(Not) Making Sense of it All
There are many aspects of being an American here in Moldova, many parts of life, that can make a born and bred Western like myself crazy. And I'm not talking about amenities like running water and a toilet inside. I'm talking about day-to-day goings on that simply make no sense and that, if added together, can drive someone like me nuts.
The most obvious examples of this happen in Chisinau, where being in the capital of a European nation makes some people and establishments feel like they are more important than they really are. For example, a few months ago I went to meet with a girl in Chisinau who had spent last summer in America and who wanted to talk about her experiences there. She told me to meet at a certain hotel in the center, a lower-class place in any other European nation but one here that is just middle-class (it costs twenty-five dollars a night), and a hotel that we Peace Corps volunteers are very familiar with because we hold a fair amount of conferences there. Upon walking through the door I started to scan the lobby for the girl but before I got too far I (dressed in normal every-day clothes) immediately had the guard at the door ask me in Russian for what reason I had come and what I wanted there. I told him I was just looking for a person but that is really beside the point – the point is that, at this little hotel in this little capital, I was grilled by this odd guard (I should have just looked at him oddly and answered something in English). Compare this reaction to the one we had at the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, where my two friends and I walked in also dressed like normal tourists and which where a room costs 125 dollars a night - were greeted with nothing but smiles and welcomes when our only goal was to access the ATM there.
Or even in my village we have two stores side-by-side (THE only two stores), both of which work the exact same hours; even their breaks are the same. Am I crazy or does this not make a whole lot of sense – shouldn't they tier their breaks so at least one is always open? And to make matters worse, both choose to close at the one time of day that would likely be the highest in traffic, right at two o'clock in the afternoon when school gets out and a mass of one hundred hungry and thirsty kids goes by the two places that can placate them.
These two previous observations are just tips of the iceberg, just little examples of goings on that can really start to bother someone like me. But recently, the government raised the price of basic transport as high as fifty-percent, all in one hike. From the moment I first got to my village in June 2006 to the week before last the cost to get to Chisinau, one way, was 25 lei (about 2 dollars). Then, all of a sudden, last week they raised the price to 34 lei, which on one hand is only 75 cents but on the other hand is 1)Quite the percentage raise, and 2) Means that the passenger pays an extra 18 lei for a round trip, around 75 percent of the original total cost and enough to discourage many people on a strict budget to even think about such a trip (and this is just an example from my village – similar hikes occurred everywhere here). Now, while I realize that the cost of gas has gone up a lot in the last twenty months and that such a rate hike was likely totally necessary, but in most places in the world it would have been a gradual, incremental hike done month-by-month or something along those lines. Here? All at once. Just another line on the list . . .
Notes:
- Last Saturday some of my friends and I, in an effort to add a little culture to our usual weekends, decided to spent 2.50$ and attend the theater in Chisinau for a two-hour performance. The bad news is that it was all in Romanian, leaving me in a state of dis-comprehension that was tough to get out of. The good news is that my time here has given my mind the ability to fill vast amounts of free time with nothingness. Teacher meetings, four-hour bus rides that go only 100 miles, hours of conferences that repeat information for the hundredth time – compared to such events, the play was a feast for the senses, far more entertaining that my usual mind-occupancy tasks such as counting the amount of times in my life I've flown or the amount of US capitals I've been to or naming all the coaches of every NFL team as well as many coordinators as I could. This was
- I've written before about the life-cycle of animals here and how they come and go so frequently that it doesn't really make any sense to get too emotionally attached to them. Farm animals are the ones who naturally go the the quickest – I've even refrained from naming our pig because while I talk to her if she's out eating I also know her days are numbered (in regards to her, I've maintained so emotionally dis-attached that I would be her executioner in a heartbeat if given the chance – it would be one of the highlights of my service too).
However, this cycle applies to 'pets' as well. I wrote back in September how my favorite cat was ran over by a car, the one named by my parents last June. A new cat had since taken his place as the one I preferred, but when I woke up this last Wednesday I walked past the barn and saw her dead as a doorknob, eyes wide open but splayed out on her side, body intact and not moving. She was fine the night before and in the morning, dead. No one really has any idea what happened either. I'm 33% sad, 33% indifferent (it was just a cat), and 33% of me is laughing at the oddness of the situation. And if any of this sounds cold – as I'm sure it maybe does – you just have to realize that this rapidity of life and death is something that all of us here just get used to.
