I received my first package from America yesterday. It was full of gorgeously durable boots, sexy thick socks, long johns, I've-been-waiting-so-long-for-them crochet hooks, yummy black licorice and double-stuf oreos, to name a sampling.
I told my fellow teachers that I had received a package.
"From Obama?" the white-haired, alcoholic French teacher asked. All the teachers at my school have been keeping an eye on the elections and many know stuff I don't know, like when Obama will actually swear in as the president, etc.
I laugh and say that no, the package is from my family.
Another teacher picks up the joke, "He is celebrating his victory and sending packages to his supporters."
"Yes." I say with gravity. "Obama is sending packages to every american that voted for him in every country in the world."
The room laughs.
I decide to share some of my american wealth and open the package of double-stuf oreos.
"Would you like a cookie from America?" I ask the Romanian teacher.
"You mean an Obama cookie?" She wittily replies.
The Romanian teacher then helped me offer cookies from Obama to the rest of the teachers.
11.07.2008
11.04.2008
voting day
I finally received my absentee ballot in the mail yesterday, the 3rd of November. I'm sure my vote won't count, because it will be arriving about a week after the elections.
But I still wanted to vote, y'know, in the spirit of the occasion.
I signed my name that I would not vote more than once and that I was a real Missouri resident. Half the candidates on the ballot I had never heard of before, as they were candidates for Newton County treasurer or coroner...I felt very democratic connecting the arrows to show my voting preference. And I was so focused on the ballot I almost smoked myself out of my room by forgetting to pull out the chimney-blocker.
This morning I stopped by the post office with the big yellow envelope and paid 5 lei for the par avion postage to send it to Kay Baum of Newton County, Missouri.
The man at the postoffice has white hair, a white mustache and a thin, droopy face. He wears a postoffice vest and does not use a computer. He is the only person I have seen working behind the counter at the post office. It always takes him a few minutes to weigh the package, look up in a book how much postage should cost for America, then look in another book for the proper postage stamps. His cigarette ashes lightly dusting the stamp catalogues.
After locating the right postage stamps he spits on their backs (apparently he has become wise to licking the envelopes after so many years behind the counter), and presses the stamp down.
Gata (finished), he says.
All this to say, I voted. You should too.
But I still wanted to vote, y'know, in the spirit of the occasion.
I signed my name that I would not vote more than once and that I was a real Missouri resident. Half the candidates on the ballot I had never heard of before, as they were candidates for Newton County treasurer or coroner...I felt very democratic connecting the arrows to show my voting preference. And I was so focused on the ballot I almost smoked myself out of my room by forgetting to pull out the chimney-blocker.
This morning I stopped by the post office with the big yellow envelope and paid 5 lei for the par avion postage to send it to Kay Baum of Newton County, Missouri.
The man at the postoffice has white hair, a white mustache and a thin, droopy face. He wears a postoffice vest and does not use a computer. He is the only person I have seen working behind the counter at the post office. It always takes him a few minutes to weigh the package, look up in a book how much postage should cost for America, then look in another book for the proper postage stamps. His cigarette ashes lightly dusting the stamp catalogues.
After locating the right postage stamps he spits on their backs (apparently he has become wise to licking the envelopes after so many years behind the counter), and presses the stamp down.
Gata (finished), he says.
All this to say, I voted. You should too.
11.01.2008
43 students and a bus
Last weekend, I was invited to go on a school field trip with students from grades 5-8 to Cluj, a city in Transylvania, the western part of Romania. "Meet at 6:30 in front of the Mayor's office," the profesoara in charge of the field trip told me on Friday.
"How are we getting there?" I queried.
"By Autocar."
"Autocar?" I imagine a caravan of cars driving over the Carpathians towards Cluj.
"A very big Autocar which we are renting."
I figured I'd just wait until Saturday morning to figure out what this autocar business was all about.
So on Saturday morning I arrived at the Mayor's office, breathing frosty air and with my English Romanian dictionary handy. After waiting for 45 minutes with 43 students and their mothers in the dark, I discovered that an autocar is a tour bus. After securing a seat in the front of the bus with the other chaperoning teachers, I put in my earplugs and began to doze as we passed through little villages and cows.
