I have found my Kryptonite...

...and it is Star Popcorn, specifically the oddly-titled "Cheese Bond" flavor.

I think there's like 24 grams of fat in a hundred gram serving. Which makes it 24% fat. It seems like that can't possibly be true, but would Moldovan ingredient labels lie to me?

I really need to stop eating it, but I can't. One handful is just never enough.

Baked Beans

I was recently rather annoyed by the fact that I don't have anywhere I can go to satisfy my taste for American food in Comrat. The Turkish students here have the Turkish Kitchen and Café Istanbul where they can go whenever they like to have food from their native land. Sadly, due to the lack of Americans here (there are 3 of us), there's no such spot for us Yanks. Then I thought, "I have a kitchen. I am American. My kitchen can be the American Kitchen!"

So when I woke up very late today (11:30), I decided to make a project of cooking some baked beans from my mother's delicious recipe (available upon request). Thankfully, Fourchette, the grocery store here, carries a variety of essential Heinz products such as Worcestershire sauce and barbeque sauce. Everything else is a pretty basic ingredient (assorted canned beans, peppers, ketchup, etc.). So I took a walk in the glorious spring weather down to Fourchette, ran into 3 students (which made me feel happy that I know people in Comrat), picked up all the ingredients, and got cooking.

Here's my BBQ sauce (note the Russian label) and my hot sauce. I am holding the scary, Looney Tunes-esque can opener that I had to fight with to get the cans open. It kind of scratched my hand in the process. I think my tetanus shot is up to date. I'm pretty sure.

Beans simmering on the stove.

Full-on stove shot. I'm very happy that the owners of the apartment left a whole bunch of pots and pans for my cooking enjoyment. You can also see my little fancy ($8) Italian coffee-maker thing on the left. I'm very pleased with it so far.

I can't report on the taste of the finished product yet, but my kitchen smells pretty delicious!

Since this Moldovan cooking experiment has been successful so far, I'm thinking of tackling homemade macaroni and cheese and homemade spaghetti sauce next weekend. I'm tired of being held hostage by the expensive Barilla pasta sauce at Green Hills (one of our other supermarkets)! Four dollars for a jar of bolognese sauce that feeds no more than two people is absurd! I'm gonna cook up a big mess of sauce and then freeze it. Mmm mmm good!

New Apartment Pictures

I just moved into a nice new place on Ulitsa Gavrilova. It's a pretty classy place, fully furnished, and it finally has internet (as of today)!

My wardrobe. (Sorry, no lions or witches.)

It's so nice to have a bookshelf. All my multi-lingual books look pretty. But it reminds me that I haven't read that many books since I've been here. However, I am currently three pages into Tolstoy's Childhood.

My room. The bed's on the left and the desk is on the right.

Just to prove that I really do live here. This is in my living room. Note my Gonzaga t-shirt, worn in honor of the first day of March Madness!

My living room. (Or should I say oturma odası? I recently learned this word in Turkish.) As you can see I have a nice rack for drying my clothes and some comfy chairs and couches. I'm sitting in one of the chairs as I write this.

This is my foyer, complete with coat rack and slippers.

This is my beloved washing machine. Thanks to it, my clothes smell good!

My bathroom. As you can see, the shower is pretty tiny, but it's functional.

Here's my stove and oven. It's gas, which is kinda scary but very fast. Plus, you get to light it with a match and that is cool.

Here is my kitchen. It's a pretty decent sized kitchen by Moldovan standards.

Here's my unfinished dining room. There are two unfinished rooms in the apartment, which is kinda weird, but pretty standard because loan rates are really high so people just build stuff when they have the money. On the left you can see my water heater. I have 24 hour water here, which is great. I'm very lucky. You can't see the regular heater because it is behind the table. Having a dining room is cool because I can have guests over for dinner! Although I have yet to do this, but I am planning on it soon. Everyone should come and visit me.

