Cumatria

As far as personal important events in a person's life goes weddings always come first in most peoples' mind, which stands true for Moldova as well as for America. However in Moldova there is another event that takes a close second and that is a cumatria.

I don't have very much experience with cumatrias since I haven't been to one but I do know that it is an event held in honor of a child usually before they are old enough to attend kindergarten. My host mother and her family had a cumatria for her 4-year-old grandson last summer while I was at the summer camp in Ukraine so I was unable to attend. Since it is May and my days in Moldova are steadily dwindling my chances of attending a cumatria have also been dwindling...that is until a car pulled up one day last week with two younger people inside who introduced themselves and offered my host mother and me a glass of wine in honor of their daughter and invited us to a cumatria. They left as quick as they came,  off to invite the next set of people with a personally delivered wine invitation.

I asked my  host mother after they left what happens at a cumatria and she explained that it is very similar to a wedding. Everyone wears their nicest clothes and a banquet hall is rented out with lots of food and wine. It is also customary for the guests to give a rather large financial gift just as guests are expected to do for a wedding. Though my host mother was quick to tell me that they aren't nearly as long as weddings. Instead of it starting at 6 in the evening and ending at 6 in the morning like a Moldovan wedding, it starts at 6 in the evening and ends at 4 in the morning, much more manageable.

My host mother has also informed me that she has named our new bunny rabbit Musia, and just like the dog's name, Lyalya, I have no ability to pronounce it correctly.

Easter of the Dead

My host mother popped the question yesterday as to whether I wanted to get up early and head out with her to visit her family in the neighboring village for Paște Blajinilor, or Memorial Easter, and since I had nothing else to do I jumped at the chance to get out of my village.

We got up at 6:00 drank some coffee and left the house by 6:30, making our way through our back garden and across the hillside to meet up at about the halfway point with her brother-in-law who gave us a ride to his house in a horse drawn cart. I was very glad I made the decision to make the trip simply based on the beautiful weather and beautiful scenery, but the caruta ride was the cherry on top.

Like last year we went to the cemetery and paid our respects to those who had passed by passing out gifts in their memory and having the priest bless their graves. Since everyone in the village comes to the cemetery to celebrate it is an opportunity for everyone to meet up with people they might not have seen all year so there were a lot of people making their rounds greeting people and usually offering a gift they had placed on top of the grave of a love one or a glass of wine in their memory.

After the cemetery we ate a big lunch together with her family and eventually caught a ride with one of her relatives that were heading in our direction and they dropped us off at the intersection of the road to our village and we hitch hiked the rest of the way.

I am also happy to inform you that we now have a new member of the household, a big white fluffy bunny rabbit. My host mother is retiring this year and said she used to have loads of rabbits but she got rid of them when she started to have too much work to do and not enough time for more house work. So now that she is looking forward to having more time on her hands she wants to start another rabbit farm. Although she only has one rabbit at the moment and I'm pretty sure she will need at least two...but I guess that will resolve itself soon enough.

Pictures

A Date with Myself

As my weeklong vacation is slowly coming to a close I finally got around to taking a trip to the capital and turning in some paper work and printing out a few things. I tried putting it off since I was afraid of the crowds of people I would encounter on all forms of public transportation since last Sunday was Orthodox Easter and this Sunday is the Easter of the dead. Though I was delightfully surprised yesterday when I made it down to the bus in the early morning and encountered a normal sized crowd to Falesti and was even more surprised to be the first person to get on the bus waiting to head to Chisinau. As usual I planned out a host of things I needed to accomplish and because the train from Chisinau no longer stops at my village I figured I would just end up catching up with the other volunteers in town and spending the night and heading back by bus in the morning...except there weren't any other volunteers when I got to the Peace Corps office. Which is unusual in and of itself but even more so considering it was midday on a Saturday. I am going to assume that everyone thought like I did that the crowds would be too much to handle or perhaps they planned on staying in the village for the Easter of the dead celebrations. Either way I was left with the prospects of having to find something to do on my own to occupy myself for the entire day and pay money to spend the night a hostel, which didn't excite me too much. So just on a hunch I checked the train schedule and realized I could take the modern train to the town of Ungheni and then wait 2 hours to take the old train which still stops at my village. I normally wouldn't be too excited with waiting around for 2 hours but since I haven't been to Ungheni before I might as well undergo the trip simply to say I had been there.

