Hello there,

Greetings from Chisinau. It’s been a while since my last email. But having gone back and read the last “Moldmail” I sent I realize not a whole lot has changed.

HOME LIFE:

The family is still friendly and wonderful. The 3-year old son, Sandu (short for Alexandru) seemed to hate me at first. He was always glaring at me. He only speaks Romanian, which made making friends with him even harder. But somehow I must have played with him the right way because now when I go next door he calls me by name and clings to my leg or tries to block the door to prevent me from leaving. Which is good because when he’s unhappy he can throw a temper tantrum better than a European football (I mean, soccer) player. Lena, the 16-year old, is fluent in English and loves to come over to chat or to do her English homework. Diana and Grigori, the two landlords, are very nice and helpful. And though I am independent and often act like I don’t need family nearby, when the power went out recently it was nice to go next door and have a family to hang out with by flashlight and eat with by candlelight.

Because the house is so big and nice and I want to keep it nice, I’ve indulged myself for the first time in my life by hiring a maid. The woman who babysits Sandu comes twice a month to do what one of my friends calls the “chemical cleaning.” It takes Mariana nearly two hours to clean the whole house. For that she gets $5.

Tony Hawks has not returned to Moldova yet. However, a few weeks ago the Irish Ambassador stopped by to see the kitchen that was featured in one of the pictures in “Playing Moldovans at Tennis”. So that was thrilling.

People in the neighborhood are starting to get to know me. There’s a food shop across the street from my house that I go to get water and other last-minute items. Last year’s fellow called it the 7-11. There’s a girl there who speaks some English. This morning I went there a little before 9:00 a.m.; the sign in Romanian said “closed”. I pulled on the door anyway, for the same reason that people who see a sign that says “Wet Paint” touch the wall or people open a U.S. mailbox, drop a letter in, close it, and open it again to make sure the letter went down. The women inside must have seen me, recognized me, and took pity on the poor foreigner who didn’t know the meaning of the word closed. They let me buy what I needed. I felt like I had died and gone into Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (When she gets there she knows if the stores are all closed/with a word she can get what she came for.)

WORK:

Work is going well. I’ve given the same 2 seminars, “Icebreakers and Warm-Up Activities” and “Communicative Pronunciation Teaching” to several groups of teachers in Chisinau with good results. For the second half of the month I’m doing “Ways of Teaching American Holidays”. There are pictures of me in action (as well as pictures of my colleagues) on the Web site of a Fulbright Scholar who is helping the resource center create a Web page: http://www.cs.amherst.edu/~jer/ETRC/Slide_Show.html.

As is always the case, schedules are never fully fixed and frequent to change at the last minute. For my first outreach (out-of-town) seminar to be held this coming Monday in the town of Orhei, I was informed only Friday afternoon that the date had been set. So it’s been a hectic weekend going with my colleagues to buy food, folders, and teaching materials to give away to the poor village teachers. I was informed Monday afternoon (the 13^th) at 4:00 that on Tuesday (the 14^th) the university would be closed in honor of “Day of the City”.

On the other hand, teachers here are continually asking for a list of seminar topics and dates in advance; this gives me hope that the lack of advance planning will change in the future. In the mean time I just have to go with the flow.

FUN:

I’m really enjoying being in a capital city. It seems like the Embassy or the city is always holding one fete or another for me to attend. I got to go to an organ recital for September 11, and another organ recital for the 25^th anniversary of the organ hall. At the end of September the Public Affairs Officer of the U.S. Embassy had a reception at her home for Fulbright Scholars and me. I could have gone that same Saturday to a reception for the new ambassador, but I already had plans to spend that weekend in Ukraine. Several weeks ago I went with the center director, Svetlana, and her teacher-friend Mila to a park downtown for an “ethnographic festival”--not a festival on doing qualitative cultural research, but a kind of fair with booths representing different minority cultures in Moldova. Last weekend there was a wine festival at the “Moldexpo” exposition center. But it was outdoors and everything was decorated like a village wine cellar. Very cute. Tuesday I went again with Svetlana and Mila to the day of the city celebration on Stefan cel Mare, the main street. (The name means Stefan the Great). We saw livestock and agriculture and many stands selling shashlik (meat grilled on skewers). We had shashlik but the service was painfully slow so I can’t quite go so far as to say we enjoyed it.

WEATHER:

We had “Indian summer” at the end of September and beginning of October, but it’s definitely European fall now. My home has “autonomous heat”, meaning my landlord/landlady can turn on the heat themselves at any time. So my home is nice and warm. People who don’t have autonomous heat have to wait until November 1, the official day when the city turns on the heat. The resource center is one of the coldest places in the university, so I have to bundle up when I teach there. The embassy has ordered a heating/cooling system with end-of-the-year money; it should come any day now. Hopefully before we can see our own breath in the room.

FOOD:

Most foods that were produced or available in Ukraine are found in Moldova as well. One food that I’ve found here that I didn’t get in Ukraine is a soup called zeama, a soup with a chicken broth base and a slightly sour or tangy taste to it. I love it. There is also a nice flaky pastry called placinta. But I’ve been on a low-carb diet (I’ve lost 20 pounds/9 kilos since July), so I’m not really indulging myself with local delicacies as I have in the past. So far I’ve been lucky in finding vegetables such as carrots, eggplant, squash, tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli (frozen) and even celery.

I think that is all for the moment. Time to go collate packets for the teachers.

Take care.

Bridget

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