Summary of 6 weeks learning Russian in Moldova through NSLI-Y

First, the incomplete first blog I started writing about our pre-departure orientation and journey to Moldova: 

The last few days have been a whirlwind of airports, airplanes, hotels, and new cities, but each of us have finally moved in with our host families. With the help of a red eye flight and major time zone changes, the past several days have sort of bled together, and it’s hard to believe that it’s already been 5 days since we said our goodbyes to our families and took off from our respective American airports.

The pre-departure orientation, which included students going to both Moldova and Estonia, helped us get to know each other a little bit before departing for our host countries. Even though we will be spending the summer apart from those going to Estonia, it was fun to meet those students. It will be exciting to hear about their time in Narva when we see them again in six weeks. The Pre-Departure Orientation also gave us a better idea of what to expect in our host countries and the chance to ask all the miscellaneous questions building up since we each received our acceptance letters.

Our flights ended up being fairly straightforward; some of us managed to get a few hours of sleep on the way to Germany, then after a quick layover in Frankfurt, we were on our way to Chisinau. With only two and a half hours between us and our new host city, the excitement among the students was palpable despite our lack of sleep. We finally landed, waited less than five minutes for a quick passport check, collected our bags and hopped on a bus.

And now, the real thing, my complete blog about my six weeks here in Moldova, of which I sadly have only one left:

Warning: I’m posting this without reading it over because I haven’t had WiFi at home for the past week, so my current WiFi is very rare and limited. Expect run on sentences, misspellings because this is typed on my phone, and probably some sentences that simply don’t make sense. I will plan to read over this and add photos as soon as possible, but I wanted to get this first draft posted quickly. I hope you enjoy in the meantime.

I’ve been pushing off writing about Moldova and my time here, well, since I got here. It’s been a month, and I’ve well passed the point when it became stranger to think of being in the US than to wake up in Moldova every day, a country a could hardly perceive of a couple of months ago. When I got the email that I had been accepted to the program, I was, of course, ecstatic. For a couple weeks I’d been nervously checking my email, telling myself I was waiting for a rejection letter, not daring to let myself be hopeful, brainstorming what I would do with my otherwise empty summer. I guess it had somehow hardly occurred to me that I wouldn’t be placed in Russia, despite knowing the languages and all their placements inside and out after hours on the NSLI-Y website. I guess other students knew from the forums and blogs I only found later, that the beginner groups would be placed in Kirov and Moscow, Russia, the advanced group would be placed in Estonia, and the intermediate group would be here, in the capital of Moldova, Chisinau. Who knows how I ended up in the intermediate group, but I was terrified when I found out, and was sure it would be discovered as soon as I posted a video speaking in Russian or took the placement test that I was in the wrong group. Luckily, when I arrived repetitive conversations disclosing these fears revealed that many others had felt the same, and it turns out we’re all at a pretty similar place. Of course, I was never disappointed that I had been placed in Moldova — with the excitement of being accepted the thought never occurred to me — but I was just a bit puzzled. Sure I could place Moldova on a map. I was pretty sure it had been part of the Soviet Union. Or had it been part of Romania? (It turns out both.) But that was about it. Elation and confusion enmeshed itself into a frenzied energy towards learning as much about Chisinau as possible. It turns out, there’s not much to learn about Moldova and it’s capital city online. I found some CIA statistics on its extremely high levels of poverty, learned about it’s famous vineyards, listened to an interview with an American restaurant owner (we just met him today! Will expand later) about corruption in the government. The only travel articles I found asked the question of whether Chisinau is worth a stop on a tour of Eastern Europe. Most concluded that no, Chisinau was simply another run down, post-Soviet city, without much to offer or the charm to be worth a day or two of exploration. Well, I figured, I’ve never been to a post-Soviet city, and it seemed to be pleasantly lacking in tourists (Moldova is the least visited country in Europe) so at least it would be something new?

It turns out I was right to be optimistic. As I described in a dialogue written for Russian class today, whenever I speak with Moldovans, especially young people, they talk about how ugly and lacking in character their city is. I mention how much I enjoy walking in the parks. Valea Morilor is partially forested, with a large lake. One of my first days here I walked around the lake with my host mom, more recently I often run there in the morning (it’s about a mile from my apartment). I’ve rented bikes there too, and hopefully soon I’ll rent kayaks with some friends and paddle around the eh lake in between the fishermen and the ducks. The two central parks, Stephan Cel Mare park with it’s towering statue of the beloved Medieval king, and cathedral park, with its Arch de Triumph and cathedral, are shady and often full of people. Because everything in the city is so centrally located, one is almost sure to walk through one of these two parks several times during a busy day. Stephan Cel Mare park, especially, is key in reforming one’s impression of the Moldovan people. The juxtaposition of stony faced Moldavans on the trolley bus or walking along the sidewalk with the smiling, bubbly Babushkas and Deidushkas dancing in the park on Saturday afternoons is striking. How could I call Moldovan people unfriendly when I think about my host babushka and deidushka hugging me when I arrived in Chisinau, welcoming me into their apartment, laughing as I react to new foods (almost always with positive exclamations of очень вкусна), making борщ a couple days ago with my host parents’ son who’s here visiting with his family, or chatting in the back room where formal pronouns are dropped and I’m invited to sit on the couch and listen to gossip after I get home in the evening. Still, coming from a culture where it’s rude not to smile when you meet a strangers eyes on the street, it took a few days to adjust to stares on the bus and avoided eye contact on the street. I’ve come to understand that Moldovans have no interest in strangers. But when they come together in a community of friends especially older Moldovans who often gather in the central parks, they are consistently warm and endlessly smiling. I’ve often watched the traditional group dances from the sidelines, and a couple of my friends were even invited to join in a week or so ago. Last week we took a traditional dance class, and had a great time spinning and marching to proud Moldovan music which I could happily listen to for hours on end. Maybe next time I’m in the park on Saturday night I’ll join in.

