Week 4 Day 1

It’s hard to believe how quickly this time is flying by...even just thinking about how many weeks I’ve been here is making me a bit sad, since I don’t want to leave quite yet!

Monday was a relatively relaxing day—classes were good and we didn’t have a huge excursion planned for the afternoon.

In class, we were learning more about different cases. Russian has six cases, which are basically different endings for nouns depending on their function in the sentence. There isn’t really a good way to explain it in English, since it doesn’t have any cases, but other languages like German and Czech and Latin have them, so it’s not something unique to the language. Russian also has three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), so that’s also something I’ve had to get used to. 

After school, we took the trolley bus and then walked to an Armenian restaurant called La Sarkis, where we were having lunch. I didn’t manage to get any good pictures of the food because the lighting was kind of strange, and it was eaten so quickly. For appetizers we had a vegetarian dip that reminded me a bit of baba ganoush (but less creamy) with toasted bread, lavash (a type of thin and crispy bread kind of similar to a tortilla) with cheese, and what was pretty much a doughier Placinte with melted cheese, kind of similar to a cross between a quesadilla and a grilled cheese—Elliott said it was also called khachapuri (the Georgian dish we had on Saturday), but different because of the regional shift. After that, we got different skewers of meat and a bunch of roasted vegetables, which were also very good. We were supposed to have a traditional dessert, but it turns out that there had been some miscommunication, so we just got ice cream instead—not the most Moldovan thing, but still good!

 

My ice cream.

From there, we walked over to the Sciusev House Museum and had a tour of it in Russian. Sciusev was a soviet architect who designed a lot of buildings and train stations in Moscow, but he lived in Chisinau at a young age and his house is now a museum. The guide spoke really quickly, so it was sometimes really hard to understand what she was saying, but I was able to pick up on some things, and it seemed like she was really knowledgeable.

The tour was pretty short, and afterwards, a group of us headed to the FLEX camp to do some volunteering. Elliott hadn’t told us about this until at lunch, so it would’ve been nice to have a bit more notice, but it didn’t inconvenience me since I wasn’t originally supposed to go...I was just taking the place of someone who had scheduled their individual meeting for that afternoon.

The six of us took the bus to the telecenter, only for it to start raining pretty heavily just before we got off. I had a rain jacket with me, but even that didn’t do much good, and neither did the umbrellas. We had to walk up a hill and then cross the street so we could get to the right place, but this was tougher than it seemed: there aren’t very many storm drains anywhere in the city, but I don’t think there were any on this road since it was pretty far outside the city, so there was just a river of water flowing past us on the road. This not only meant that we would get soaked up to our ankles if we tried to walk across, but also that when a van or bus drove by, we got completely drenched from the waist down. 

Eventually, we arrived at the building drenched and cold, and we had a few minutes to dry our skin with some paper towels and get a drink of water before we sat down on some benches to talk to the FLEX participants. We started out by introducing us and saying what state we’re from, and then they asked us a lot of questions about what to expect in America. We talked about pets, different school clubs and sports, homecoming and prom (neither of which I’ve been to), how much homework we get, what we do in our free time, and also about “school parties”...we had to explain to them that a lot of the parties they see in movies aren’t realistic, and even if they did exist, we weren’t the type of people who would go to them (which is part of why we’re here, I guess). We talked for about two hours, and afterwards we took some pictures with them, and a lot of them asked for our instagrams (which I also don’t have), and if was really fun getting to know them and help them practice their English! 

From there, Alex left to take the bus, Miette, Amaya and Maggie called a taxi, and Cameron and I walked together. The bus stop where we had originally gotten off was the same one I usually walked home from, so I just walked back from there, and Cameron came with me since there was a bus stop going back into the city on the other side of my street. On our way, we stopped at the corner currency exchange place, since I had spent most of my lei at the festival on Sunday.

When I got home, I did my homework and FaceTimed Mia, one of my friends from school in Washington. It was the first time I had managed to video chat with someone outside of my family since getting here, so it was really good to just talk to her for a bit before going to bed, even though it was kind of late.