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Week 6 Day 4

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Yesterday, we had our final exam in class, which was (luckily) not as hard as I had expected it to be!  I hadn’t had much time to study the night before, but I was still able to understand pretty much everything (although our teacher did mention there would be some material that we hadn’t really learned much of, but was just to see what we could figure out) and my brain was functioning normally, which was very useful. We had an independent lunch, and since I still had some things I wanted to do, I walked down Pushkin and got myself some savory goods at a bakery, got almost the rest of my money exchanged, and then scoured the two nearby Librarius’ (a book store) for Mafia card decks...I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but they did have something pretty similar, which I bought since it was cheap: The cards look a bit different, but otherwise it seems to be the same thing. After that, I walked over to the bus stop and got on the #22 bus to go to the Botanical G
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Week 6 Day 3

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Wow...yesterday was quite the day. In class we went over the grammar and vocab that was going to be on our test and practiced talking about illnesses. We had a group lunch scheduled at Smokehouse , an American barbecue restaurant that is owned by a few former peace corps volunteers. There, we had an informal Q & A session with two of the owners, David (who is from Virginia), and Vlad (who is Moldovan, I believe). Their big focus is about encouraging locals to fight corruption and open corruption-free businesses, so they told us a lot about the process of opening the restaurant, the times they were persuaded to bribe someone, and just other examples of corruption in Moldova. One thing they told us was about the way the trolley bus system was kind of corrupt, because apparently many of the locals try to “help out” the ticket takers (who they think don’t make enough money) by returning their tickets after paying, so that they can be resold to another person. This means that the
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Week 6 Day 2

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Today was one of the busier remaining days this week, but still very laid back compared to the first few weeks. In class, we reviewed all the grammar we had learned so far in preparation for our test on Thursday. Since we had an independent lunch, about eight of us took a bus to the center and had lunch at Andy’s Restaurant (owned by the same people who run Andy’s Pizza), since it was close to the post office (where we were supposed to meet up at 2:30), and because it was fast. There was also a currency exchange spot just around the corner, so Elizabeth and I stopped in there so we would have enough money to eat. At 2:30, we met up outside the post office and split up into groups for the Market city quest we were going to do with our language partners. We got to walk down Stephan cel Mare blvd. for a while, and had to stop in several different stores and ask for the prices of different things, and one of them was a candy store: I will most definitely be going back t
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Week 6 Day 1

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This morning, unfortunately, did not start out all too well for me. First, I got out of bed about ten minutes later than I should have, which set me back by a lot and was just a little bit more stressful since there was more pressure on me to get to school on time. Next, my host mom gave me a HUGE breakfast: the remaining blinchki with jam, a plate full of boiled bean sprouts with vegetables, and a cup of tea. I also ate this a bit more quickly than I should have, which made me feel a little bit sick for the next hour. I managed to get to school early, albeit fifteen minutes later than usually. Then, all throughout the first two classes, I had an odd sort of pain in my right leg (?), and although I never figured out what it was, it did go away after that, which was fortunate. After class, we took a trolley bus to the restaurant, Пётр первый (Peter the 1st, a Russian king), which was accross from Stephan cel Mare park and just around the corner from the museum we would be visiting.
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Week 5 Day 7

Sunday was (I think) the first day I have spent entirely at home. I woke up at about 10:00, at which point Vera had already left for church, and then made myself some breakfast. After that, I did my homework for class and corrected last week’s test, and then wrote some postcards. I also did a lot of summer reading stuff, which is important since I still have about two and a half more books to read as well as a bunch of other stuff for classes before the end of August...I guess I should get started on that as well. During the course of the day, I had the chance to text back and forth with some of my friends from the U.S., which was fortunate since usually I’m on excursions or doing work when they’re awake (D.C. is about 7 hours behind Moldovan time). I also listened to the entire soundtrack of Die Zauberflöte between 3-5 times, which I would highly recommend doing if you have the time. Vera came back from church at about 1:30, and then we had lunch together and watched a bit of a
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Week 5 Day 6

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Saturday’s excursion was to the Autonomous Region of Gagauzia , which was about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Chisinau. We met up at the American Councils building at 9:00 and left shortly after, and we saw some gorgeous scenery on the ride there: We arrived at about 11:30 in Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia which has a population of about 20,000 people (it is very small). We visited the monument to World War II and also a statue of Lenin in the center of the city. The World War II memorial. After that, we visited a library that had a lot of books in both Russian and Gagauz—a language similar to Turkish and also dying out as fewer in younger generations continue to learn it. At the library, they had a shelf of classic western books in Gagauz, so it was pretty cool to try and interpreted the titles and just see which books were considered so popular that they were owned in the middle of a small region in Moldova, of all places... They had about three copies of Oli
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Week 5 Day 5

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Friday was an amazing day. In class, we had our tests, and I actually did really well on mine (except for a few spelling mistakes), so that was fulfilling. For lunch, we went to Rozmarin (as always), and I had a sandwich and lemonade, and then stole some of Georgia’s cake, so I was definitely not hungry after that. In our weekly meeting, we went over our weekend excursion and what we would be doing next week and just gave some general feedback about the week’s activities. When that was done, a few of us (me, Renee, Amaya, Miette, Melina and Devin) took the bus to the center and looked around the souvenir market some more—I thought I had exhausted its contents, but I managed to find some more presents, so that was also fortunate. Next, we walked over to Gemeni, a sort of indoor market on Stephan cel Mare Street about a block away. Miette got some Moldova socks and then we looked around at one of the floors where there were a lot of people selling really nice dresses at good prices
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