Dancing with Moldovans: November 2009

Today I didn't hitchhike, but instead I timed it just right and caught a rutiera (public mini bus) out of the village. I somehow lucked up and got the front seat. Most of the time there are no seats and I'm stuck standing; hence, why I like to hitchhike. As we were pulling away from the village, I saw a fish hanging in the road. No kidding, there was literally a fish hanging halfway across the road on a stick. Apparently, a lady had caught a good sized fish from our lake, stuck the fish on a long stick, and tied the base of the stick to the guard rails on our bridge. I hadn't seen excellent business marketing in Moldova until today. Every car or bus that drove across the bridge had no choice but to see the fish. Sure enough, our bus driver sees the fish and whips our rutiera full of people clear across two lanes to pull over to the lady. I could hear some folks start mumbling in the back of the bus. I guess he didn't like the price, because he dropped the gearstick into low gear and started speeding away. Immediately, three bunicas (grandmas) leaned over my shoulder to ask the driver the price. One bunica didn't hear what he said, so she hit me on the shoulder and said "cît costa mei?", which is village speak for "how much does it cost boy?"

A fost prea scump.

Life is good in Moldova. Winter is coming fast. It snowed a little last week. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I haven't changed my long john pants in two weeks. When it's freezing outside, only one room of your house is heated by burning wood, you don't have running water, and you have to hand wash clothes, you seem to forget about how dirty your clothes are. For all honestly though, I don't think I smell.

As for language, one day my Romanian is unstoppable, and the next day I can't say much of anything. Living in a small village is leading me to speaking Romanian like I live in a small village. I started my Peace Corps service learning clean and proper Romanian, but my village of 2,000 people has quickly changed that. The more language I learn in the village, the more of a hick I sound like when I go into the cities of Moldova. It's a little like leaving South Carolina and visiting my buddies in the Northeast; however, to them I only have a strong accent. The villagers in Moldova use many different nouns, verbs, and phrases on top of having a different accent than the folks living in the cities of Moldova. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy speaking the village talk with people in the cities. Most of the city folks in Moldova grew up in villages, moved into the cities, and cleaned up their language. Most of the people I encounter seem to like it when I pull out the country talk....maybe it hits close to home.

Hitch-hiking is prevalent around my village, as well in the rest of Moldova, so I usually hitch a ride to and from the nearest town when I need to go in to the open market to shop. Somehow, me and about 9 other Moldovans ended up hitching a ride from the police......in the back of the Paddy Wagon. As the 10 of us sat in a circle in the back facing each other, everyone seemed to be smiling. I think it was because we weren't handcuffed. Someone should have had a guitar.

Here's a few kids that live on my street. I had to present my village at a conference with Peace Corps, so I put the kids to work and had them draw maps and pictures of our village. If I would have known that they were giving me bunny ears in the pic, I would have slammed a kid.

Hardly none of them knew where America was on the map, and only one or two knew where Moldova was. They all knew where Russia was.

Kickin' it with some PC volunteers in my raion (district). We had an Arabic knock-off version of Monopoly that has taken into account years of inflation (big bill was 50,000). Martin, the guy to the left, is convinced that the utilities are a good buy. He had a lucky game with them, but I'm still convinced to stay away from the utilities.

We had two more weeks of training with Peace Corps, so I went back and stayed with my first host family in Milestii Mici. It's been a few months since I last saw them, and my Romanian has developed a good bit, so they were happy that I could actually speak now. As you can see in the picture, they sent me home with a bottle of homemade wine in my hand.

The Placinta's at Milestii Mici. My host mom and dad went and bought a pig the first day I got there, so for the first few days we toasted our shots of wine by saying "pentru porcul sa creasca mare" or "for the pig to grow big".

After doing a little work in the village of Cotova, we rode in the back of Vloidea's big blue truck through the village to go to a bar for a coffee and beer.