Costesti

Hey Everybody!

This is officially my first blog as a Peace Corps Trainee! Rejoice!

After all that grief you all saw me go through in the application process I am now in the last leg of it. If I pass my language exam in August (its a ten week course to fluency) I will be a full fledged volunteer. The other part of my training is how to teach ESL, so that when I'm displaced into another village, the one I'll stay in for two years, I'll be able to teach all their children.

As I talk to other volunteers who have been here a year, there is not one who doesn't love it. Apparently the people think we're odd for jogging, but they are in no way snobbish about our abusing their language as we struggle to learn it! So far I've been met with nothing but patient encouragement. I try to say something and they correct me, say the words super slow a couple times so I get all the correct dipthongs and "ts"s ans "sh"s. I didn't know it was so possible to have "sh" as every other sound in a sentence. Ok, not that much but the phrase for "so so" is "asa si asa" with each s being an sh. I know that seems easy, but its rough when youre in rapid conversation.

I'm now living with my first host family at my training sight. The village (it seems to be a big enough cluster of houses to be a town, and there is more than two schools and churchs that I know of already, but it's still called a village. According to one of the other volunteers there is a disco in town too, but, still, its a village. I have to find out what the definition is there. The town's name is Costesti, but the "i" is mostly silent, very short, but I haven't figured out yet how to make it that short without just dropping it. The second s is one of the sh sound, but my kepboard doesnt romanian letters, only russian, so I can't put the little tail on it's s to make it the sh letter.

Wow, did that make sense?

I'm learning Romanian like no-body's business. Loving every scrap of it. Its the closest thing alive to original latin, so it looks french, pronounced in Italian and spoken with a Russian accent!

Every family, it seems, has a little farm in their front yard. My family, for example, has a family of turkeys, 15 yr old grapevines (yes we drink wine all the time, barrel is in the "bitch" or cellar), what I think my host mother said is water melon, a cherry tree (its cherry season!) and a couple other things I haven't yet identified.

I'll check in again soon! My family has internet so it should be pretty prequent.