This Valentine’s day is a sad day for me. I’ve been in a long term relationship that I think is working on coming to an end. We’ve enjoyed great times together. We’ve had our ups and downs, good and bads but alas all things must come to an end. It all started to deteriorate last week when communication started to break down. We just couldn’t communicate well any more and our interactions would end with a freezing. I think their might be hope but it will take some time and doings.

Ok, so my love is my laptop. The problem is my video card. I think I can buy one on E-Bay and have it sent over. I’m just trying to find someone flying this way in the near future who can fly with it so I don’t have to trust it to the postal system.

Have a Happy Valentines day! Or  a Singles Awareness Day if that is better

BTW, I’ve put some new photos up on my albums.

So I made an offhand remark about having to use a squatting toilet outside now that it’s cold out. This friend (whom I will allow to remain nameless, although he may name himself in the comments) made a mention of squatting being healthier. I decided to put google to work and verify his claims.

I guess he is right as long as the sources which are also selling devices to allow westerners to squat are accurate.

http://healthrewardsyou.com/goodelimination.htm

http://naturesplatform.com/health_benefits.html

Enjoy some good reading and I hope you have a good superbowl party. Who’s playing this year? I’m going to miss the commercials and half-time porn show.

I am really lucky to be in Moldova and celebrate two Christmases and New Years. Most of the Orthodox church uses the old calendar which means they celebrate religious holidays on different dates. Today was Christmas. Under communism much of the Christmas traditions were moved to New Years to down play the religion. For example, Santa came on New Years eve (Their big new years celebration is the new one, Dec 31.)

For Christmas we went to Chisinau last night and stayed with my host Dad’s brother’s family. It was a lot of fun. The center of Chisinau is pretty lit of and it was a lot of fun. This morning we went to an orthodox church where my host cousin was singing in the Choir. Now, I don’t know much about music, but they were really good. I was really impressed. I think they sang for a good three hours with only a couple of breaks. Standing for the whole time wasn’t as much fun. After this we had a big delicious rabbit dinner and played games. I took a ton of pictures that I will try to upload when I get a chance.

I also found out that my host cousin is webmaster for the telephone and  internet company. She speaks English quite well so it was nice to talk in my own language. And, maybe now I will be able to get an inside scoop on when we will be getting DSL!

Time for bed, Crăciun fericit

Since Moldova doesn’t celebrate Christmas until January7 today is just a normal day for most people. For volunteers, we get to celebrate Christmas twice! Today I went to a larger town about 30 minutes away for dinner on speaking English.

The menu was the most random assortment of food, none of which are traditional Christmas foods because the two people doing most of the prep kept a list of food cravings over the last several weeks.. It was really good through. The Moldovan food I’ve had is good but lacks the zing of the American cuisine. Most of our food was international I think we had American, Mexican, Japanese, and Molodan foods represented. My favorite was the brownies, with ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream. MmmIt wasn’t a White Christmas but is we did have a couple of snow showers which forced us to run outside and verify it really was snowing and take advantage of the brief opportunity to have a snowball fight.

After dinner and cleaning the massive amount of dirty dishes we all watched Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation which mom sent over. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch the whole thing as the last ruteara of the day leaves at 6:30.

All in all it was a good Christmas but I miss all my friends and family. I hope this Christmas has been good you. Time to call home and disrupt dinner…

I’ve uploaded some pictures from this month and Christmas at: http://picasaweb.google.com/elenbaum/2006December

PS. If you got a call from a strange number yesterday and a mumbled  voicemail message it was probably from me. If you didn’t sorry, I either didn’t have your number or didn’t think you important enough to call on Christmas Eve…  Sorry

On an unrelated note, check out the website of my friend Mark Rogers at http://fallingfifth.com/

I just got done discussing politics for an hour and a half with my host family. Now, I love a good argument or discussion, but I tend to avoid politics. I know just enough to know that I don’t know squat. I know that both sides of the table have valid arguments and it will be up to the history writers to to tell us who was right. Nevertheless, how do you answer questions about Bush, Clinton, and Iraq in another language to non Americans.

BTW, our conversation started out with a question of why North America is more developed than South America. I know just enough history of South America to have a general idea but not a good solid grasp. Anyone got any opinions?

