Enter April

The below is an entry I started a week ago and didn't have time to finish:
Training is officially half way finished, which I'm pretty stoked about. Sorta. It means that in five weeks I'll be shipped off to a new spot in Romania. Alone. It means having my own apartment with my own kitchen, my own bathroom, my own space, but it also means that on days like today, when I've got a day "off" and spend a decent chunk of it hanging out with other trainees, I'll be in a site far from any other volunteers and will no longer have the option of comfy American interaction, which'll take some getting used to. I've always been the "loner" type, but this'll be a different sort of loner. I'm used to being the loner with options, the loner by choice, not the loner by force. Of course, the purpose of this whole adventure is to integrate and make friends in the new community, but I'm thinking the first three to six months are going to consist of many books, lots of alone time, and dozens of chocolate chip cookies.

We had something like a language test on Friday, and I feel ok about it. I'll find out more details on my aptitude tomorrow, but, after spending yesterday with a trainee who's doing really well and listening to her have full-on conversations with Romanians, but not being able to understand most of it, I'm feeling pretty crappy about language this weekend. All of a sudden nothing my gazda says makes sense, I can't make a coherent sentence in any tense, and I dream about the incorrect conjugations of verbs. Fun. They've said over and over it'd be like this - a good day followed by a bad day, a week where you can say everything, then a week where nothing makes sense, but it's still a crappy feeling.

The above is no longer fully applicable, but meh...onto current things (05 April 08, 22:00):
Life has fallen into a routine here and that explains the majority of my lack of updating. Really, not much goes on in the day to day life of a trainee, at least for me. The shiny layer of newness is wearing away and losing its luster, but it's still exciting. I've looked forward to every day and the further we go, the faster this ball rolls.

Three days after we arrived in Ploiesti, I bought a new tube of toothpaste, not a huge tube, but a bigger-than-travel-size tube. I finished that tube of toothpaste two days ago and had to purchase another tube. Such a normal thing, buying toothpaste, right? It's a simple part of life that doesn't require much thought, but going through an entire tube of toothpaste in a foreign country is, to me, pretty significant. I know it sounds silly and I'll go through plenty more tubes while I'm here (hopefully), but that first foreign tube of toothpaste will hold a special spot in my heart.

Over the past six weeks, I've had orange juice in the morning four or five times. It's always served in a small glass and it's oddly delicious, so I usually can't help and finish the glass in two or three swallows and sit silently hoping for more. I've been wondering where she keeps the box of juice because I never see it in the fridge, but the last time I had orange juice in the morning, I went to throw something away and noticed a bunch of orange peels in the trash can. My initial thought? Wow, she eats alot of oranges. Then, like a brick, it hit me. There isn't a box of orange juice in the fridge because she makes it fresh from actual oranges. She doesn't eat alot of oranges, I do. I drink them. In two or three swallows, like it was nothing. And then I sit there hoping for more. A lesson in appreciation.

We got our site announcements yesterday and that was a pretty big deal. The staff made a map of Romania (not to scale) with each of our individual cities on the floor of our school's gymnasium and, one by one and through a painfully slow process of elimination, doled out each trainee's site. Want to know where I'll spend the next two years? It's a Hungarian town of about 62,000 residents in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains and is called Sfantu Gheorghe. Yeah, I'm excited. I know I shouldn't get too excited because that could lead to disappointment, but it sounds like exactly the kind of town I was hoping for. I'll be working with the Environmental Protection Agency of Covasna County, which is a governmental organization and I was kinda hoping for an NGO, but the work they have outlined for me sounds like it's up my alley - helping with public outreach projects, developing environmental education programs, and working on local environmental projects. All good things. So we'll see. Oh, did you catch that word "Hungarian" a few sentences ago? Yep, it's a Hungarian town in Transylvania, so I get to learn Hungarian! On top of Romanian! I'm excited and petrified at the same time. Hungarian is not a romance language...I'm not sure what kind of language it is, but it sounds terrifying. They say we just need to learn the basics because the majority of business in the Hungarian towns is done in English...but that means I won't learn Romanian as well as I would like. I dunno. I wanna come away from this thing with at least one new language, so it might take a little extra effort on my part to figure out which and to stick with it. Wish me luck. I'll reveal more info on my site and on my job as the information becomes available...I really don't know that much right now.

In order to honor and thank our Gazdas for putting up with us for ten weeks, every group of trainees organizes and hosts their own Gazda Day event each year and ours just happened to be today. We had piles and piles of extra food, but it's supposedly a huge embarrassment if the host runs out of food here, so better to be safe than sorry. I made cookies last night for the first time in about two months. It was frickin' great. I didn't realize how much I missed baking until I started mixing up that tasty combo of sugar and buttery goo. They turned out surprisingly well considering all the different ingredients and amounts of things I used, and the oven was gas, which was an experiment all its own. AND I didn't have my kitchen aid...mixing cookies by hand is a mini-work out and my pinkie is now blistered. But I made two batches of cookies and walked away from the event empty-handed, so that's a success in my book. Plus, we played volleyball, had an egg toss, smacked around a pinata, and tossed bean bags back and forth. You can't top that.

Guess that's the most exciting bits that I can think of right now...I'm going to Sinaia again tomorrow. I really like that town and it'll be very nice to get away from Ploiesti for a day, as much as I love this city...

Oh, and our practicum is finished. All presentations went well, etc etc.

More pictures to come soon. Promise.

Happy spring!