A Long Walk Home, and Other Things

I love good weather, because it means that people are out and about. I get out to run almost every day now, and I usually go the same route, about 8 km towards another village and back. It is not a main road, it simply links the main road to this other village. There are a few large farms along the way that belong to a company that makes juice and canned fruits and vegetables. This company buses in workers from all over the region to work in the fields. Well, the bus drives by at almost the same time every day while I’m running. So now the driver always taps the horn and waves, and some of the workers on the bus have even started waving. I also feel like I know the tractor drivers who also always drive by and wave, or give me a ‘thumbs up.’ Strange, I’ve never even talked to these people, and I see them (through a window) for 5 seconds each day, yet I feel like they are my friends. ‘Oh, there goes my friend the bus driver! Oh, and here comes my friend the blue tractor driver!’

The following is a story of my walk home one day. I really enjoy such days as this, when it seems like everyone is happy and glad to talk, when I don’t have to rush, and when I feel like just another member of the village:

I was waiting on the side of the road to try to get a ride home from Soroca. My village is only about 6 km away from the city, directly on the main road to Chisinau, but it can be impossible to get there sometimes! There are two mini-bus drivers who drive between Soroca and my village every day, but there is not a regular schedule. It is not uncommon to be riding with one of them when he decides make a detour to his house to pick up a snack or something. Also, they don’t go anywhere until the bus is full. So sometimes I could spend up to an hour just sitting in the bus waiting for more people to come. Sometimes hours go by and neither of the buses come. Then you just have to hitchhike. There is a parking lot at the edge of the city, across from the bus station, and everyone wanting to go to the surrounding villages waits there to hitch rides. If a car stops, it can be a mad dash for who gets the seats.

Anyhoo, I was waiting to get a ride, and it was a beautiful day, the mini-buses were nowhere in sight, and I was tired of fighting people to get to a car first, so I decided to walk home. It’s really quite a nice walk, the first kilometer is along the Nistru River (which marks the Ukrainian border), and then there is a huuuge hill. The road does a long switchback, but there is a path straight up through the woods, which I took. Then it is another 3 kilometers up on a hill, which overlooks the city, and endless farmland. Upon reaching the edge of my village, I decided to stop in and see my friend who just had her baby. I popped in, and we caught up on the events of the past two weeks, and I admired the baby. I then headed out, because I had to be at choir practice.

I took the shortcut through the woods and met up with the main road. I ran into the friend’s 7-year-old, who was munching on some popcorn on his way home. He stopped me and made me eat some, and I promised him I would bring him candy from Russia when I went there the following week. I continued on, but soon realized the my jacket had fallen out of my bag. So I went to retrace my steps to try to find it. As I reached the entrance to the woods, I heard a friendly voice call out to me in Russian. Two young men were working on a car on the side of the road up ahead. Ah, one of them was one of the only people my age in the village. He had been working in St. Petersburg most of the time, but due to the ‘economic crisis,’ there isn’t much work there anymore, so he came home. He had given me his sim card to use while I was in Russia, and he wanted to know how my preparations for my trip were going. I struggled through a few minutes of conversing in Russian, but then switched back to Romanian and told him about my jacket. He wished me luck, and I went on through the woods. No sign of it. I couldn’t figure out where I lost it. I made it all the way back to my friend’s house, and found her, her husband, and the boy sitting in the back room. They all started laughing when I entered. ‘Looking for something?’ The asked. The boy had found it in the woods on his way home. ‘Be careful not to lose my candy on the way home from Russia!’ he told me. And I continued on my way home. As I exited from the woods, I held up my jacket to show the two guys working on the car down the road and they shouted a congratulations.

A bit further down the road I met up with a woman who was coming out of the field carrying a huge burlap sack on her back. She was wearing one of the bright, floral-patterned bathrobe-like things that all Moldovan women wear, and a bright, floral-pattered head scarf, which doesn’t at all match the bright floral-patterend bathrobe. I didn’t know her, but she seemed to know me, which isn’t uncommon, I guess. She asked me if I walked all the way from Soroca, and I said yes, it’s a nice day, why not? She replied with ‘yeah, nice to exercise a little!’

Then, on the other side of the road, going in the same direction, appeared a horse-drawn cart. It was extremely over-loading with twiggy branches sticking out in all directions, and the two watchmen from work were sitting atop the pile. ‘Katerina!’ the shouted to me. ‘Where are you coming from?’ We yelled across the road to each other for a bit, and they continued on. A bit later, they stopped to talk to someone else, and I passed them and made the turn into my part of the village. A few minutes later I heard the cart approaching from behind, so I move as far as possible to the side of the road for them to pass me. It got closer and closer, and I kept waiting for it to pass me, but it never did. Finally I turned around to see why they were going so slowly, and the horse’s head was about an inch from my shoulder! I yelped a bit and jumped into a bush, and the two watchmen were sitting atop their branches laughing their heads off. I laughed to, and then continued on.

As I walked on, I greeted people with the required ‘Christ is risen!’ (for 40 days after Easter, instead of hello). I got enthusiastic responses and smiles from all. I turned on to my old street, and the old man who lives on the corner waved from his garden. A bit further on I turned onto my new street, and another jokingly asked me if I hadn’t lost my way home. Finally, two and a half hours after setting out from the town, I arrived home, in a good mood and with just enough time to grab my notebook and make it to choir practice!


So I’m really liking my new home. My partner and the girls are very interested in my ‘gymnastics.’ That is, my body circuit exercises – jumping jacks, squats, sit-ups, push-ups, lunges, etc. I do a lot of the exercises with a large medicine ball, which they love. One evening they all came into my room and I tried to show them how to do some of the exercises. There was a lot of shrieking and stumbling and falling off of the medicine ball. In trade for the gymnastics instruction, I was instructed on how to hang up my laundry. I did a very large load the other day, and I hung them up on the clothesline in the order that they came out of the washing machine. But apparently, I have to put the pants by the pants, shirts by the shirts, etc, and in order by color. Otherwise people might walk by and think that I don’t know how to do things right. Hanging up my clothes that way never even occured to me, but now that I know, I have noticed throughout the village that everyone does it that way!

Awhile back I really got to put my language skills to use. There was a soccer game between Switzerland and Moldova (I don’t think I need to tell you the outcome) here in Chisinau. After the game a bunch of us were out at a bar where there is live music, and one of the Moldovans who works at Peace Corps plays the harmonica there. Some Swiss fans showed up, so we talked with them a bit. Lots of the Moldovans in the bar also wanted to talk with them, being so obviously foreign, dressed all in red with big swiss flags. But of course the Moldovans speak only Russian and Romanian, and the Swiss only German and English. But I speak all four! So I got to be translator. Man, that was a riot. My Russian is very poor, but I was able to facilitate a Russian-German ‘hi, how are you, where are you from, what are you doing here, how do you like Moldova, do you want a beer’ conversation! I don’t know if I’ll ever again find myself in a situation where those four languages all come into play. Crazy. Fun.

Stayed tuned for tales from my adventures with both of my siblings in Russia, and with my sister in Moldova and Romania!