Anyway, sorry for the delay in posting. I got a case or writers block knowing that there are people who actually read this thing. I guess my head hurts enough to make a post now.

Time for bed..

One of the things about being a Peace Corps Volunteer is living my life in a fishbowl. Just like any small town in America it seems everyone knows everyone. I’m the new guy in town, and an American. I can pretty safely assume everything I do will be known by everyone. I can also assume people I don’t know are watching me and trying to figure me out. This isn’t all that new for me because: I lived in a small town growing up; I was homeschooled back when it wasn’t popular; and I was always different because my family traveled the country with a national motorsport. Why am I blogging about this? I get the feeling there are quite a few people checking out my blog (or I just have an over inflated ego) and I’m curious who.

So, please leave a comment with your name so I can have an idea of who the heck reads my ramblings. It will also serve to either help my over inflated ego or shatter it when I find out I’m the only one that reads this.

In other news. I’m really liking my host family. They are hilarious so we joke around a lot. Sometimes they even get my jokes. It’s also been a lot of fun to sit around and look at the photo album of my host dad and his brother’s time in the USSR military. We joke about how they were working to take over America and the world.

One more day here and I’m back to Chisinau for a conference and Thanksgiving dinner!

Thanks! Don’t forget to comment.

As of yesterday I’m officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. The swearing in ceremony was large, attended by probably 300 people including embassy staff, training host families, partners, and the media. For those of you wondering, I didn’t trip when walking across the strange. Some of the volunteers sang and danced. For the benefit of all humanity, I did neither.

After swearing in my partner drove me home. Just after leaving Chisinau the car started shaking a little bit. We pulled over and the driver checked out the problem by kicking the tires, scratching he head, and finally kicking the tire right to determine the left front tire could move forward and back about a half inch. While he was checking it out I decided I would take a look myself (I kinda value living.) Sure enough the left front CV, Ball Joint, and other assorted parts were just plain worn out. Earlier they (partner and driver) mentioned “magazine” (store) so I assumed they knew about the problem and we would stop at a repair shop and have it taken care of. They didn’t, we made it home without incident.

The most interesting thing about the ride home is when I was informed of a slight change. I wasn’t going to be living with the mayor but with another host family. This in and of itself isn’t that big of a deal, with the exception of not having the glory of living with the mayor,  except that two days prior we filed the paper work for my residency and work permit. I guess I’ll have to redo those. This family is one that I visited on my previous visit. My host dad Ion has a fruit dryer which  he built. My host mom Lilia teaches history at the school. I have two host brothers 17 and 14 years old. The house is really nice. I have a washing machine, bath, hot water, gas heat, and …. and outhouse. Oh, being the genious that I am, I forgot a bag at the hotel. It has been found and is safe at the PC office. I’ll have to bring it with me back from the Thanksgiving conference next week.

My partner was gone today so I spent most of the day organizing my room and massive amounts of papers given to me throughout training. Since it is such a nice day I also took a walk through the village. It was interesting. I am the first volunteer here so most people don’t know what the Peace Corps is. My host mom also pointed out that most of the older people were educated under the soviet system which taught that all Americans are evil. I get to work on changing that perception and saying hi and introducing myself in broken Romanian hopefully is a good start. Tonight my partner is going to introduce me to our disco tech. Tomorrow we are supposed to talk about the plan for the next while and what I will be doing.

On an unrelated topic, I received two packages last week! My mom sent my boots, smartwool socks, lint rollers (4 – I asked for 1 ), a bunch of magazines, and fire balls. The fire balls provided the most entertainment because it seems my host family doesn’t like hot food. My sister took one, not knowing what it was and I wasn’t going  to tell her. After about a minute she started making weird faces and looked to be in pain. It was great! Of course every other family member had to try one and had the same reaction. I coolly ate two. The second package was from Sarah K (and crew?). It included a bunch of candy, season 1 of Lost, and a handful of things I asked her to throw in when I heard she was sending a package. It was great to receive the packages. Feel free to keep them coming

BTW, I have a new phone number: My new number is 001 - 373 – 079-095511. It doesn’t work in my house though so if you would like my land line phone please E-Mail me.

