Summer in Moldova, an entirely new experience.

It is summer in Moldova and we were freed up to leave our village during our free time which many of the younger volunteers took advantage of to travel to Chișinău.  We were happy to spend the afternoons doing language homework, reading or trying to talk with Iulia and Sasha.  We were finding that we were understanding a bit more of the language and were feeling pretty good about this part of our training.

Culturally we are “integrating”, we are accomplished “bucket bathers” but will use the summer shower any chance we get.  The summer shower is a lovely contraption that consists of a shower stall in the garden with a big plastic 100 litre barrel on top.  A tube runs from a hole in the bottom of the barrel straight through a hole in the roof, there is usually a valve attached just inside the ceiling with a shower head just beneath.  You reach up and turn the valve on and have a great gravity shower.  The water is filled from the well in the morning so that it sits in the sun all day, if the weather turns cold or you have a few days of rain with no sun you just go heat a bucket of water on the stove and add it to the barrel (by climbing the ladder in the chicken coop to reach the roof of the shower) so you can have a warm shower.  It is heaven compared to a bucket bath!

We have dinner at home every night and depending on Iulia’s work schedule, we have Sasha or one of the grand-daughters for company, or we have Iulia and Sasha.  We love the homemade wine and enjoy the food that Iulia prepares for us.  We had our first experience with “racitura” and like many other volunteers found it very difficult to eat, it is a jellied meat dish (usually pork or chicken) that takes a lot of time and effort to prepare, it is a specialty here and they make it for special occasions. I am afraid we may never acquire a taste for it.

We had the opportunity to attend a birthday “masa” for Lilia, Sasha and Iulia’s daughter.  She is the mother of Daniela, the 17 year old English speaker, Iuliana, age 11 and a new baby boy named Bodgan who was just 8 months old (at the time of this writing in summer 2013).  Lilia and her husband Valeri have a new home on the other side of the village.  It is more modern and has an indoor bathroom with an actual hot water heater and working shower.  Valeri works in the Cricova winery not far from Ciorescu and his job, we think, has something to do with the manufacturing of their Champagne.  The birthday dinner (or masa) was, as usual, way more food than any of us could eat.  We all gathered around a big table with family and friends talking a million miles a minute, in Russian or the local dialect known as Moldovanesti. 

Dani made a point to try to talk with us a bit and translate a little, then she went off to tend the baby and we found that these lovely folks would switch to Romanian to try to talk to us.  We know it had to sound like baby talk to them and we are sure that we are very difficult for them to understand but they asked us simple questions about the U.S. and in particular about our family, things we could answer, somewhat anyway.   The choice of beverages was cognac or champagne….for several hours……good thing everybody was walking home!

Late June through early July is cherry season in Moldova.  There are loaded trees everywhere you go, two varieties are very common and everyone seems to have access to both, a sour cherry similar to a bing, and a dark sweet cherry that you could easily eat enough of to make yourself sick if you are not careful.  Lilia with Daniela and Iuliana came over one evening to pick cherries for bottling.

  We all picked until we couldn’t get to any more cherries and then Iulia made some compote, the Moldovan version of juice made by cooking the fruit in water for about half an hour and then letting it cool overnight before bottling.  She also made preserves from some of the cherries and we had them on crepes for breakfast, the cherries in Moldova are absolutely wonderful.

The huge garden behind the house is producing onions, garlic, cucumbers, potatoes, beans and herbs of all kinds.  The grapes on the vines are beginning to ripen and the carrots, cabbage, beets, corn and tomatoes are just coming on.  We have never lived anywhere else that you could literally walk out and pick your dinner.  The chickens provide fresh eggs and occasionally meat for the table.  Rabbits are in hutches at the bottom of the garden and provide the staple meat for the house, and every year Sasha and Valeri buy a pig and have it slaughtered and each family takes half of the meat to freeze and use throughout the year.  The food is simple, fresh and nutritious during the summer.

We are starting to better understand when and who to greet and interact with.  This is particularly difficult for me as a woman because my normal behavior is to greet and talk to everyone.  In Moldova, it is very common for men to greet each other and shake hands but they do not normally greet women unless they know them very well and they very rarely shake hands with a woman.  In more formal situations when we are introduced to men, I generally find that the men kiss my hand if I extend it rather than shaking it. 

We can competently order beer or wine at the local bar (of course) and get a bag of chips if we want it.  We are slowly making friends with the bartender; she now smiles at us, (our first few times in the bar she was definitely scowling).  The local drunk has joined us once, uninvited of course, and he spoke to us in uninterrupted Russian for about 10 minutes.

