I have now made it through the first month and I feel like we are really in the thick of training. Last Saturday through Tuesday we got the opportunity to get out of town for a little bit. It was a nice break since we have not yet been allowed to leave the county. I along with my language group, and one other headed towards the region of Moldova to visit with Liz, a volunteer there who is nearing the end of her service. She was awesome and did everything she could to help us and show us how she has been living and working in a this city of 50,000, a larger city than what most of us trainees are expecting. Besides eating really good food, and watching the world cup we managed to find the time to get to know Liz’s’ school, counterpart (the teacher she has been working with most closely during her service), and we got to see the children’s center at which she has been working as a secondary project.

Both days we took a group of kids from the center to the park. The first day we took the bale bodied kids. We picked five girls up from an apartment where they live with a teacher and met another five who live at the center, in the park. To my amazement some of them were fluent in Spanish, which they learned strictly from watching telanovelas. Speaking Spanish with Romanians is something I have come across more often than I could have imagined before arriving here. Many Romanians go to Spain and Italy to work and live, so it isn’t too hard to find someone with whom I can speak Spanish. I have found speaking Spanish with Romanians to be the most confusing and tiring activities that my brain has ever been encountered. Some words that used to be natural part of my Spanish vocabulary have been replaced with the Romanian word. Without thinking I mix the languages saying “da” where I once said “si”, and so on. At one point when I was chatting with the girls over ice cream, about something that they had heard in English, my friend Brad came over and let m know that we were having a conversation in three languages. I hadn’t even noticed.

The second day we took a group of children with severe mental and physical disabilities to the park and swung with them and interacted with them. I will never forget the excitement of the boy that I took to the park. Even the mere action of being pushed in a wheel chair elicited happy screams and bouts of enthusiastic clapping. It was nice to be able to do this for the kids. They have wonderful people at the center who do work that breaks my heart, but they are understaffed, due to lack of funding, and cannot always give the kids as much individual attention as would be ideal.

After two busy, eye opening days we came back “home”. We were all a little annoyed to have to leave by 6:40, but it turned out to be a small price to pay in order to avoid the later part of the day. As the day drug on, the maxi taxi that we were on got progressively hotter and more crowded. On the positive side, the ride was filled with amazing pine forests, mountains, and ideal villages tucked in at the bottom and it made me very excited that come week seven we will be allowed to leave the training city and explore some more of this beautiful country.

Being back has been equally as busy. We received our placement questionnaires, and so I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of community I would like to live in, the age I would like to teach, and the kinds of activities and projects I would like to be involved in outside of school. I am going to try to keep an open mind and expect that everything will work out for the best because not having expectations has worked well for me so far, and when it comes down to it, this experience isn’t so much about me as it is about being in a situation in which I can be help. Next week we will have our sight-matching interview, along with our first week of practicum. For the next two weeks, the four hours in which, until now have been filled with lectures and such, will now be filled with teaching. My fellow trainees and I will be teaching a total of 800 junior high and high school students in order to get a feel for the age groups we like and practice teaching. Next week I will be sharing a sixth grade class with two other trainees. We will take turns, each teaching an hour a day. Since I am a California girl and one of the other girls in my group is from LA we thought it would be appropriate to do a Movie theme. Planning has gone really well so far, but I really have no idea what it will look like in practice. My home-stay sister who is a 6^th grader has perfect English, but there is no telling what level the kids in class will be at.

That was all pretty technical, so just to liven things up a bit I will leave you with an anecdote, which demonstrates the chaos that is my life. This morning I was leaving to go to school to print out a few things for Monday’s classes when I ran into one of my neighbors in the entrance to my building. He was excited because he had just bought a car. I went over to check it out and as I stepped down from the sidewalk I noticed a flash of orange. Turns out I had left my house in my slippers. Whoops!