew out of Minneapolis. I would have called more people but didn't have some numbers and some didn't answer. Believe me when I say that those conversations carried me through all of my problems in school for about two weeks. Just amazing.
- Thankfully, winter has finally arrived to my village. It snowed a lot here on the first Saturday of February last year (I remember that day because it was class reunion Saturday in Moldova), and not again until last week. It came and went in the early part of last week, leaving behind an unprecedented wake of mud in it's tracks. It got to the point that I would put on my galoshes over my tennis shoes just because I couldn't take the fact that they would literally be covered in mud. At one point, in walking home from school, I stepped on a seemingly innocent lump of dirt and had water literally jump up to my knee. I wish the preceding sentence was a joke.
Last Thursday, however, the temperature dropped and the snow started to fall, not stopping until early on Sunday morning. It was just great. On Friday night I was with a friend from Virginia at one of the main grocery stores in Chisinau, waiting for another guy. My friend wanted to wait inside but I insisted on the outdoors. And I refused to stand under the canopy, instead letting the wind and snow blow against me. My friend and I talked for about ten minutes until he told me he just couldn't take it anymore and had to go inside, which we did. Then later we went back to the store, four of us in-total, and spent the ten minute walk to the store throwing snowballs at each-other.
- Thanksgiving, while not being the spectacle it was last year, turned out to be a great time. I went up to the north of Moldova with some friends who threw a little holiday at their house – there were about sixteen of us in total, as well as the parents of the host volunteer. In one room there were three of us sleeping, and I had to share an unzipped sleeping bag with one girl who kept taking it from me. That was really cold. And probably the best part of the day (aside from the food and the conversation, of course) was when some friends of mine went to a store to get some bottles of a new beer that had just come out. They approached the shop-woman and said, “How many bottles of that beer do you have in this store?”, and she counted a little before saying, “We have seventeen.” My friends talked some and said, “We'll take all seventeen bottles.” She looked in shock and asked if they were joking. “No,” they said, “we want every bottle in this store.”
I also had one of the classic 'traveling around Moldova' stories in which I was on a bus that took 2.5 hours to travel a distance of fifty miles. I read 120 pages of the new John Grisham book on the way.
- Highlight of my month so far: yesterday, due to an oddity in our school schedule, I was able to leave school after the fourth lesson, at about 12:15. I proceeded to go home and watch Apocalypto in Russian with my host grandpa, who is amazingly bored all the time because there really isn't anything for him to do around here. And we drank beer at the same time. He really liked it, so I then showed him some episodes of the Planet Earth documentary and translated the highlights for him, which he liked even more.
- Mentally, these last two weeks have been the toughest time of the year for the simple facts that 1)It's cold – about fifty degrees in my room at night – and 2)Darkness. I wake up at 7:20 in the morning and it's as dark as it was at 5:00 in the morning in the summer. It makes it mentally very difficult to simply get the energy to get up, especially coupled with the fact that I have to exit from my warm sheets to my cold room. However, after this weekend the days just get longer and longer and by the time that January 9th rolls around for the first day of lessons, things should be better.
- In a bit of tragedy, this week at school we some really bad news. On Wednesday, at an assembly that we have usually once a month, I walked in a little late and found the mood to be a little somber. After a minute or so our director walked in and demanded totally silence, which was a clear sign to me that something was amiss – I then glanced around and saw tears in the eyes of many. Then our director started up and told us how, unfortunately, one girl from tenth grade had died earlier in the day – she had been in a hospital in Chisinau for the last month and a half. Because I don't teach that class I didn't really know her and didn't really know who she was – it wasn't until I got home and talked to my host mom who described the girl to me that I remembered the girl. She was the top student in the class, and I had talked to her only a handful of times in my life. Needless to say, it's a disaster.
- As I've written about before, I'm officially heading out for my next vacation come Friday evening, taking the overnight train to Bucharest with some friends before flying to Cairo (via Amman) on Saturday night, only to return to Chisinau on December 30th, in time for New Year. There is one special silver-lining to this trip. Basically, I'm looking forward to my day in the Romanian capital because every volunteer I know who has been there (with the exception of one) has just despised it and couldn't wait to leave. In a way, I'm excited to dislike the place.
And of course, upon my return I will work hard to post my next entry as soon as I can, hopefully with some pictures included. In the mean time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone . . .
- I can't even begin to describe how totally bored I was here without my computer. There were times that made my bus trip to Moscow look like a amusement park in comparison. Totally brutal. I would come home from school, eat lunch, go for my daily walk around our lake, and then arrive home at 4:30, wondering just how I would be able to kill the six hours between my arrival and my time going to sleep. I did a lot of crossword puzzles, read a book every two days or so, and . . . . that's about it. I watched TV some but my host mom commandeered the remote between 5:30 and 6:30 every day so she could watch Russian soap operas, which were really good language skills for a year ago but now, because my comprehension is almost total, I've come to realize that I just can't stand them. They're amazingly stupid. I couldn't take it anymore. So as I told my parents when my new power cord finally got here last Friday, I felt like I had received a new life. I immediately proceeded to download eighteen podcasts.