Wow, It has been a while since I posted. A lot has happened in the life of Ryan. Language is continuing. I’m far from comfortable and fluent but I can at least communicate basic things to intelligent and patient people. I started to write a long narrative of the last two weeks worth of events but realized it was getting pretty long, it wasn’t that interesting, and that no one would read it. I’ll just give you the highlights:

Site Visit

• It was cold and wet most of the time

• The rutiera driver was rewiring the radio while waiting for the departure time. The wiring was scary.

• I tried to talk with an old guy about his time working in Sudan while waiting for the rutiera to leave.

• It was the 570′th birthday of the Chisinau. It seems like a great celebration of dance, exhibits, food, and music. I wish I’d of had more time.

• It is about an hour and a half to my village. The rutiera runs 4 times a day.

• My partner is 26, has a physics degree, teaches physics at the school, is working on a business degree, and is president of my assigned NGO.

• My NGO is pretty small and consists of a couple computers and a really nice copy machine.

• I’m not really sure what the specific objectives of the NGO are. I think I get to codify those as part of my job.

• I’ll be living with the mayor. He has a really nice house complete with a shower (but no curtain *haven’t figured out that Moldavian norm yet) and indoor toilet. He and his wife seem really nice. They have three kids. The two boys are going to a university in Romania and their daughter (10 years old) is going to a boarding school in Romania.

• I’m the first volunteer in the village which I think will be good.

Visiting the South

• The group of us took a large bus to visit some Bulgarian and Gargaouse villages in the south.

• They fed us really good food and treated us to song and dance.

• We crashed a village’s wine festival which was a lot of fun.

• I have pictures in my gallery.

Birthday

• My birthday was the 25′th. I am now a quarter century old.

• I got a lot of E-Mails, Facebook postings, and a couple of E-cards. Thanks!

• My host mom and sister sang to me while dancing in a circle around me and kissing me on the cheek each time they made a lap. That was weird.

• My host mom gave me a pair of slippers and socks. I think she had to work hard to find my size.

• My fellow volunteers and language instructors threw an impromptu party for me.

• My host mom threw a big party and dinner for me in the evening with some friends.

• I got a call from my real mom & dad plus my aunt in Norway

• All in all it was a great day

I’ve uploaded some new photos to my gallery. I need to come up with a blogging strategy. I’m trying to decide if I should continue writing random narratives of my life, if I should select specific stories of things that happen, or if I should start doing post on specific aspects of Moldavian life (transportation, food, culture, etc.) What are you thoughts?

We had our site assignment this morning. They way they communicated our assignments was pretty cool. They drew a big map of moldova on the ground and placed a chair with each assignment in the appropriate location with a label. They drew our names from a hat, read a brief description of our assignment and led us to the appropriate chair. My name was called near the end and I was quite anxious to find out where I would be.

Drum Roll Please>>>>>>>>>

I’m going to be in the raion of Calarasi and the villiage of Valcinet. It is small and has maybe 4500 people. It is an hour and a half from the capital. I don’t have a real good idea about the organization I’m be working with other than they were created in March, 2006. They work to develop the community, organizations, and businesses. It sounds like my first work may be Org Dev which is cool. They have a couple computers and internet!!! They haven’t had a volunteer before.

 Next weekend is my site visit. I get to spend a couple days there, meet and select a host family, and see what is happening. It is a solo trip so it should be a bit of an adventure.

 A contest: Try to find as much info as you can and post it in the comments section. Get creative and maybe I will reward you with a post card.

I was just able to upload some new pictures check them out at http://picasaweb.google.com/elenbaum/PeaceCorpsPreServiceTraining

Things are going well here. I went to church this morning in the capital. It was nice. I got in contact with them through a friend of a friend. I met an American who is working with IVCF. He and his wife were kind enough to translate the service for me. I also got to meet an American just arrived to teach as class on worship at a local Christian college.

After church I checked out the Wine Festival. It was really nice as far as festivals are concerned. There were a couple dozen really nice exibits set up by various wine companies. I also managed to find some really nice pasteries.

Now I’m at the PC office uploading pictures and taking advantage of high speed internet.