Week 1 Day 3

Unfortunately, I did not have time to write yesterday, so I will just keep it short so I can stay caught up and go to bed at a reasonable time.

Wednesday was our first day of classes, and I had to wake up at 7:00 to catch the троллейбус (trolley bus) at 8:00 and get to school before 9:00. I had some leftover zucchini pancakes for breakfast, along with some каша (kasha), a type of grain made into porridge.

We left the apartment and got on the #24 trolley bus just around the corner, and then switched to the #22 once we got into the city, which took us straight to Ion Creanga University, where we have our classes. It costs 2 MLDs (leu/lei, pronounced “lay”) for a bus ticket no matter how far you go. With the exchange rate, this is equivalent to about 8 cents.

A trolley bus ticket.

We got to the school and waited in the courtyard for the other students and host families to arrive, and we figured out that two girls, Sara and Elizabeth (both graduated seniors) lived really close to my apartment, so we would be able to take the bus together.

We had four hours of classes, with a ten minute break between each. For the first three hours we studied vocabulary and grammar with one teacher, which was mostly review, and for the last hour we had фонетика (fonetika) which was mostly just pronunciation and learning how to accent words.

After class, we took the trolley bus to a restaurant that served Moldovan food. We ate sausages, potato and vegetable pancakes, a corn-based cake, sour cream, Moldovan feta (I forget what it’s called), bell peppers and other miscellaneous meats.


Then, we met up with some adults living in Moldova but who spoke English (our language partners) to do a scavenger hunt of the city. Broken up into smaller groups, we walked through several parks and saw several monuments dedicated to old straight white men (yay 🙄) and looked at some of the landmarks. 

We ended up outside the American Resource Center, where, ironically, they busted us for sitting on the steps. We took a group picture and then went home with our host families. After school, I went to buy water with my host mom (tap water is not potable), and then Skyped my actual family back in the U.S. for about an hour. It was nice talking to them, and I made them a bit jealous of me, so at least I have once accomplishment for the week. 

I finished off the day by doing my homework (pretty easy stuff, mostly just memorizing little paragraphs) and took a shower before heading to bed kind of late.





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