PC HQ

The Peace Corps Headquarters is a great big white building in the capital of Moldova. I like it very much. The top floor is the volunteer lounge, where I am currently. It has internet and AC, flushing toilets, showers and english speaking people, unlike everywhere else in the country.

I'm almost done with my training. At first I couldn't wait for training to be over, I wanted to get out and be on my own, away from these other Americans, What am I here for? etc. etc. But in the last week I've finally started feeling close to a couple of them and will be sad to see them go. Ah well. I really can't wait to start doing the things I wanna do here.

I'm starting to plan my secondary projects in my head already. As an English teacher, teachingEnglish is my primary project. In addition to that we're encouraged to find a need in our community and fulfill it as a secondary project. My ideas are: debate team, school newspaper, contradance club.

I have two teachers I'm going to be working with in my village, Renata and Natalia, and when I told them I'd been a journalist, they were exceedingly jealous. Its their dream to be journalists and its almost impossible to do in this country. This is where the newspaper comes in. I feel it will be a good thing for the students, obviously, but if I can teach two very intelligent young women (they are 23 and 25, by far the youngest english teachers any volunteer will be working with in the whold country) how to operate and maintain a newspaper, I will feel doubly useful and proud!

IE. if anyone wants to send me newspapers, school or otherwise -- please do so.

My Romanian comes along nicely. Its really noticable to me how my english speaking skill deteriorate as I get better at Romanian. My sentences all get restructured into Romanian grammar and some words just dissapear completlely. I think I may have plateaued in my learning curve, but that just means my sentences are becoming more consistently good.

Unfortunately, I am in a place where I must vacate to free up a rare computer for other volunteers so I cannot write you all emails, but I love you all and hope to write to you personally soon.

Open Office

Hey kids...

Since I have limited internet access I've been keeping blogs on my computer, saving them on my flash drive, and ready to load them onto a computer with internet! huzzah.

Except I can convert Windows 2000 Word files into Open Office, which is what I'm running with on Alix the 10" Wonder, but cannot get them to open into Windows 2000 Word again on the internet computer.

Sorry.

In the mean time know that, in abbreviated form:

+ I can't drink the water here. I have special equipment.
+ The buses are small, very full, cheap and dependable.
+ Gummies = a recreational drug for self medicinal purposes
+ Summer is delightful
+ Teambuilding exercises reveal more about yourself than they teach you about teamwork ... quoi?
+ Baby ducks are adorable (its all manipulation, I know, but its still true)
+ I feel like a baby duck

That's all.
Office closed...

Musical Woes

So, I have no way of burning cds and little time... I will post my mix when I can and reimburse people for the cover printout, blank cd and jewel case...

sorry...

Also, I've been told by Billy that Franny and Phil's mixes made it to the apartment in OK. If you all want to, send them there this month since he has to fwd these two to me anyhow, and I'll get you the next address to send them to Moldova asap.

I'll also let you know if I get an external cd/dvd drive for my new pooter.

New pooter is shiny, black, named Alix (to keep up the weird A names I have for my pooters, precursors were Azrael and Alys) and only10 inches wide, less a cd/dvd drive, weighs a good 2 and a half pounds but has 160 gbts hardrive! woot! Who needs a drive when they can use Hulu and have all the less baggage?

Also, Billy uploaded all of Venture Brothers and a bunch of french films on her for me before leaving. God bless big hardrives.

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.

Istanbul

I'm there!

Much Profusion of Grovelling

Darling Readers,

I do apologize, with effusion and bunches of daisies, for my late and steadfast absence from you esteemed presence.

Alys, dear little Dell, has succumbed to a tragic Trojan related death.

In her own absence I have neglected horribly the keeping up of conversations in favor of darting on and off Billy's pristine Mac while he is not writing great long treatises on Derrida and Truffaut. These jaunts have mainly been concerned with Peace Corps, immediacy.

As an update:

Everyone must read:
Lost in Austen
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Also, I will be on the East Coast in three weeks. I wish for Empire Night.

I am moving to Moldova on June 10th, I do hope to see you all before imminent departure.

Forever, devotedly yours,
Kiddo

It's odd to me how I manage to go through life oblivious to all sorts of things. I only discover new things as they present themselves to me.

It's like I'm secure enough in knowing exactly what I like and to focus only on that.

Or, I'm just oblivious.

At any rate, I have just now fallen in love with Bjork. Turns out that most of the pop imagery I adore was at some point engineered/initiated/exploited and developed by her imagination.

Verdict: either the cutest crazy lady ever, or the craziest cute lady ever.

Also, her type of crazy is both high brow crazy and low brow crazy.

High brow crazy: google image search Stelarc, kind of imagery.

Low brow crazy: "He left me! My life is over! F*** him!" mentality

Pretty cool all around.