Calling All Brain Studiers

I'm starting to get a little worried. I've talked to a few other people about something I've been experiencing here, and no one else has experienced it, which worries me, despite my enjoyment of feeling unique. I frequently doze off while traveling on trains, buses and maxi taxis - not enough to be considered asleep, but enough to do the head-jerk thing every few seconds. When this happens, every conversation I hear is in English, even the conversations of my Romanian or Hungarian compartment-mates. As I start to doze off, the foreign language conversation will morph into English, but an unintelligible English. An example: Person 1 "The cat's bread went for hair but did it go under something yesterday?" Person 2 "Well I don't swim and there people break into holes and turkeys. Do ladders make songs with sidewalks taking pictures." and so on. It's very confusing. So confusing, and a bit startling, that I'll snap out of it and try to figure out what they're talking about. But, the moment I start paying attention and open my eyes, poof! Back to Romanian or Hungarian. The conversation's too hard to follow, so I drift back into doze mode and the weird English returns. "Becky's car split but your mom's drinking the lamps. They said wait without holding a note and I can buy the whole blue for reason." Stuff like that. Nothing that makes sense. I think it might be similar to how I saw people I knew in the faces of strangers when I first arrived. English is so imprinted on my brain that it takes the first opportunity to turn everything into something somewhat computable. Maybe my brain misses English, though I do hear it fairly regularly. Maybe it can't handle learning a foreign language. I'm jealous of all those volunteers gushing about the dreams they're now having in Romanian or Hungarian, or those who are speaking it in their sleep. I can't even hear Romanian when I'm asleep. What's wrong with my brain?

Behind Door Number 1

I spent last week sleeping in a tent, barely showering in a wooden box with unheated water and contorting my body to find an un-lumpy patch of earth to curl up on. Despite the discomforts, I've never felt so ok with camping. As mentioned in previous posts, I often count down the days until such events are over, but this time around, I somehow managed to simply enjoy the newness and slight adventure of it. Maybe some things do change.

One of last week's tasks included making a map of all the traditional homes in the village Grosii Tiblesului (don't ask me how to pronounce it) and I, being of the map-making type and feeling a bit unenthusiastic about the remaining scrub-the-dust-off-the-house task, jumped at the opportunity. It took me and my two friends two days to walk down every street, determine the traditional-ness of every single house, take a picture of those deemed most traditional and briefly chat with whomever happened by. In all, we recorded 296 houses. Just as we finished up our final street and started heading back to the museum, a man approached and asked us to come with him to his house. There had been a tv newscast the night before about what our group was doing and he had heard about the project and wanted us to see something, but I couldn't understand what. Now, I try not to be a judgmental person, but when a man with red eyes, sour looking clothes and alcohol on his breath starts pulling on my arm rather forcefully and telling me that I have to go with him, I get unhappy. We all said that we were tired and we needed to get back to the museum because our friends were waiting for us and we couldn't go with him, but he wouldn't have it and his grip on my arm tightened as his persistence increased. Reluctantly, we let ourselves be led away from the trail towards home and into a strange man's yard. He led us past the house and to a small, padlocked shed in the back. With slightly shaky hands, he undid the lock and opened the door and, as he fumbled for the light switch, gestured for us to step inside. Still feeling uneasy, but knowing that, with the help of my two companions, I could easily kick this guys butt, we stepped inside the little, plain shed. If you have read the Harry Potter series, you are familiar with the magical tents they use for camping, the ones that look simple and small on the outside, but are vastly ornate mansions on the inside. This felt a little reminiscent of those. Though the shed did not increase in size once inside, its beauty was the utter opposite of the plain, white outside walls. The man is a wood carver and stores his crafts in this shed. Intricately carved wooden chairs, tables, cabinets, frames, spoons, plates, coat racks, toys, etc covered every square inch of wall space and as much floor space as possible. In an instance, my unease sheepishly fizzled away and was replaced with awe. He's hoping to turn his little shed into a museum and bring tourists in to see his work, which I think is a great idea. He'll just have to work on his greeting and tourist hook a little. No arm-pulling allowed.

Two years seems like a long time

Over the past year, I've been bottling up my homesickness into a small chamber located a little above my stomach and a touch below my heart. It's a decent sized chamber that has been able to hold quite a lot of the tar-like homesick goo, but it has recently reached its limit and has begun to overflow. At first, the goo seeped from the bloated walls of the chamber slowly, releasing its toxins into my chest cavity at a manageable rate. At a rate that allowed me to press it down and to the side, into a place where I could digest it when the lights went out and no one could see the goo seep from my eyes. But it seems to be overflowing at a faster rate now, poisoning my stomach and piercing my heart and pressing against my throat. And it no longer always waits until dark to seep. I hope that either the chamber bucks up and increases its capacity or the goo cuts me some slack soon because I like it here and I want to make it here and I don't want to be a failure.

But I no longer feel like me.

