On Sunday, May 21st I attended the Gay Pride Parade in Chisinau.
I arrived at 11:50, and a few rubber-neckers were already beginning to crust around the edges of the police barricade. I entered at the left corner of Bucuresti and Ismail streets. This was the only point where someone beckoned for those who would join – how did they choose us? Did I just look nice?
Do you know how much I miss you?
Your lives are rolling still and I’m not there to see it happen.
I joke, “Haven’t they invented teleportation yet? I mean, we have robotic chefs, suitcases that follow you around the airport and backpacks that make piggyback rides better…”
We stumbled in cross-eyed, like with many of our ambitions – (mostly) not knowing what to expect. Flimsy communication…
We went to the Beshalma museum, a regular attraction for our reporting volunteers. The current museum director is the father of Dmitri Cara-Cobani, a Gagauz historian and poet. She always greets us with warmth and a glimmer, an undeniably open woman with a passion for her work. Continue reading “Motivated! Surprise Event…”
Groans and clacks now ricochet by the lake in the name of progress. Comrat, a town of many ethnicities and varied allegiances, has recently begun constructing a hotel with the financial aid of bosom-friend Turkey. The first Turkish-sponsored project, which halted and stuttered under resistance from pro-Russian factions, was a water purification scheme.1 Comrat’s metal-heavy waters were a late-Soviet era catalyst for health problems, and it wasn’t until 1999 that the program finally got off the ground.2 But the area has since managed support from many donors, and is leveraging well. This April, the town began preparing for the Turkish delegation and the Moldovan diplomats who met to sweep in the future.
I stepped into a hive, minus the keeper’s jacket, and the chirping female hum vibrating low in the high-vaulted space was momentarily overwhelming. I was surrounded by long-skirted blossoms, the falling petals of their scarfed crowns speaking respect to God. The scent of honey would come later, when the women lit their spindly candles; and the calming smoke, cloying smoke, when the pope pendulated his thurible.
It was Little Easter, or the Day of Remembrance. I first learned about the holiday after I attended a church service with my first host mother in my first Moldovan village (you can read about the service in my post Churches and Fainting Americans). I followed her to tour the cemetery afterwards, where she mentioned some holiday where families would gather at small tables next to headstones and share candy.
If there’s anything a Peace Corps Volunteer can relate to, it’s shoving herself into a stuffy, smelly, overcrowded minibus (in Romanian, it’s called a “rutiera,” but down Comrat way we use the Russian term “marshrutka” (маршрутка)) for a bumpy ride with a barnyard atmosphere.
Continue reading “Marshrutka, My Sh-route-ka: Interview with a Driver”
Sundry Travels 