"No no." Anucu, the profesoara that reminds me of Mrs. Teapot from Beauty and the Beast, points at me and shakes her finger. "This is new for you. You must talk romanian with us and look at the country side"
I try my best to not speak Romanian for the first hour of my day...it never comes out right that early. But if Anucu really wanted me to speak with them, I couldn't argue with that shaking finger.
After the first hour, we had gone beyond familiar territory and were climbing up the mountains on drum cu serpentin (winding road). The fir trees were covered by a haze of fog. We stopped for coffee at Dracula's castle hotel where students flooded the souvenier shop and bought multicolored neon wigs and scary masks. Then we took the students in two groups to the "museum" which was walking down a narrow, unlighted corridor into a small room with paintings of dracula on the wall and a small old-style coffin. The tour guide described the pictures and then simultaneously opened the casket lid, turned the light off and screamed. Immediately the lights came back on, my students looked fearfully around from the protection of their huddle and we were done with the scary museum. In the narrow corridor a hand would come out of a hole in the wall and scare the students as they walked back up the stairs. Because of that hand, I had to almost carry one of my terrified fifth graders outside.
The rest of Saturday was spent stopping at "museums" of famous romanians, mostly poets and writers. The museums were their parents houses where they grew up. At 9 o'clock, I figured we were almost done, when the bus pulled into a monastary and the students and their teachers did their thing in the monastary and lit candles. Several older women were crawling on their knees around a tiny church near the bus. Some of the kids saw them and decided it would be funny to do it as well, so a couple rolled up their pants and crawled their way around the church, with the other students pointing and laughing, after which they also rolled up their pant legs and crawled around the church.
We finally got to our pensiune (kind of like a motel) by 10:30. My students spend the night running around the halls, smearing toothpaste on each other, not sleeping, playing cards, calling their friends in the next room with their cell phones and being yelled at by the other teachers. I got out of policing the students because that would mean I would have to yell in Romanian and being yelled at grammatically incorrectly...well, it's like if someone yelled "you sleep immediately!"...doesn't quite have the right affect.
Sunday morning after a breakfast of coffee, bread and the ever-present ham, we finally made it to Cluj. For the morning and most of the afternoon we went to another museum, the botanical gardens and then a quick tour of the city and a couple famous churches there. I slipped away from the group for an hour and walked around the big city by myself. Big cities are great for feeling anonymous and no one cares if you're foreign. Needless to say, it did my soul a lot of good.
Finally, late in the afternoon we climb back in the bus, all the students talking about how tired they are and all the teachers glad that the students are finally tired. We didn't get back to Vama until midnight where the bus dropped me and the students that live near me at our road. We walked home together, talking about our favorite parts of the weekend. The stars were bright against the frosty night air and wood-smoke permeated the air. I was exhausted.
But now I finally know the names of class 5a and I had something to talk about for the week. My life is surprisingly not dull.
"How are we getting there?" I queried.
"By Autocar."
"Autocar?" I imagine a caravan of cars driving over the Carpathians towards Cluj.
"A very big Autocar which we are renting."
I figured I'd just wait until Saturday morning to figure out what this autocar business was all about.
So on Saturday morning I arrived at the Mayor's office, breathing frosty air and with my English Romanian dictionary handy. After waiting for 45 minutes with 43 students and their mothers in the dark, I discovered that an autocar is a tour bus. After securing a seat in the front of the bus with the other chaperoning teachers, I put in my earplugs and began to doze as we passed through little villages and cows.
"No no." Anucu, the profesoara that reminds me of Mrs. Teapot from Beauty and the Beast, points at me and shakes her finger. "This is new for you. You must talk romanian with us and look at the country side"
I try my best to not speak Romanian for the first hour of my day...it never comes out right that early. But if Anucu really wanted me to speak with them, I couldn't argue with that shaking finger.