Our language instructors have changed up the classes and we now have different teachers.  It is probably a good thing to have put us in separate classes; I guess they got tired of asking us what we did the day before and getting the same story twice using only the “we” personal pronoun.  All three classes are studying the same material but each teacher has a slightly different style.  We are really enjoying the language learning even if it is incredibly difficult.   For our technical training they have had some of the volunteers who have been here for a while come in and talk with us about the projects they have going and the experiences they have had.  If there is one thing that has become abundantly clear already it is that the “Peace Corps” experience is unique to each volunteer.

Costa Blanca, fabulous weather all year round.

Suddenly, it was October and there were still so many things we wanted to do.  One of those was to visit our new friends Mike and Pam who live in the Costa Blanca region of south eastern Spain. 

We scheduled a week in early October and after a 7 hour bus ride, met them in the very strange coastal city of Benidorm.  They city is strange because it appears to have been built to be an apartment/hotel community for the Germans and Brits to flock to in the winter.  It was full of expats so I guess the strategy paid off.  We wandered the surprisingly crowded streets before settling in for a nice glass of wine and tapas (Mike had a Belgian beer).  We immediately realized why everyone was out, the prices for a drink and a tapa were absolutely unbelievably low.  We were told that many of the hotel and apartment packages include all three meals a day and that for some Germans and Brits it is actually cheaper to come to Benidorm on a package for the coldest months of winter than it is to heat their houses at home.  (Not being either we can’t vouch for this but Mike and Pam are both Brits and assured us it was possible.) 

Later we traveled to a really quaint Chinese restaurant where Mike and Pam were obviously regulars so we let them order.  We filled up on some very good Chinese food and drank our fill of wine (except for the other Mike who was driving) and were surprised at the incredibly low cost of around 30 euros for the four of us.  Each meal came with appetizers, soup or salad, egg rolls, a main dish, desert and a half a bottle of wine (your choice, red or white) for between 6 and 8 euros per person.  The food was great so we were left to wonder….how the heck do they make any money?

Then it was off to Mike’s very large, multi-story, recently remodeled home for bed. He bought the place years ago as a ruin.  Over the last several years he has transformed it into a showplace. 

It was beautiful in every way, with a large garden and  a swimming pool, huge terraces with outdoor cooking facilities, 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, 2 salons, a huge dining room and an office.

  He can completely close off the top from the bottom level and sometimes rents out the bottom to vacationers from….yep, you guessed it…Germany or the UK.

In the morning it was off to explore the area a bit, we headed for Denia and had lovely views on the drive over.  These small towns are dotted all along this stretch of the coast between Alicante and Valencia, the areas has beautiful hills going right down to the beaches and the slopes are planted in grapes, oranges and olives.  After Denia we headed inland a bit to Orba where Pam has her lovely home high on a hillside covered with gardens abundant with all kinds of different flowers.  Spectacular views from the windows and terraces made a simple lunch feel like a special treat.

In the afternoon back over to Mike’s place in Benissa where we relaxed at home for a while and Mike cooked up a fresh fish pie for dinner.  Thursday morning we were off to see the coastline.  First stop, a fry up (British style fried eggs, potatoes, bacon, etc.) at a lovely little place right out on the water in Calp.

The weather was perfect and the Mediterranean was inviting but the water is a bit chilly in October for us poor Arizonans, so we settled for a stroll along the boardwalk, with a little bit of a stop for a champagne pick me up at the far end.

Next along the coast was a stop at Moraira where there is a lovely marina area where we found…an Irish pub…such as it was.  Then on to Xabia for a great view of the rocky point jutting out into the Med with the fishing harbor tucked right in underneath it. 

Fresh seafood of all kinds readily available for reasonable prices and great views in every direction, what more could you want?

In the afternoon we headed to Benissa for a wine tasting event that Mike was in charge of, we tasted several lovely Spanish wines all available for prices unheard of in the states.  This wine tasting club has a special charter, they only work with vineyards that have wine to sell at 4 euros a bottle or less.  Believe it or not, in Spain it is very possible to find excellent wines in this price range.

After a quick recovery nap in the afternoon we headed off to a lovely restaurant that over looked the valley below Mike’s place, they had a mouth-watering menu and some of the best food we have eaten in Spain.  Appetizer, salad, main course, desert and half a bottle of wine for 12-15 euros per person included great service and a chat with the chef.

Early Friday we were up and headed to Benidorm to catch our bus for the 7 hour ride back home to Granada.  Costa Blanca was lovely, thanks Mike and Pam for your warm hospitality and delightful company.

Summer in Spain

By the end of June we were settled into a routine.  A beautiful stroll every morning through the upper Albaicin from the Sacramonte with a quick stop for coffee at Pasteles and then settle in at our outdoor table under the fig tree at school for four hours of language lessons.  Through the end of May and first few weeks of June we had several people spend a week or two with us in our class.  There was Federico, a German gentleman and then there was Maurice whose French accent was so strong that we struggled to understand his Spanish at all.  Then, we were joined by the amazing Ricardo, a young, energetic American from Miami with whom we became very good friends.

