Week 2 Day 2

What. A. Day.

When the day started off not so well, maybe I should have taken the hint: my alarm rang at 7:02 as scheduled (I’m very peculiar about these things), but for some reason I didn’t get out of bed until 7:29...so it was a pretty slow (and then rushed) start to my day.

Since I had gotten up late, I was running a little behind, and Elizabeth got on the bus before me. I got on one of the next busses, a little nervous to be alone since I had never gone to school by myself (always with Elizabeth or Vera). Luckily, about a stop into my ride I noticed that Mattie was also on my bus, which turned out to be VERY useful.

About halfway through my first bus ride, I got a call from Elizabeth saying that there might be some issues with our commute: since there was a protest going on in front of city hall (on the same street where we changed buses), the #22 (what we needed to get on) wasn’t running, but she was looking for a stop that it might have been re-routed to. 

Sure enough, as we drove up to the city center, about a block away from the city hall, we saw a mass of riot police...in complete black uniforms with helmets and sticks and everything, gathered on the sidewalk attentively. There must have been between a hundred and two hundred of them, which from a distance just looked like an ominous black mass. 

Mattie and I got off the bus, and from the street we could hear yelling and chanting. At this point, I got another call from Elizabeth, saying that she had found a #22 going in the right direction and gotten on it, but the rerouted stop was several blocks away from where we were, and although she tried to direct us to it, it was pretty hard to understand.

Around this same time, we also got a text from Elliott, saying that he didn’t know the center was going to be closed today until this morning, and that if it disrupted our commute, our smartest bet would be to order a taxi. Fortunately, before arriving in Moldova, I had downloaded YandexTaxi (a taxi-ordering app) onto my phone, and although we tried to use it, it kept on rejecting our phone numbers. During this time, Mattie and I had been walking around near Stefan cel Mare (the Main Street, named for a Moldovan king), trying to find a bus that might be going near the university.

We ended up having to walk 23 minutes from the city center to class, and we were about half an hour late, exhausted, and really hot.

After that, class was pretty uneventful.

For lunch, we were allowed to break off into small groups and go wherever we wanted, as long as we were at the American Councils building by 2:30 for our afternoon activity. Elliott mentioned several restaurants in the area, but then decided that he wanted to show us the alternate bus route so we could find the stops on our own if there was ever a transportation emergency again (at least this was my understanding), so we all rode into the city center with the bus (the protest was over by now). 

A few of us had decided that we wanted to go to a restaurant Elliott had mentioned, La Placinte, which we had also passed on our bus ride into the center. We looked it up on google maps and walked there (which was kind of tedious and longer than expected) and we got there at 1:45. We assumed that it was reasonable to expect to eat within about half an hour, which would leave us 15 minutes to walk back to the A.C. building and arrive there just on time.

As it turns out, we did not get our food in over 45 minutes (even though others who arrived after us were leaving before we did). I texted Elliott, who told us to ask for our food to go, which was a great idea, except we couldn’t find our waiter and there was no one else for us to talk to about it. In the end, we decided to leave at 2:30—as Cameron would later describe it, we dined & dashed, without dining. 

We walked the next 15 minutes to the A.C. building, where we met up with our language partners to go to the post office. This, of course, required more walking, which was hard on a completely empty stomach. When we got to the post office, we bought some postcards and stamps using the phrases we had practiced, and mailed a letter each.

Some of the postcards I haven't mailed yet.

After the post office activity, about five of us walked down Pushkin street (perpendicular to the main street) and stopped at a bakery to get some snacks (or lunch, since we hadn’t had any). Eveything was really cheap, about 10-20 lei (reminder: about 17 lei to a dollar). 

A bun (?) filled with ham and cheese.
A pastry filled with cherries.

After that, some of us visited a high end grocery store on the same street, and Renee bought some sunflower seed snickers bars she had apparently seen on reddit...who knew??

Finally, Sara and I went to our bus stop and headed home after a long day.

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