After the first hour, we had gone beyond familiar territory and were climbing up the mountains on drum cu serpentin (winding road). The fir trees were covered by a haze of fog. We stopped for coffee at Dracula's castle hotel where students flooded the souvenier shop and bought multicolored neon wigs and scary masks. Then we took the students in two groups to the "museum" which was walking down a narrow, unlighted corridor into a small room with paintings of dracula on the wall and a small old-style coffin. The tour guide described the pictures and then simultaneously opened the casket lid, turned the light off and screamed. Immediately the lights came back on, my students looked fearfully around from the protection of their huddle and we were done with the scary museum. In the narrow corridor a hand would come out of a hole in the wall and scare the students as they walked back up the stairs. Because of that hand, I had to almost carry one of my terrified fifth graders outside.
The rest of Saturday was spent stopping at "museums" of famous romanians, mostly poets and writers. The museums were their parents houses where they grew up. At 9 o'clock, I figured we were almost done, when the bus pulled into a monastary and the students and their teachers did their thing in the monastary and lit candles. Several older women were crawling on their knees around a tiny church near the bus. Some of the kids saw them and decided it would be funny to do it as well, so a couple rolled up their pants and crawled their way around the church, with the other students pointing and laughing, after which they also rolled up their pant legs and crawled around the church.
We finally got to our pensiune (kind of like a motel) by 10:30. My students spend the night running around the halls, smearing toothpaste on each other, not sleeping, playing cards, calling their friends in the next room with their cell phones and being yelled at by the other teachers. I got out of policing the students because that would mean I would have to yell in Romanian and being yelled at grammatically incorrectly...well, it's like if someone yelled "you sleep immediately!"...doesn't quite have the right affect.
Sunday morning after a breakfast of coffee, bread and the ever-present ham, we finally made it to Cluj. For the morning and most of the afternoon we went to another museum, the botanical gardens and then a quick tour of the city and a couple famous churches there. I slipped away from the group for an hour and walked around the big city by myself. Big cities are great for feeling anonymous and no one cares if you're foreign. Needless to say, it did my soul a lot of good.
Finally, late in the afternoon we climb back in the bus, all the students talking about how tired they are and all the teachers glad that the students are finally tired. We didn't get back to Vama until midnight where the bus dropped me and the students that live near me at our road. We walked home together, talking about our favorite parts of the weekend. The stars were bright against the frosty night air and wood-smoke permeated the air. I was exhausted.
But now I finally know the names of class 5a and I had something to talk about for the week. My life is surprisingly not dull.
10.23.2008
chilly morning
I was walking to school this morning, keeping my eyes on the ground to keep from tripping embarrassingly on the uneven sidewalk in front of my students who were also walking to school.
It is frosty in the morning, so I was bundled up in my recent Romanian thrift store jacket with a scarf wound multiple times around my throat and my hands dug deep into my pockets.
I was walking past a young man wearing a blue and pink wind jacket.
"Tu nu esti plicitisit de Romania?" he asked me.
I stopped, confused that I was being talked to by someone I've never met and trying to switch my mind to Romanian.
"Poftim" (Say again) I said.
He repeated his question, but this time I understood, "You're not bored of Romania yet?"
" Nu inca" (not yet) I replied, continuing on my way and wondering who he was.
It is frosty in the morning, so I was bundled up in my recent Romanian thrift store jacket with a scarf wound multiple times around my throat and my hands dug deep into my pockets.
I was walking past a young man wearing a blue and pink wind jacket.
"Tu nu esti plicitisit de Romania?" he asked me.
I stopped, confused that I was being talked to by someone I've never met and trying to switch my mind to Romanian.
"Poftim" (Say again) I said.
He repeated his question, but this time I understood, "You're not bored of Romania yet?"
" Nu inca" (not yet) I replied, continuing on my way and wondering who he was.
10.20.2008
picking mushrooms could mean making strudel
I am never sure what I will be doing on any given day.
At first, I thought this was because I couldn't understand an entire conversation, but now I realize it is because there is just not a lot of commitment to plans around my village.
On Saturday, I thought I was going to pick mushrooms which is a popular weekend activity around here.