Ridiculous Fun with Hundred Dollar Bills

The other day my former landlady asked me to exchange the hundred dollar bill I had given her for rent money last week. Apparently, her bank rejected it because of a tiny tear (approximately an eighth of an inch) on the lower left corner. Other than that the bill was pristine.

I found this frankly hilarious and rather annoying at the same time. I went back to the bank where I exchanged the money and the clerk happily exchanged the bill for another one.
I went and gave the new bill to my landlady. She told me that the people at the exchange place were trying to cheat me. I tried to explain to her that I used to work at a bank and we accepted money in basically any condition.

“But this is a lot of money!” she said to me.

I didn’t have the heart to explain that I easily went through $25,000 in cash—the majority of it in hundreds—on a payday Friday at Marisol Federal Credit Union.

Life Goals (Or, How I Went to Moldova and Learned to Sing Like Elliot Smith)

I have always identified strongly with Rob, the record store owner played by John Cusak in High Fidelity. Rob spends a great deal of time obsessing about popular music (like me) and kicking out thieving hoodlums from his record store (uh...not like me). By accident he realizes that two of those hoodlums are actually talented musicians and ends up producing their record. His girlfriend Laura tells him that he’s come full circle by actually becoming a part of the music-making process instead of just being a music consumer.

Those of you who follow Facebook probably saw the video of me and two students from the university singing “Hear You Me” for a school concert. I hadn’t sung in front of people in nine years (since I played Madam Mysteria in the ninth grade play, to be exact), but my church choir training at St. Bridget’s all came back to me with some help. It was really cool to actually make music again.

The guys from the band invited me to sing with them anytime I wanted and I was more than happy to take them up on the offer. Tragically, I haven’t been able to track down a cello for rent in Comrat, so I’ve been sticking with singing, although guitar lessons have been promised soon.

We have no gigs yet—there’s only three of us so we can’t exactly do full sets now—but we are getting a repertoire together. Thus far we have worked on:

“Viva la Vida” — Coldplay

“Say Yes” — Elliot Smith

“Lovers in Japan” — Coldplay

“Wonderwall” — Oasis

“Miss Misery” — Elliot Smith

“Twilight” — Elliot Smith

“The Middle” — Jimmy Eat World

“Cemeteries of London” — Coldplay

“Waltz #2” — Elliot Smith

We’ve tried to add some Regina Spektor songs, but they’re really hard to sing! Her voice is just too intense for my limited powers. We’ve been leaning pretty heavily on the Elliot Smith. When I was playing classical music, I always loved pieces a lot more once I’d played them. I’ve discovered that the same thing is true for Elliot Smith’s music. His songs are even more fantastic when you’ve learned them inside and out. (I know it’s sacrilege, but I have to admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of Either/Or until I started singing songs from it.) His songs aren’t that hard to sing and they grow on you tremendously. His voice is in a totally different register than mine so I end up sounding pretty manly on “Say Yes,” but I’m hoping that the more I sing it, the less weird the low notes will sound.

I’ve also discovered the amazing power of YouTube for listening to new stuff by artists you like. I found a sweet video of Elliot Smith performing in the Stinkweeds on Apache (RIP) in Tempe from 1996. It made me extremely nostalgic for Tempe. Oh, to have an Eastside Records in Comrat! Or a Hoodlums! Or a Milano’s Music! I could go on forever. We don’t realize how good we have it music-wise in America.

I can also recommend Sad Kermit singing “Needle in the Hay” in a bizarre homage to Wes Anderson. It’s definitely worth a watch to hear a Muppet singing about drug abuse.

My recent switch from a music consumer to a music maker has inspired me to add another life goal to my list. So far we have:

1. Visit every former Soviet country. (5 down, 10 to go!)
2. Read War and Peace in Russian. (1 volume down, 3 to go!)
3. Learn to play and sing the entire Weakerthans discography. (0 down, at least 50 to go!)

I need more life goals!