I could go on about the parks and how much the green fringes of the concrete city remind me of Portland. I forgot to mention the skatepark in another big park on the outskirts of town, where we intermingled with a throng of high schoolers, nervous to make conversation and break into their tight groups of friends, and definitely not cool enough to actually skate up and down the ramps. Finally we made friends with a girl with a died black bob and bright eyeshadow. She told us she goes to the park every day after school, and invited us to come back in a couple weeks when there would be a skate competition. We ended up arriving after the competition had finished, one evening after an excursion, and instead walked around the lakes nearby and got a scoop of ice cream. So clearly, strolls through the parks of Chisinau have formed a good portion of the memories I’ll have of Moldova. When I explain to the local students that this is why I have come to appreciate the city, why I think more foreigners should visit it, they counter that this is only one small aspect of their city. So I explain, the nextwork of trolleybuses, buses and marshrutkas that can take anyone from students to shopping babushkas anywhere in the city for 2-4 lei (that’s 10-20 cents), add their own charm to the city. Sure, the trolley busses, especially the main bus, the 22, which I ride every morning to school and often anywhere near the center, is always packed tight, and when I force my way out the doors, it often feels like the sticky sweat rolling down my legs is that of the other passengers, pressed around me. Sure, the older busses, taken straight out of the Soviet comedies we watched as a group (famous films with Shuri, specifically Mission O and other films and Andrei Vasilyevich changes professions) definitely show their age as the y bounce along the city streets. But on a whole the transportation system is robust, convenient, and cheap, and has made getting to know Chisinau in six weeks very accessible. 

Of course, Chisinau has its share of the classic attractions: museums, monuments to dead kings (Stephan cel Mare’s face in stone is now one I could recognize anywhere, and often do, whether along a wall in a museum, or in the city center in Chinsinau and in Sarocca, a city near Ukraine with an impressive medieval fortress we visited recently), dead poets (a dozen or more line the “alley of classics” in Stephan Cel Mare park, capped by a bust of Pushkin, peering down at the viewer among a bed of flowers), or memorials to those lost in WW2, or the civil war with autonomous but unrecognized Transnistria (where we absolutely can not travel) following Moldova’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1989. Some favorites included the military museum which houses Soviet relics and much more, and where we learned about the history of the country, to augment what we learned at the history museum, but with a much stronger focus on recent history. Our guide Andrei, who has accompanied us on many excursions and museum visits, gave his first hand account of living during the end of soviet times and through the civil war. It helped me to better understand the relevance and closeness of those experiences for my host family, for striders I’ve befriended, and for the city of Chisinau itself. So many of the monasteries we’ve visited, whether at Old Orhei, the birth of civilization in the region, or at Sahorna, had been rebuilt after soviet times, when they had consistently been used as asylums. The big bright, clearly new monasteries, while beautiful and impressive, might have been a lot less interesting if not for the reasoning behind their being rebuilt, the devotion of the Moldovan people to restore what had existed before Soviet Times as a part of retaking their Moldovan identity. The only original monasteries that we did see, at Orhei and at Tsipova, across from Transnistria, were cave monasteries, carved deep into the rock cliffs by monks of centuries past. I also enjoyed exploring the small but interesting art museum with friends last weekend, and we had our first tour which was only in Russian at Pushkin’s house (Pushkin lived in Chisinau for 3 years while exiled from Russia, but they manage to make a lot of those years). Within the past week, I finally visited the two famous cemeteries in Chisinau, a goal of mine before the end of the program. The Jewish cemetary, a 20 minute walk from my apartment, which I took this past Sunday evening, was gated and very extensive, but also crowded and overgrown. On Tuesday, we had a free afternoon in the city with language partners, and I manage to convince my group (in Russian of course) to visit the large WW2 memorial, four massive pink guns leaned up against each other, surrounding an eternal flame, and surrounded themselves by reliefs of soldiers and citizens throughout the war, and next to a military cemetery which also happens to be next to the famous Armenian cemetery. I enjoyed visiting each cemetary, especially the Jewish cemetary because the sun was setting while I was there and I saw only one other couple walking around. Among the old, crumbling gravestones, dating back a century or more, were newer ones in no particular order, tall black shiny slabs carved with faces, often of couples together. Another check off the bucket list was finding the hidden Lenin statue at Valea Morilor. After all my evenings runs around the lake, I had a hard time imagining where a giant monument to Lenin, once housed in the center of the city, could be. (This was, of course, the case in every soviet city, and today when we visited Komrat, the capital city of the autonomous region of Gaguizia, whose culture and language is much more similar to Turkey than to the rest of Moldova, there was in fact a statue of Lenin in front of the government building, which we were informed was unique, whether in Moldova or the region it was unclear.) In the end, with a hint that the statue was across from the statue of “Girl, Boy, Dog” as my map calls it, we found an opening in the fence from which to adventure into the forest. My friend and I walked for a few minutes and soon came to an old square in front of an abandoned building with a sign in Romanian which I’m guessing translates to House of Saviors. Off to the side, there it was: a massive black of red stone, the front half a pedestal with ленин stamped across and the man himself towering over the broken square, empty apart from my friends and I and a family eating a iconic in the grass nearby, one of their bicycles leaned up against against the stone, just beneath the infamous name. No one told me about the bonus statues at Lenin’s sides, so I won’t reveal their identity in case anyone reading this ever goes to Moldova, as discovering them there was part of the found. I took a few photos, posing cheerfully, then seriously, at Lenin’s feet, then we wandered back towards the lake. In fact, Valea Morilor holds another hidden statue, but this one I found on my first Saturday here in Chisinau. After sleeping all day thanks to jet lag, and a lot of built up excitement, my host mom took me for an afternoon walk at the park I would come to know well. As we walked along the side of the lake, passing along the fence, laughing at a dog trying to retrieve it’s log from the lake without entering the yellow tinged water, my host mom past me at a post the stood out from the rest. Where there should have been a black ball on top of the post, at about waist height, instead there was a little gold globe, featuring familiar, exaggerated volcanoes, and a tiny, but theoretically monstrous, boy standing on top of the globe. Last Friday, before seeking out Lenin, my friend and I stopped to admire the miniature scene familiar to us after we had bought “The Little Prince” (or more correctly «Малинкий Принц») earlier that afternoon in order to practice our Russian.

