pigs, Park Place, and paddy wagons

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.

Three American volunteers, three Moldovan villagers, and a spontaneous meal and drinks on top of chairs in the middle of the living room.

Funky looking Soviet tractor that refuses to stop working.

Small flour mill close to my house in my village.

Typical village houses



I'm going into Balti to stay with another volunteer this weekend. He has a toilet, running water, and a bathtub. Holler if you hear me.