Usually, after class we would stop at Puerta de las Pesas for a drink to relieve our headaches and of course, tapas, sometimes even lunch.  Although we usually did not want to hear another word of Spanish, Jose and Fernando continued to speak with us and work with us on our homework.  We had completed the English translation of their brochure and this really helped in our learning process, especially vocabulary and also indoctrinated us into the incredible history of Granada and the Albaicin. 

Fernando was looking forward to seeing his oldest, Adrian who was returning with his young family from a couple of years in Chile.  When Adrian arrived he began waiting tables as well and one day he prepared the most fabulous seafood paella for all of us.  Did I mention that only three or four of us (generally Marilyn, Diana, Ricardo and I) would sit down and within an hour there would sometimes be as many as seven or eight?

Daniela, Adrian’s wife was pregnant and struggling through the summer heat to keep up with their beautiful and sometimes recalcitrant daughter Noella.  At three years old we were jealous of her conjugating skills if you can believe it.  Although we were concerned about our inability to speak and understand the language very well this was shaping up to be a magical summer of new friends and interesting places for us.

We sampled the nightlife around Granada on the weekends, sometimes leaving the younger students and friends around 3 or sometimes 4 in the morning to head home “early”.  By this time, the private school student deluge had ceased but the school still had 15 or 20 students, most of who socialized together at one point or another, especially during Friday afternoon/evening tapas.

By late June Ethan, a young man from Chicago with great language skills and Adam, a true polyglot whom we called “Bob” (because Antonio at the school thought he looked like Bob Marley with his wild hair), had become part of our social crowd.  The classes mixed and matched every other Monday as new students arrived and student skill levels evaluated.

Our class generally consisted of Diana, Ricardo, Paulina and ourselves with the occasional addition of another student or two.  Mabel, our friend from Singapore (and a world traveler) had finished up by the end of May and headed home.  Kelsey left for the USA and our Aussie doctors, Mike and Natalia headed home by mid-June but we had gained Lucinda “Cinders” and her husband along with a couple of beautiful girls, Tuva and Klara from Norway and Hungary respectively.  As you can see our language school was an ever expanding and contracting social net.

Meanwhile, Chessa had returned to New York in May with Renee and surprising us all, returned in time to catch the June TEFL course in Granada which she passed with flying colors.  We managed to catch up with our old TEFL teachers Dylan and Richard, although separately this time around.  Our new friend Jamie and her husband (who had told us about the house we were currently living in) were experiencing difficulty obtaining a work visa for her without returning to the USA according to some new regulations now being enforced by Spanish immigration officials and it was looking like they’d have to incur the travel expense to take care of it.

By the end of June we had our heads full of the Spanish language grammatical structure, could not understand much of what was being said around us and certainly couldn’t speak well at all.  We had made many new and fun friends however and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of our daughter Kellie and her friend Brittany in early July for their TEFL class.

 It was a perfect time to do a little more exploring, Diana was game for another drive so the last weekend in June we headed out for another Andalucian getaway.

Learning to live in an entirely new way.

At least a couple evenings per week we would travel to one or more of the other barrios in Granada (Realejo or Centro for example) and visit some of our other favorite places. 

We had specifically budgeted for the breakfast “fry up” offered by Hannigans in Centro and we have rarely missed these weekly or bi-weekly events even though we really feel like we’re cheating on the cultural experience when we do.  Rationalization: the Irish culture, in Spain, is still a new and different culture….yeah sure. 

Our friend from TEFL, Tony, had a birthday during our second week in Granada and we met up at the Mirador San Nicolas

 then the party moved to Taberna 22 in the lower Albaicyn and soon ended up in one of our favorite places in Realejo, the restaurant Casa Lopez de Correa. 

This restaurant is run by a British couple, Miles and Sue and features, among other great things, a tapas menu of seven or eight items that you can choose your tapa from when you order a drink.  All of them are great as Sue is a fabulous chef and Mike insists that they serve the best lasagna in Granada.

The party moved on as first one bar then another closed for the evening until we found ourselves in the lower part of Realejo in the wee small hours of the morning….a forty minute uphill hike home for us.

On another evening, with Tony not long after we again went “a tapeo” and during our wandering on this special evening we picked up a few more people at every stop until we were a group of nearly twenty people. 

Two of the people that joined us were Chessa and Renee, both lovely ladies from New York traveling in southern Spain for a few weeks.  Before we knew it we had adopted them both and Chessa, after completing the TEFL course, is still in Granada and has been in a relationship with our dear friend Tony.  We loved being able to see them both on a regular basis.

