Hello!

Hi there!

 My name is Lucia and I am a 15-year-old from McLean, Virginia.

 As the title of this blog suggests, I am traveling to Chisinau, Moldova (“Кишинёв” in Russian)!

 Last Fall, I applied to the State Department-funded National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y), a scholarship program for high schoolers seeking to learn languages deemed as “undertaught” in the United States. Somehow, I was accepted, and now I will be spending six weeks in Moldova, living with a host family and learning Russian with about twenty other high schoolers from around the U.S.!

 Pre-departure orientation starts this Friday, June 15, in Washington, D.C., and I am so excited to meet all of the others who will be traveling with me! We have been communicating on Facebook for a few months, and they all seem to be great people, which has really put me at ease, since I am on the younger side of most participants.

 In preparation for the trip, all participants had to take an online Russian class, to learn useful phrases, basic grammatical structure, and some vocabulary. I have also ordered a small Russian-English (and vice versa) translation dictionary, to make my first few days a little bit easier.

 Other than that, I have been setting aside things to pack and making sure I have all the things I might need while I am away.

 It’s kind of hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I’m going to be away from my family and friends for about a month and a half. I have been on sleep away trips abroad before, but never for such a long period of time, so I am a little bit nervous about feeling homesick and culture shock. However, thanks to *modern technology* I’ll be able to FaceTime with them and update them regularly on how I’m doing.

 Which is also why I made this blog: I want to be able to share my experiences and photos with my friends and family as they’re happening, and to hopefully help out future NSLI-Y applicants and finalists who may be curious about the experience!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1 Day 2

Image
After breakfast at the hotel, we packed our bags and had them stored in the lobby, because we were meeting our host families that afternoon! Once again, we all agreed that we should procrastinate on thinking so we could avoid high nerves. We then had a presentation about navigating in the city and downloaded some helpful apps. We also learned about the different neighborhoods in Chisinau. There is the “centru”, located at the city center; “botanica”, near the botanical gardens; “telecentru”, located outside of the ‘centru’; “riscani”, which is separated from the rest of the city by a bridge (where our hotel was located); “buiucani”, which has the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe (fun fact); and “ciocana” which has a large Romanian population. (Unfortunately, I could not find a map of the neighborhoods.) Next, we went on a short walk near the hotel and saw a lot of (stray?) cats and dogs, as well as a bunch of people selling fruit along the street. After lunch, the host familie...
Read more

Week 4 Day 3

Image
Wednesday was probably one of my favorite days from this week. We had class as usual, and then we got a takeout lunch from La Placinte to eat in the courtyard in the university, since we had to drive a good distance for our excursion that day. The food came in these cute little boxes, kind of the equivalent of pizza delivery in the U.S. There were three kinds of Placinte: potato, meat (I think it was chicken, but I couldn’t really tell), and apple. These were also more cylindrical as opposed to the round ones we had had before, which was nice because it meant that we each just got our own box without having to share. The boxes. My apple, meat and partially eaten potato Placinte,  since I didn’t think of taking a picture until after I started eating. After we finished eating, we got into two different vans and drove about an hour to Dolna, a small town in the Moldovan countryside where Pushkin stayed at a friend’s estate for a summer. When we got there, we had a few...
Read more

Week 5 Day 4

Image
In class on Thursday, we mostly just prepared for our test and reviewed all of the new things we had learned during the week, as well as some things from earlier in the program, since this week’s test was going to be more cumulative. Also, since it was the day before a test, we had an independent lunch and a free afternoon, which was very convenient. As soon as class was done, we took a bus into the center and I stopped by the post office to mail some postcards and letters, and then about nine or ten of us walked a few blocks to a Greek restaurant that Maggie’s host mom had recommended. I had some type of kebab with a bunch of condiments—I would have gotten something else, but the menu didn’t have many english translations, and those that it did have weren’t particularly descriptive, so to a certain degree, we all just ordered some random things. Since service was kind of slow (as it is in most Moldovan restaurants), we didn’t finish up until about 3:00, and we walked back to...
Read more