Apartments

An interesting fact I found out from talking to the European volunteers here is that landlords and -ladies have the legal right to come into the apartment you are renting from them at any time.

Luckily, my landlord understands the idea of privacy and always lets me know when he needs to come by and arranges a time when we can both be there. And anyways I have a chain on the second door (why do all Soviet apartments have multiple doors? for this reason?) so it's cool.

Unfortunately, a lot of the European volunteers have had serious issues with unannounced visits from landladies, who then pitch a fit about (of all things) unwashed dishes in the sink. Of all the things that will cause permanent damage to an apartment, unwashed dishes are definitely not one of them. (Thank goodness the Goode family, my AZ condo landlords, didn't have this rule!) It's such a weird concept that it's actually acceptable for someone to come into your home and tell you how much you should be cleaning. Very different mindset than in the U.S.

I can see that landlords and -ladies might want to have this control because in Moldova the whole idea of an advance damage deposit wouldn't work. Who would enforce the return of the money? Everything is so informal here, and good luck going to the cops. (Brief tangent: The market right across from the police station in Comrat was robbed last year. As one of my colleagues said, "This is the shame of our city!") At the same time, if you're not willing to see things in your apartment get a little roughed up...don't rent your apartment!

The strangest thing about this whole situation was the attitude that the European volunteers' organization took to this when one of the current volunteers said they should inform future volunteers about this problem in advance.

"Well, I thought you were all adults and I didn't need to tell you to clean up after yourself."

Ah, parochialism. Something we won't have to worry about disappearing from Moldova any time soon.

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!

Pre-Kiev Post

On the eve of my departure for Kiev, I realized that it’s been a pathetic 23 days since my last post. I figured I ought to remedy that before heading into Ukraine.

There are three things that generally inhibit me from posting:

1. A wish to avoid talking about people here on the Internet
2. A desire to avoid being constantly whiny about certain things
3. Work

All three factors have colluded in the past few weeks.

The last three weeks have been busy and quite fun. I no longer spend all evenings holed up in my room like an Internet junkie! I have engaged in many semi-scandalous activities such as drinking coffee illicitly and dancing at the disco. The last two weeks were the start of classes, and I had 11 pairs per week to prep for, which is no joke. At any rate, this semester I have a much lighter courseload than last year, thank God. Here’s what I’m teaching:

Development of Conversational Speech

Linguistic Analysis of Artistic Texts

History of English-Speaking Peoples

You gotta love the convoluted course titles! The conversation class is the most fun because I get to teach my students extremely practical things and just talk with them. Today I showed them a bunch of videos of people with Valley girl accents. Then I pretended to be a waitress at a restaurant. Everyone wanted strawberry shortcake. I forgot Alyona’s Coke...sorry, Alyona! For those who are interested this website has pretty awesome, realistic colloquial English lesson materials.

The main frustrations have been getting back into the post-Soviet work culture. Enough said. I am leaving for a training in Kiev with my fellow Moldovan, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani ETA’s tomorrow, which I hope will recharge my tolerance for bureaucracy and give me a plethora of lesson planning ideas. I’m excited in the extreme because the Regional English Language Officer will be conducting the training and he is extraordinarily cool.

To change the subject abruptly, I have found myself getting weirdly obsessed with the Hold Steady and Bruce Springsteen. In particular, the song “Atlantic City.” I went on a fairly long tangent about popular perceptions of New Jersey in my literature class today. It was pretty uncalled for. I’m already getting as nuts as the professors I knew in the States.

I think this has to do with the fact that both the Hold Steady and the Boss are what Russian speakers would call спесифический. That is to say, they reflect the character of a certain place (Minneapolis and Jersey, respectively). I mean, you probably couldn’t even translate Hold Steady lyrics because they just wouldn’t make sense outside of an American context. (Although the chorus of “Party Pit”--“I’m going to walk around and drink some more”--is pretty much the most Russian thing I’ve ever heard.)

They are both essentially trying to tell the stories of people who live in a certain time and place without a whole lot of judgment, which is pretty unusual in popular music. Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady, writes about people like a college girl who gets mixed up with a townie murder and a teenage boy who gets kicked out of his own prom for being high. Bruce tells us about a man moving to Atlantic City to become a contract killer--and trying to convince his girlfriend to come with. It makes for some pretty good listening.

The Hold Steady also adds an interesting element of religion, alternating between blasphemy and piety. Craig Finn says, “I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers / I feel Judas in the long odd of the rackets on the corner.” Nevertheless, he seems pretty pleased that a past girlfriend was “a really good kisser and wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.”

I’m not sure if I’m obsessed because of nostalgia or the good music, but I can say that buying Boys and Girls in America at Hoodlums while I was on break was probably the best $5.99 I’ve spent in quite a while.

With that, I’m going to pack. Here I come, Kievan Rus!