But the people I was going to go with left earlier than planned, so I missed them.
"What to do on a clear-skied Saturday?" I ask (I have started talking to myself)
I text my friend Silvia who is in her 50's and ask if she wants to pick mushrooms with me. She texts back that she has work to do in her yard.
Can I help? I ask.
Da (yes) she replies.
When I arrive at her house, she acts surprised I have actually come to work, then points me towards the apple trees. Can you climb trees?
Sure.
Her husband seems dubious about the whole thing, but willingly pulls the ladder out from behind the shed.
The next two hours are spent with Dorul, the husband, repositioning the ladder for me and me filling up bag after bag of shiny red apples under a bright blue sky.
When the last tree is almost done, they call me down for a break which turns into an early dinner with soup and cabbage and sausage and drink.
Silvia asks if I have time to stay for an apple strudel while she starts mixing a pie crust.
De ce nu? (why not) I respond.
She grates a bucket of apples, then squeezes the juice from the gratings, offering me the juice, "It is organic" she jokes, referring to an earlier conversation about processed food.
She mixed sugar, cinnamon and semolina with the squeezed apple gratings, then rolled the pie dough out and put the apple on the pie dough like cinnamon sugar on cinnamon rolls.
After a discussion about how she doesn't think President Bush is very handsome she pulls the strudel out of the oven and gives me half of it to take home. Mmmm.
Picking mushrooms is probably overrated anyways.
At first, I thought this was because I couldn't understand an entire conversation, but now I realize it is because there is just not a lot of commitment to plans around my village.
On Saturday, I thought I was going to pick mushrooms which is a popular weekend activity around here.
But the people I was going to go with left earlier than planned, so I missed them.
"What to do on a clear-skied Saturday?" I ask (I have started talking to myself)
I text my friend Silvia who is in her 50's and ask if she wants to pick mushrooms with me. She texts back that she has work to do in her yard.
Can I help? I ask.
Da (yes) she replies.
When I arrive at her house, she acts surprised I have actually come to work, then points me towards the apple trees. Can you climb trees?
Sure.
Her husband seems dubious about the whole thing, but willingly pulls the ladder out from behind the shed.
The next two hours are spent with Dorul, the husband, repositioning the ladder for me and me filling up bag after bag of shiny red apples under a bright blue sky.
When the last tree is almost done, they call me down for a break which turns into an early dinner with soup and cabbage and sausage and drink.
Silvia asks if I have time to stay for an apple strudel while she starts mixing a pie crust.
De ce nu? (why not) I respond.
She grates a bucket of apples, then squeezes the juice from the gratings, offering me the juice, "It is organic" she jokes, referring to an earlier conversation about processed food.
She mixed sugar, cinnamon and semolina with the squeezed apple gratings, then rolled the pie dough out and put the apple on the pie dough like cinnamon sugar on cinnamon rolls.
After a discussion about how she doesn't think President Bush is very handsome she pulls the strudel out of the oven and gives me half of it to take home. Mmmm.
Picking mushrooms is probably overrated anyways.
10.16.2008
The Chicagoan in Romania
I spent the first week of school teaching my students the "first conversation"
me: My name is Ms. Johnson. What is your name?
student: My name is Alexandru.
me: Nice to meet you.
student: Nice to meet you.
I added other pleasantries for more advanced classes, such as
How old are you?
Where are you from?
student: Where are you from, Ms. Johnson?
me: I am from Chicago.
That's right, out of laziness I have claimed Chicago as my home in America. Having lived there for almost 3 whole months, I surely know everything there is to know about the city, right?
In the past, my answers have always been twisted by that question. Sometimes I say everywhere, sometimes I say Wisconsin. At times, when I don't care if the questioner thinks I would marry my cousin, I'll say Arkansas. If I want to seem moderately exotic, I respond with Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. If the questioner wants to get down to the bottom of it, they always ask, "where were you born?" Well, Arizona, then. Because my home address is now in Missouri, I sometimes throw that one into the mix.