- Last week my friend and I had a plan we had been working about for a few weeks; we were going to do a surprise visit to her village, to just show up out of the blue. The only catch was that we wanted to call her host-family and get their permission first, thinking it would be merely a formality and that we would be welcomed with open arms. So I called the house one day when I knew our friend would be at school and when the host-mom answered I told her that it was likely a little strange but that I didn't want the American, that I wanted to talk to the mom herself and explained the situation, again waiting for the expected welcoming words of invitation. So you can imagine my shock when after my suggestion she responded with a, “well . . . this Saturday will be difficult. It'll be better another time.” I was stunned with disbelief and the only thing I could mutter was, “OK . . . . well then, we won't come on Saturday.” I went from being 100 percent happy to 100 percent incredulous in a few seconds.
- If you want to watch something new about Moldova and have thirty minutes to kill, go to YouTube and search “BBC Places that don't exist Moldova” and you'll find a three part series, each ten minutes, about a guy from the BBC who goes to the breakaway region of Transnestria. It's really interesting to watch and you'll also get some images of the capital city here. For example, the park where they have the ceremony that the woman crashes in right in the center – I see it all the time and all of us here use it as a common meeting place.
- I spent last weekend in the village of a friend in the north of Moldova, about 120 miles (or four hours) from Chisinau, going up there with another girl in my group for a trip that was six weeks in the making. Before we went, however, we decided to play a little joke on our host. We sent him two frantic text messages telling him how the bus was full and the driver wouldn't let us stand up because of a police crackdown; we then told him how we were going to the cheapest hotel in Chisinau and would roll in the next day (he told me that the first bus leaves at 8:00 AM – I said that was too early just to rub it in). He naturally panicked and the girl I was with couldn't keep it together on the phone so I, being the colder blooded of the two of us, had to take over. It was classic – we kept him on a string for a long, long while. It was so great that even when we got to his village it was clear that he was still seething. It was one of the top five jokes I've ever perpetuated in my life, and despite the fact that my buddy hated it, I would do it all again. In a second.
The most obvious examples of this happen in Chisinau, where being in the capital of a European nation makes some people and establishments feel like they are more important than they really are. For example, a few months ago I went to meet with a girl in Chisinau who had spent last summer in America and who wanted to talk about her experiences there. She told me to meet at a certain hotel in the center, a lower-class place in any other European nation but one here that is just middle-class (it costs twenty-five dollars a night), and a hotel that we Peace Corps volunteers are very familiar with because we hold a fair amount of conferences there. Upon walking through the door I started to scan the lobby for the girl but before I got too far I (dressed in normal every-day clothes) immediately had the guard at the door ask me in Russian for what reason I had come and what I wanted there. I told him I was just looking for a person but that is really beside the point – the point is that, at this little hotel in this little capital, I was grilled by this odd guard (I should have just looked at him oddly and answered something in English). Compare this reaction to the one we had at the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, where my two friends and I walked in also dressed like normal tourists and which where a room costs 125 dollars a night - were greeted with nothing but smiles and welcomes when our only goal was to access the ATM there.
Or even in my village we have two stores side-by-side (THE only two stores), both of which work the exact same hours; even their breaks are the same. Am I crazy or does this not make a whole lot of sense – shouldn't they tier their breaks so at least one is always open? And to make matters worse, both choose to close at the one time of day that would likely be the highest in traffic, right at two o'clock in the afternoon when school gets out and a mass of one hundred hungry and thirsty kids goes by the two places that can placate them.
These two previous observations are just tips of the iceberg, just little examples of goings on that can really start to bother someone like me. But recently, the government raised the price of basic transport as high as fifty-percent, all in one hike. From the moment I first got to my village in June 2006 to the week before last the cost to get to Chisinau, one way, was 25 lei (about 2 dollars). Then, all of a sudden, last week they raised the price to 34 lei, which on one hand is only 75 cents but on the other hand is 1)Quite the percentage raise, and 2) Means that the passenger pays an extra 18 lei for a round trip, around 75 percent of the original total cost and enough to discourage many people on a strict budget to even think about such a trip (and this is just an example from my village – similar hikes occurred everywhere here). Now, while I realize that the cost of gas has gone up a lot in the last twenty months and that such a rate hike was likely totally necessary, but in most places in the world it would have been a gradual, incremental hike done month-by-month or something along those lines. Here? All at once. Just another line on the list . . .