A few days later we passed through the Puerta de las Pesas with Diana and Jose called to us by name, remembering where we were from and inquiring how are classes were going.

  Wow…we were very surprised and impressed that he remembered us from our brief and difficult conversation a few days before.  We decided to stop again and after our meal he brought out a brochure they had just produced and asked us to check the English, it was a Google translate version and was terrible. 

We offered to try to translate it for them in order to get the practice with the Spanish, so he gave us a copy in the original Spanish.  This was the beginning of a friendship that we treasure.

Knowing that we would need to work through the translation over several days we decided to bring it back the following week after we found a new place to live and got settled.  We had been talking with a wonderful couple from California, Allie and Andrew, friends that Diana had made previously, who were actually living in Spain, and had an apartment that they wanted to sublet for the summer.  They were going home to get married in June and would not be back until September or October, perfect for us!  There was only one catch, they had four cats.  The cats were part of the deal; we thought long and hard and came to the difficult decision that part of our whole process had been to free ourselves of that type of responsibility, so we would have to find somewhere else.

We got a call from another friend, a teacher at the TEFL school who suggested that we get in touch with some friends of hers.  They had been renting a small house and were scheduled to leave sometime “soon” and possibly their house would be available.  Sadly, we discovered that they were out of town for a few days so we could not talk to them until after the weekend.

It was Friday and by Saturday our stay at the residencia was scheduled to end so instead of stressing out and working diligently to find a place to live like we would have a few short weeks earlier, we decided to embrace the southern Mediterranean lifestyle, refused to worry, extended our stay at the residencia for a few days and went to the beach with Diana and Kelsey for the weekend.  

New people, new friends, new language.

In these early days at Castila, we met Diana, an attorney from Baton Rouge who had arrived just three weeks before we did and Kelsey a vivacious 18 year old from Colorado doing her “gap year” in Spain and who, damn her, spoke Spanish fairly well.  

From Australia we had a classmate Lesley and a couple who were both physicians, another couple who had just spent 9 months in Nepal as observers in the electoral process were originally from England.

 We met university students from both mainland China and Taiwan, a woman from Singapore and a travel journalist from Hong Kong.

  Ricardo, a 22 year old from Florida who had just graduated and was headed back in the fall for grad school joined our class, and we got to know Ethan, a 16 year old high school student from Chicago whose Spanish was several levels better than ours and those are just the people we got too know in the first couple of weeks!

On Friday afternoons, after classes, the school would get everyone together for an afternoon tapas hour, occasionally it was hosted at the school with Victoria cooking but most often they would pick a local restaurant and off we would go “a tapeo”.  Most of the restaurants and bars in the Albaicin and many all over Granada are family owned and have been for several generations.  After our experience in the market at Plaza Larga we started going up there regularly to shop and also to grab a drink after class or to enjoy “comida” (traditionally the large meal of the day eaten in mid-afternoon) in one of the several restaurants in the area. 

Puerta de las Pesas (also known as Puerta Nueva) is actually a very special gate in the wall of the original city that dates from the 11th century.  It was a strong defensive position and the place where the people who came from inside the city would leave to go out to the markets that built up outside the walls and then return with their purchases.  As they passed through the gates the weight of the items that had been purchased would be verified by the authorities for the payment of taxes.  If it was found that a merchant had cheated someone (shorted the weight) then the merchant’s weights would be confiscated and hung above the gate, effectively putting him out of business.  Puerta de las Pesas in Spanish means Gate of the Weights. 

Every time we would go up to Plaza Larga we would pass through this beautiful reminder of what a wonderfully historic place we had chosen for this new beginning.  One afternoon, on the way to the open air produce market we stopped at the restaurant named Puerta de las Pesas, a family owned restaurant just beyond the gate itself.  We needed a drink and a tapa to ease the after school headache and they were offering a great “menu del dia” special of the day, for comida; an appetizer, main course, dessert and bread for 8.50 euros.  We chatted with Jose, the waiter, in our very broken Spanish and learned that the restaurant had recently changed ownership and had only been reopened for a month prior to our arrival. 

The school had activities of one kind or another almost every evening.

 We took a long beautiful hike above the Alhambra and got some of the most spectacular views of Granada, the Albaicin and the Sacramonte we had ever seen. 

This old city was really starting to capture our hearts.

We tried “movie night” and although we do understand that listening to Spanish is a great way to try to train your ear, we were so far out of our depth that we decided movies would be much more enjoyable after a few more weeks of lessons. 

Our interest in and fascination with the history and culture of this area was increasing daily, what a great choice Granada was for a first try at living overseas.