All The Other Me's

I have internet now! Woo! Here's something I wrote during my un-internet week of doom:

Occasionally, I get glimpses of myself living different lives. Lives that were brought up by different parents, with different friends, different morals and ideals, and different experiences and cultures. I’ll see these lives in front of me, either in the form of an actual person who had the necessary experiences to equate one of the different lives, or in the form of a group that is missing one member – the other me. As I meandered along on my destination-free walk the other night, I found myself trailing behind a father in the act of teaching his son how to ride a bicycle. At first, they were going far slower than I would have liked and I had to purposefully keep my pace calm if I wanted to venture unnoticed with them for a while. The bike occasionally swerved straight towards a parked car or a pesky wall and, even though my heart did a little jump every time a crash was eminent, the dad was quick enough to prevent any major disasters. This was a good thing because I didn’t want my little 10-minute stalking spree to end in tears and scraped up knees. Each time the handlebars made a crazy pivot towards doom and the father methodically straightened things out just in time, I couldn’t help but smile from behind them and wish that I could somehow partake in, instead of just witness, this simple parent-child moment. The father started trotting ahead, making the son go faster to keep up. That’s when it happened. That’s when I glimpsed a different me there, running ahead on the other side of the bike, cheering for the kid as he caught up with us and then laughing with the father as he started pedaling ahead, picking up speed and confidence. My own pace quickened as I realized that the father, son and other me were now sprinting, racing eachother down the sidewalk, pedaling and striding with friendly competition, leaving the real me decidedly behind. I could no longer follow without looking loony for trying to keep up with two strangers. They reached a corner and turned right and a few beats later, I was crossing the intersection, accepting defeat and going straight. As casually as possible, I glanced down the street and saw that the boy was now several meters beyond the father, slowing as he reached another intersection and looking back over his shoulder to make sure his dad was still there, huffing and puffing and laughing. Two minutes later, as I tripped and stumbled and tried to avoid a rather wild and persistent three-year old on a tricycle, nearly failing at saving my shins, I noticed that the other me was nowhere in sight.

The Perks of the Cartoon Network

Twenty years ago, just after the fall of communism, one of the first stations to show up on the freshly freed television waves here was the Cartoon Network. I am continually amazed at how well many of the young people here speak English and am often reminded that I should thank Tom and Jerry for the English impact they had on the students here. Whenever we talk about their first exposures to English, the students I work with speak about Tom and Jerry with reminiscent little smiles, remembering their tot days in front of a colorful slew of mischief being emitted from the tube. At first, I thought it very bizarre that the first station brought in would be the Cartoon Network, but it was probably the safest, least informative and ideally influential station possible. I wonder if they foresaw the learning benefits of this for the children growing up during that time. One boy from my drama group told me that the first word he learned in English was door. He was four years old and was watching Tom and Jerry and one of the characters complained about the door slamming and Gabi put two and two together and from that point on regularly picked up new English words through cartoons. There's a special generation here of kids from about 13 to 20 years of age who acquired a set of vocabulary, albeit interesting, at a very early age and are now excelling at their English studies. Unfortunately, they recently started dubbing the cartoons instead of subtitling them and all the kids groan about the lack of original language in their cartoons. I must agree, subtitles are hands down better than dubbing. You actually get to learn something about a different language and perhaps if we all grew up with a foreign Cartoon Network teaching us new languages, the world would be a bit better off.

Alright, I'm stealing internet time from my favorite tea shop and I really don't want them to hate me. Hopefully I'll have internet next week. Later!

Fourteen Peaces

I've moved recently and currently do not have internet in my new apartment, but hopefully it will be up and running in a week or two. It's funny how dependent I am on the internet. I feel anxious without it, and yet am so much more productive. I read, clean, cook, walk, work in the free evenings instead of dwindling away the hours on this thing. It's actually kinda nice not have the draw of the net at my fingertips. Anyways, as a peace corps volunteer I suppose we occassionally think about peace and what it means to us and how we can bring it to other people. Last night, as I tried to think of something to do that didn't involve interspace, I decided to create a list of the things that bring me peace. Here it is in no particular order.

1. The texture and taste of chocolate chip cookie dough (this came up first because I had just made cookies...).

2. The idea that I could, at any moment, discover that I have a super-natural power. I hope it's the ability to fly or time travel.

3. Watching an intense down pour of rain or snow from my apartment with no where that I need to go.

4. Listening to the wind move through the tall trees and shake up their leaves.

5. The brief excursion elsewhere that my mind takes when I play one of my favorite songs without messing up.

6. Entering my apartment for the first time after I've thoroughly cleaned it.

7. The silence and contentment that follows a good concert.

8. Holding a sleeping animal in my arms or on my lap.

9. The exhaustion and slight ache that follows a good work out or a day of physical labor.

10. Hearing TJ excitedly shout "Bear! Bear!!" when he realizes I'm nearby, and the little-armed hug that follows (when possible).

11. Baking cookies for people and knowing that they like them.

12. Thinking about all the possibilities this blue-green pearl holds.

13. Feeling like I've earned my right to sleep at the end of the day.

14. Dreaming up all the wonderful worlds that await us when we die and looking forward to seeing all of my family, friends and pets there. We'll eat ice cream and stroll along the beach and laugh at the bizarreness of it all.

Roost

I feel like shaking things up a little. Hence the new layout. I just put on my flickr page some pictures from the past month and a half of random and planned trips around Romania, amongst other things...like veggies, origami and cheese. Oh, and roosters.