Along with our four hours of Russian  classes every morning, and of course lunch afterwards almost always at new restaurants (traditional moldovan foods like placenta, mamaliga, and pelmini, and of course very European kababs. Uzbekistani and Gagauzi food was decent, but Georgian food is incredible and especially after making friends with girl from Georgia who is here for a pre-program English camp this summer before going to the US next year with the Flex program, also through the state department, Georgia is definitely very far up on my list of places to travel to), I have definitely done a lot since arriving five weeks ago. Almost every afternoon we have activities, whether doing quests around the city, to markets, parks, and monuments, visiting the Frnazilutsa (cooking, snacks, cakes, etc.) factory, or wine painting (we definitely can’t try Moldova’s pride and probably number one expert, but at least we had a lot of fun painting with it). On Saturdays we go out of the city, riding our bus a couple hours past lavender, corn wheat, must of all lots and lots of sunflowers. We’ve been to monasteries, fortresses, other cities, and, on our second Saturday, a festival called “Ia Mania” celebrating Ia, the traditional Moldovan shirts, where we watched kids perform traditional dances and ate delicious roasted, unidentified small birds, placinta, mint lemonade, and a variety of deserts that caught our eye. I walked down to the river in the nearby village to pet some goats, and there it was, almost within reach, Transnistria. Right now, I’m on the bus back from one of those very Saturday excursions. Today we were in Gagauzia, as I mentioned earlier. Our second stop, after the capital city, was a horse farm, where we met many horses and several foals, pet week old kittens and puppies, and admired the immense collection of impressive painting and drawings of horses by the owner of the farm, which he had  put together in a book. He even gave us each a copy of one of the pencil drawings from his book, which he signed. I picked one of a bull because it stood out from the rest and because the man leading the bull was wearing very traditional Russian clothing — a black, square, fur hat, and pointed upturned boots. I’ll post a photo. 

There are few things I’m still hoping to do before I leave: buy a traditional dress, which are white and embroidered in red or sometime yellow or green, go kayaking on the lake at Valea Morilor, and attend a service at a Russian Orthodox Church, but my time here is running short, and after the whirlwind of the past five weeks, I’m already grasping to do everything and make all the memories I can with the other students and my host family before I leave. One of the things that made every unexpected moment here, every experience, even more significant is the feeling that the vibrant city, and country, I’m getting to know doesn’t even exist in the minds of most American’s I know. That this beautiful pocket of the world exists in what, for many Americans, is a empty patch of unknown on a map of Eastern Europe. Maybe for the sake of the tourism industry here in Moldova, I should be encouraging everyone I know to visit, and really for their own sake, anyone reading this should ignore the articles I found, and should absolutely stop by and stay for a while if they are in Eastern Europe. For now, however, I’m pretty happy with just my group of 17 curious America teens, actually forced to use our limited but growing Russian, in this country of the most welcoming people who still us as individuals, eager to learn about a country often so different from our own.