- I spent the last two weekends in Chisinau, and they were some of the best weekends I've had in a while. First, two weeks ago we all went to a bar where a cover band of The Doors played. They're Moldovan, and they are amazing. A volunteer actually used to play with them but he left last summer (he was the harmonica player, which they substituted in place of the organ. Fear not, though, as a new harmonica player is in place). It was great. Then last weekend, we celebrated three birthdays together and about thirty of us volunteers all celebrated in a bar together. When there is a mass of us together, there is this energy, this atmosphere, that can't be accurately described or replicated. I was there with a Moldovan girl and I asked her about a dozen times if Moldovan people would do what we were (dancing without music, singing loudly to any and all music played), and she said that as a rule, people absolutely would not behave as we behaved. Of course, as a lot of Moldovans have found, it can be rather refreshing to be around us because we're just so different. She loved it.
- In spite of last weekend, the absolute best thing I've done in a really, really long time happened when three weeks ago when I called some friends whom I haven't talked to in a long, long time. First, my buddy and I called one friend of ours who was a volunteer here last year but left last summer (he just couldn't take it anymore). We talked to him for an hour and a half, which thanks to the Internet cost a grand total of $1.60. Then I called two other friends, one of whom I hadn't talked to since March 15th of this year and the other of which I hadn't spoken to since June 3rd, 2006, the day before I flew out of Minneapolis. I would have called more people but didn't have some numbers and some didn't answer. Believe me when I say that those conversations carried me through all of my problems in school for about two weeks. Just amazing.
- Thankfully, winter has finally arrived to my village. It snowed a lot here on the first Saturday of February last year (I remember that day because it was class reunion Saturday in Moldova), and not again until last week. It came and went in the early part of last week, leaving behind an unprecedented wake of mud in it's tracks. It got to the point that I would put on my galoshes over my tennis shoes just because I couldn't take the fact that they would literally be covered in mud. At one point, in walking home from school, I stepped on a seemingly innocent lump of dirt and had water literally jump up to my knee. I wish the preceding sentence was a joke.
Last Thursday, however, the temperature dropped and the snow started to fall, not stopping until early on Sunday morning. It was just great. On Friday night I was with a friend from Virginia at one of the main grocery stores in Chisinau, waiting for another guy. My friend wanted to wait inside but I insisted on the outdoors. And I refused to stand under the canopy, instead letting the wind and snow blow against me. My friend and I talked for about ten minutes until he told me he just couldn't take it anymore and had to go inside, which we did. Then later we went back to the store, four of us in-total, and spent the ten minute walk to the store throwing snowballs at each-other.
- Thanksgiving, while not being the spectacle it was last year, turned out to be a great time. I went up to the north of Moldova with some friends who threw a little holiday at their house – there were about sixteen of us in total, as well as the parents of the host volunteer. In one room there were three of us sleeping, and I had to share an unzipped sleeping bag with one girl who kept taking it from me. That was really cold. And probably the best part of the day (aside from the food and the conversation, of course) was when some friends of mine went to a store to get some bottles of a new beer that had just come out. They approached the shop-woman and said, “How many bottles of that beer do you have in this store?”, and she counted a little before saying, “We have seventeen.” My friends talked some and said, “We'll take all seventeen bottles.” She looked in shock and asked if they were joking. “No,” they said, “we want every bottle in this store.”
I also had one of the classic 'traveling around Moldova' stories in which I was on a bus that took 2.5 hours to travel a distance of fifty miles. I read 120 pages of the new John Grisham book on the way.
- Highlight of my month so far: yesterday, due to an oddity in our school schedule, I was able to leave school after the fourth lesson, at about 12:15. I proceeded to go home and watch Apocalypto in Russian with my host grandpa, who is amazingly bored all the time because there really isn't anything for him to do around here. And we drank beer at the same time. He really liked it, so I then showed him some episodes of the Planet Earth documentary and translated the highlights for him, which he liked even more.
- Mentally, these last two weeks have been the toughest time of the year for the simple facts that 1)It's cold – about fifty degrees in my room at night – and 2)Darkness. I wake up at 7:20 in the morning and it's as dark as it was at 5:00 in the morning in the summer. It makes it mentally very difficult to simply get the energy to get up, especially coupled with the fact that I have to exit from my warm sheets to my cold room. However, after this weekend the days just get longer and longer and by the time that January 9th rolls around for the first day of lessons, things should be better.
- In a bit of tragedy, this week at school we some really bad news. On Wednesday, at an assembly that we have usually once a month, I walked in a little late and found the mood to be a little somber. After a minute or so our director walked in and demanded totally silence, which was a clear sign to me that something was amiss – I then glanced around and saw tears in the eyes of many. Then our director started up and told us how, unfortunately, one girl from tenth grade had died earlier in the day – she had been in a hospital in Chisinau for the last month and a half. Because I don't teach that class I didn't really know her and didn't really know who she was – it wasn't until I got home and talked to my host mom who described the girl to me that I remembered the girl. She was the top student in the class, and I had talked to her only a handful of times in my life. Needless to say, it's a disaster.
- As I've written about before, I'm officially heading out for my next vacation come Friday evening, taking the overnight train to Bucharest with some friends before flying to Cairo (via Amman) on Saturday night, only to return to Chisinau on December 30th, in time for New Year. There is one special silver-lining to this trip. Basically, I'm looking forward to my day in the Romanian capital because every volunteer I know who has been there (with the exception of one) has just despised it and couldn't wait to leave. In a way, I'm excited to dislike the place.
And of course, upon my return I will work hard to post my next entry as soon as I can, hopefully with some pictures included. In the mean time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone . . .
posted by Andy Buchanan at 5:32 AM
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