I had to wait about 4 hours until the modern train left Chisinau and even trying to fill that amount of time was pretty hard, I think I take for granted how much less things there are to do when there is no one else to do it with. I ended up getting lunch at a restaurant since fast food options are limited in Chisinau and I had more then enough time to kill, though that meant I would be at my own table by myself which I hate doing but it's a lot more bearable in warmer weather when you can sit outside and read a book while you wait on your food. I also managed to finally take a leisurely stroll through the open air market instead of my normally very quick run through to grab what I need and get out. I hate buying things in a hurry and if I go anywhere looking to buy something and the clock is ticking I will never leave with anything other then what I went in looking for, no matter what catches my eye along the way. So it was nice to finally pick up quite a few things that I never really 'needed' but had always wanted to buy.

I made it to the train station about an hour before the train was scheduled to leave and walked up to the convenient little booth that sits outside of the actual train station that makes it easy to just walk up to the booth pass in your money and get a ticket. However, this time according the sign on the booth (and according to the very loud woman who yelled at a man when he tried to purchase a ticket) I had to go inside to buy the ticket which I thought was odd, since normally you only need to go inside to buy international tickets. But then I remembered that the new train came with a new ticket  with a printed seat number and so it requires a fancy printer and the only printers are inside.

There were three windows that I could use to buy tickets with three people assigned to work them, so naturally there was only one person doing any work while the other two were literally chatting by the water cooler and I would assume merely switched places throughout the day. As I waited in line it got even more frustrating as the woman working the window kept stopping any transactions to answer her cell phone and just walk off. When I finally got to the window and got my ticket having waited at least 10 minutes for something that normally took me less then 30 seconds I walked away wondering if the hassle of having to go through all of that is worth having a new train, especially one that doesn't even stop at my village. *deep breaths* I guess that's the price of progress.

I found it a lot harder to complain though once I made it to Ungheni an hour quicker than it would normally take. Since I had been reading and we traveled there so quickly I nearly missed my stop and when I got off in a hurry I was slightly turned around since normally the old train always stops at the domestic train station (which is on the left) but for some unknown reason the new train stops at the international station (which is on the right) and since I didn't recognize it I wasn't quite sure if I was even at the right town until I found a sign.

I had two hours to stroll through Ungheni and see all the sights and the only thing I had to do in the mean time was find the other train station on my way. I ended up in a park about 10 minutes later after having seen all of Ungheni, finding the train station, and buying food from a super market. I wasn't walking particularly fast either, Ungheni just wasn't quite the metropolis I had been expecting. There was also something about it though that reminded me so much of being back in the US. I can't even really explain why but walking down the street just gave the impression of walking down any street in small town America to me. While I was enjoying the deja vu I was feeling walking down the street I found a park with a working water fountain and a bouncy castle (the presence of bouncy castles being the chief measure I use to judge all parks) I sat down on a bench and tried reading some more of my book but couldn't help but people watch. There were so many people in the park enjoying the sunshine; parents with strollers, kids with skates and skate boards, huddles of teenagers snickering amongst themselves. It was so quiet and peaceful that I felt bad when I finally had to get up and make my way to catch my train.

I finally made it back at around 10 o'clock and ate a second dinner before falling straight to sleep. I still feel so tired from yesterday that I am having a hard time deciding if I want to get up early tomorrow morning and walk to another village with my host mother to celebrate Easter of the dead with her family.

Orthodox Easter Round II

COS Conference

No matter how much you enjoy your Peace Corps service every volunteer is always looking forward to their COS conference. COS stands for Close-of-Service and essentially is a three day retreat at a Moldovan hotel near the Nistru River to be informed of all the information related to preparing to leave Moldova, including the readjustment allowance, health insurance, deciding on whether to have Peace Corps plan my trip home or to take Cash-in-Lieu, getting a job and resume writing help, and most importantly how to handle the onslaught of paperwork that will need to be completed along with signatures in order to actually get out of the country. We also had our LPI, or Language Proficiency Interview (Peace Corps, and in general all government agencies, love their acronyms) and according to my results I now speak Romanian at an Advanced-Low level, which is only two steps away from the highest designation of Superior!

As much as I have grown accustomed to Moldova and acclimated to the culture it still feels like such a relief to know that I made it to the finish line, a sense of accomplishment to be finishing the full two years of my service. And of course along with that accomplishment came the added benefit of getting out of work for a few days and spending time with a group of Americans I have spent a turbulent 2 years with.

Peace Corps Moldova 26

Which reminds me. The director of Peace Corps Moldova reminded us of some interesting figures. Of the initial 64 people to be invited only 55 arrived in Moldova, 52 made it through training to swear in as an official volunteer and 34 volunteers made it the COS conference 2 years later. There are also 4 volunteers who are extending for a third year.

English Education Volunteers and our Program Managers

Even though we lost more than a third of the volunteers we started out with no one from my training village has left early.