Notes:
- Last Saturday some of my friends and I, in an effort to add a little culture to our usual weekends, decided to spent 2.50$ and attend the theater in Chisinau for a two-hour performance. The bad news is that it was all in Romanian, leaving me in a state of dis-comprehension that was tough to get out of. The good news is that my time here has given my mind the ability to fill vast amounts of free time with nothingness. Teacher meetings, four-hour bus rides that go only 100 miles, hours of conferences that repeat information for the hundredth time – compared to such events, the play was a feast for the senses, far more entertaining that my usual mind-occupancy tasks such as counting the amount of times in my life I've flown or the amount of US capitals I've been to or naming all the coaches of every NFL team as well as many coordinators as I could. This was
- I've written before about the life-cycle of animals here and how they come and go so frequently that it doesn't really make any sense to get too emotionally attached to them. Farm animals are the ones who naturally go the the quickest – I've even refrained from naming our pig because while I talk to her if she's out eating I also know her days are numbered (in regards to her, I've maintained so emotionally dis-attached that I would be her executioner in a heartbeat if given the chance – it would be one of the highlights of my service too).
However, this cycle applies to 'pets' as well. I wrote back in September how my favorite cat was ran over by a car, the one named by my parents last June. A new cat had since taken his place as the one I preferred, but when I woke up this last Wednesday I walked past the barn and saw her dead as a doorknob, eyes wide open but splayed out on her side, body intact and not moving. She was fine the night before and in the morning, dead. No one really has any idea what happened either. I'm 33% sad, 33% indifferent (it was just a cat), and 33% of me is laughing at the oddness of the situation. And if any of this sounds cold – as I'm sure it maybe does – you just have to realize that this rapidity of life and death is something that all of us here just get used to.
- Last week my friend and I had a plan we had been working about for a few weeks; we were going to do a surprise visit to her village, to just show up out of the blue. The only catch was that we wanted to call her host-family and get their permission first, thinking it would be merely a formality and that we would be welcomed with open arms. So I called the house one day when I knew our friend would be at school and when the host-mom answered I told her that it was likely a little strange but that I didn't want the American, that I wanted to talk to the mom herself and explained the situation, again waiting for the expected welcoming words of invitation. So you can imagine my shock when after my suggestion she responded with a, “well . . . this Saturday will be difficult. It'll be better another time.” I was stunned with disbelief and the only thing I could mutter was, “OK . . . . well then, we won't come on Saturday.” I went from being 100 percent happy to 100 percent incredulous in a few seconds.
- If you want to watch something new about Moldova and have thirty minutes to kill, go to YouTube and search “BBC Places that don't exist Moldova” and you'll find a three part series, each ten minutes, about a guy from the BBC who goes to the breakaway region of Transnestria. It's really interesting to watch and you'll also get some images of the capital city here. For example, the park where they have the ceremony that the woman crashes in right in the center – I see it all the time and all of us here use it as a common meeting place.
- I spent last weekend in the village of a friend in the north of Moldova, about 120 miles (or four hours) from Chisinau, going up there with another girl in my group for a trip that was six weeks in the making. Before we went, however, we decided to play a little joke on our host. We sent him two frantic text messages telling him how the bus was full and the driver wouldn't let us stand up because of a police crackdown; we then told him how we were going to the cheapest hotel in Chisinau and would roll in the next day (he told me that the first bus leaves at 8:00 AM – I said that was too early just to rub it in). He naturally panicked and the girl I was with couldn't keep it together on the phone so I, being the colder blooded of the two of us, had to take over. It was classic – we kept him on a string for a long, long while. It was so great that even when we got to his village it was clear that he was still seething. It was one of the top five jokes I've ever perpetuated in my life, and despite the fact that my buddy hated it, I would do it all again. In a second.
posted by Andy Buchanan at 2:04 AM
3 Comments:
Lol. Makes new york seem easy to live in.
Andy,
Unless we move to a farm I think you'll miss the animals and their sometimes friendly and even seemingly intelligent faces. Compared to the sadly blank looks you'll find on a typical city bus it makes you wonder if there is something about this precious but brief experience on earth that may be being wasted.
The observation about the stores' opening hours is great, somehow it fits in with the security guard's suspicions and the "This Saturday will be difficult" comment. It's a collective mindset that probably won't change.
I just saw a short article that the oldest human habitation ever found was in Moldova, it was about 40,000 years old. They think it was made by Mammoth hunters because the structure was built of their bones. This is where you live ! Continuous habitation.... It makes sense for as your host Mom said the best soil is in Moldova and ancient man, while not farmers, would find it easiest to live there.
What a place !
Dad
People should read this.
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