Easter

Easter this year was very late. Like last year was pretty early. Easter, I will never understand the uber-pagan timing of it all. The third Sunday after the first full moon in Spring. Is the first day of spring the equinox? March 1^st, like it officially is here. Some 21^st of a spring-ish month? Who decided this? Where is the sense?

Point being, for some reason, despite the lateness in the season in 2011, the weather was still dictating two-arm load fires at Easter this year. It was cold. Thank our self-determination my family came. I’d have been very cold had two toasty 17 year olds not been squished onto my king size cupboard bed with me. Mom got to stay in the nice little winter room with the soba door, desk and comfy, double- mattressed, sprung bed. We were a merry company.

The family, these three women, had a beautiful Jane Austen experience here.

We spent two nights in Chisinau with my favorite apartment landlord, Lilia. Even though she thinks I’m named Jessica, and is chronically late for key exchange meetings, she is a darling who was quite charmed by my blonde cohort. During the day we lunched at an overly themed French café with a couple other volunteers with considerably more qualifications for professional life than me, ate delicious food, walked around, saw the dirty and the pretty parts of Chisinau and rented a car.

Driving home was exactly as confusing as you could imagine it, though Mom liked the communal use of the road, and even amused by the potholes.

Family meeting family at home here in Balatina was smooth and fun. We blondes moved as a unit until Mom met Bunica (and hit it off great) and the twins met the babies of the house—a couple dozen goslings and a 3 day old kitten. They learned about the outdoor toilet, and shoe etiquette. Mom, by virtue of being a learned linguist understood much conversation. Greta by virtue of having a natural ear for language instantly pronounced many words correctly. By the time they left they had good little 20 word Romanian vocabularies! Maria, Laurentiu, and the local babas were all very impressed.

They came to a day of school. Only half the school was there, but the half that was did little but stare at my blonde Amazonian family the whole time. I hear of little else from those who saw and met them since. “So beautiful!” “So like you!” “Your mother is like another sister!” etc.

Everyday we went to a different masa. Friday night: Renata. Saturday night: bar. Sunday: Home. Monday: Natalia. This is why dad urges us all to diet at home, so when vacations roll around , why, yes! You CAN sit and eat for 4 hours a day and comsume vast amounts of alcohol along the way.

I forget how shocking wine/beer/moonshine/vodka at every meal is for white-bread protestant Americans. Elise, it turns out, is the sweetest giggly drunk ever. Yep, corrupting the youth. Corrupting in the name of cultural integration. My students, with whom we hung out, were amazed the girls had never drunk beer before, or tasted rachiu/tuika.

We left the bar to go to church for an hour at midnight, to clean the air and bless the surroundings with some other of my students, then returned to the bar until I felt the twins had sufficiently integrated. As the bar was packed with no one but my older students, and some visiting who’d graduated last year, they accepted Elise and Greta immediately and absorbed them easily into all the hugging, hand shaking/kissing, joke cracking, seed eating, shot taking, hole peeing greatness that I love about them.

Sunday morning we helped Maria lay the table, played with the goslings and kitten, lounged, and then ate all afternoon.

Monday was much the same. Leaving the homestead was full of photos and Laurentiu produced various bottles of alcohol for Mom to smuggle back home for a taste of Moldova for Dad and Kelsie who were not here.

We returned to Chisinau that day by way of Nat’s family’s house in Glodeni. There, we got stuck in a funeral procession and talked to a shop keeper so heartily he gave us free plastic roses! Even though I felt more conspicuous than ever, and was on higher-than-average alert for scariness, their big blonde presence ended in more happy meetings than thievery.

Overall, it was a brilliant Easter.