Actually getting to the capital to catch the bus to the hotel was a odyssey in and of itself. Recently the train that runs from Chisinau to my village has stopped running and has been replaced with a new express train that only stops at bigger towns and not smaller villages. As I needed to be in the capital by 11 to get on the bus the only thing that could get me there in time was the new express train. But in order to get to the next town over in order to catch it I needed to ride one of the older trains that still stop at my village but only run between Balti and Ungheni in order to get to my Raion center Falesti. I had to get up at 5 in order to get on the train by 5:50 traveled in the opposite direction of Chisinau to my raion, got there at 6:10 and had to wait till 7 for the new train to finally pick me up and take me right past my village again at 7:20. But the train was well worth the hassle. It was built in Germany and must have cost quite a pretty penny since it had LED lights and signs, along with LCD TVs and automatic push-to-open doors. And even though the train didn't stop at the smaller villages it still announced them as we went past and it felt so weird to be watching TV while the disembodied voice tells me we are now passing the village of Scumpia.

I needed to be in Chisinau to catch the bus because the hotel we were staying at was not actually in the capital it was a little bit on the outside in a small town called Vadul Lui Voda which is situated along the Nistru River. On the other side of the Nistru River is actually the breakaway region of Moldova called Transnistria that is not recognised by Moldova or most other countries in the world but operates its own government. Because America does not have diplomatic ties to Transnistria, volunteers are prohibited from traveling there and disobeying that rule can land you a quick ticket back to the USA. So it was quite a forbidden pleasure to suck up the sun along the Nistru a few meters away from a place  where Soviet era tanks still stand at the border ready for action. I even dipped my feet in the water though I regretted that choice not long after as I walked back up the river bank my feet literally caked in mud.

Map of Moldova with the places mentioned highlighted. Transnistria is also shown as the gray area on the right side of the map. 

Now that my COS conference is out of the way I am starting to run out of things to look forward to other then my COS date which is only 80 days away. I still have a solid month of teaching, a week of Easter vacation, English Week, and the arrival of the next group of volunteers in June.

I also have an album of all the pictures from the conference on Facebook.

Is This a Weather Blog?

I keep meaning to write a new post but whenever I sit down to do it the only thing I can think to write about is the weather which is really the only thing that changes even if it isn't the most exciting topic to discuss. 

As I've mentioned spring hasn't really been too much like spring this year with cold weather lasting well past the equinox and at the start of April we had a week of beautiful almost 60 degree weather and it appeared as if we had finally shaken off the the chains of winter weather so when I wrote my last blog post with the praises of April I was very unsettled to wake up on Monday this week to 30 degree temperatures in the morning that only raised to 40 degrees by midday. However disappointing this was the weather in and of itself is not a big deal. It was when I got to school and found out that schools are not allowed to waste money on heating after April 1st...which was fine last week...but not so good this week.  And it's not just the schools, a few other people who work in office buildings or have apartments in the bigger cities also found that they would not be getting any more heat. So while America has been having a heat wave, or at least the part of America I am from, all of Moldova has been wearing their winter coats inside to keep warm. Luckily enough for me, however, I have a wood stove so at least when I go home I have a warm bed to sleep in. Just another one of those moments I'm sure I'll look back on and I'll have a great story to tell when I run into a teacher complaining about their classroom being 65 instead of 72.

Go With the Flow

In direct contrast to the snow we got last week the weather this week has been perfect. Sunshine and warmer weather is finally here to stay even if it took its sweet time getting here. The changing in the weather also means a return to the fields to begin the preparations for planting this years crops. After the monotony of winter sitting indoors to avoid the cold with nothing to do, the long list of things to complete starts to seem a bit daunting until you walk outside and feel the sun on your skin again. It all seems worth it after all.

The end is near for the school year as students in the 9th and 12th grades begin to take pretests to practice for their final exit exams. Even though only the 9th and 12th grades are taking them the pretests have wrecked havoc on the day-to-day school function. Two teachers are present during for each grade and the tests last for half of the day which means at least four teachers on any given day will not be able to have class and of course the 9th and 12th forms will also be busy with tests. For me this hasn't caused to much of a change but in order to conduct the test each student is given their own desk to combat their ability to cheat from their neighbor. In Moldovan classrooms, however, the desks are designed to be shared by two students. So in order to have enough desks to fill the room for the students taking the pretest all but four of the tables from my classroom were taken to another room. Luckily we were able to find two other cast off tables that weren't being used and found a way to sit 20 students around 6 tables. Everything was going pretty well until about 10 minutes into my first class when a group of students came looking to scavenge another of our desks leaving us with only five. Sometimes you take for granted how used you are to a routine until something comes spices up your life a little. And as the school year winds down I think not having a routine is going to start becoming the norm for me which is going to make it a lot easy to count down those last few days.

Taken with my laptop camera so its not the best quality.