Since the average Romanian middle schooler has no clue where or what Missouri, Wisconsin and Arkansas are, and I want them to think I'm from America, not the Philippines, I tell them I'm from Chicago. People know what Chicago is and I don't have to stumble through wrongly conjugated Romanian trying to explain my transient history.
Although now, when I return to the English-speaking world, I'll have another addition to my answer.
me: My name is Ms. Johnson. What is your name?
student: My name is Alexandru.
me: Nice to meet you.
student: Nice to meet you.
I added other pleasantries for more advanced classes, such as
How old are you?
Where are you from?
student: Where are you from, Ms. Johnson?
me: I am from Chicago.
That's right, out of laziness I have claimed Chicago as my home in America. Having lived there for almost 3 whole months, I surely know everything there is to know about the city, right?
In the past, my answers have always been twisted by that question. Sometimes I say everywhere, sometimes I say Wisconsin. At times, when I don't care if the questioner thinks I would marry my cousin, I'll say Arkansas. If I want to seem moderately exotic, I respond with Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. If the questioner wants to get down to the bottom of it, they always ask, "where were you born?" Well, Arizona, then. Because my home address is now in Missouri, I sometimes throw that one into the mix.
Since the average Romanian middle schooler has no clue where or what Missouri, Wisconsin and Arkansas are, and I want them to think I'm from America, not the Philippines, I tell them I'm from Chicago. People know what Chicago is and I don't have to stumble through wrongly conjugated Romanian trying to explain my transient history.
Although now, when I return to the English-speaking world, I'll have another addition to my answer.
10.14.2008
students
I really do work.
4 days a week, some days 6 classes.
And when your students look at you with varying levels of incomprehension for 6 hours straight, it can seem like a thankless day.
Sometimes, I feel more like an actor than a teacher. Like today when I went over the first few lines of a poem
"There was an old woman who swallowed (finger pointing down throat)a fly(jazz fingers as a fly)
"I don't know why she swallowed a fly(huge shoulder shrug and massive intonations)
"Perhaps she'll die(doing the pose from the painting, Scream)
"There was an old woman who swallowed a spider(hands walking like a spider)
"Who whiggled and jiggled and tickled(I gyrate around the room) inside her.
"She swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."
They like the "whiggled and jiggled and tickled" part the best.
My older students tend to be more self-conscious, so I had them write me a letter to gauge their language skills.
Some of the letters sound like advertisements in the personals:
" I am tall and slim. I am quiet, quick-tempered and sociable."
Most of them say something about me:
"It's a pity that we will be doing english with you only this year because you are a good teacher and I like learn english with you."
"I really like your english classes because it`s a new experience for me.Since I was just a kid I`d liked english ,but now i love english.I don`t like so much english gramar but I like comunication"
"I'm verry happy to learn english from an american people."
So this is what "the american people" in Romania is doing, as of late.
4 days a week, some days 6 classes.
And when your students look at you with varying levels of incomprehension for 6 hours straight, it can seem like a thankless day.
Sometimes, I feel more like an actor than a teacher. Like today when I went over the first few lines of a poem
"There was an old woman who swallowed (finger pointing down throat)a fly(jazz fingers as a fly)
"I don't know why she swallowed a fly(huge shoulder shrug and massive intonations)
"Perhaps she'll die(doing the pose from the painting, Scream)
"There was an old woman who swallowed a spider(hands walking like a spider)
"Who whiggled and jiggled and tickled(I gyrate around the room) inside her.
"She swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."
They like the "whiggled and jiggled and tickled" part the best.
My older students tend to be more self-conscious, so I had them write me a letter to gauge their language skills.
Some of the letters sound like advertisements in the personals:
" I am tall and slim. I am quiet, quick-tempered and sociable."
Most of them say something about me:
"It's a pity that we will be doing english with you only this year because you are a good teacher and I like learn english with you."
"I really like your english classes because it`s a new experience for me.Since I was just a kid I`d liked english ,but now i love english.I don`t like so much english gramar but I like comunication"
"I'm verry happy to learn english from an american people."
So this is what "the american people" in Romania is doing, as of late.
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