Sunday, January 21, 2007

Boys' Night Out


As you will recall from my recent "Caroling" entry, we Christmas revelers raised about 1500 lei ($120) by going door-to-door and spreading Moldovan Christmas cheer - or just bothering people until they gave us money to go away.

In the following days we were debating what to do with this money, and ultimately settled on saving it for March 8th, Women's Day, so we could buy some nice presents for all the women in the office. That plan, however, was soon modified to include a little something for us men - namely, a night out at a sauna.

So, Friday night we bought all the necessary foodstuffs, piled into a van, and drove two villages over to some spa. We ate and drank (well, they drank), sang songs, played ping pong, and alternated between an extremely hot sauna and a freezing pool. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night. My only two regrets were being unable to best Oleg in ping-pong and the fact that I went to sleep at 5am. Why do all the Moldovan social events have to go all night long? Can't we just a little earlier and end at a decent hour?

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Come Visit!

As of January 1, 2007, citizens of the United States, European Union,
Canada, Switzerland, and Japan can enter Moldova without a visa. I
hope this will bring an influx of visitors and investment to Moldova,
and any friends or family who wish to step into the village life for
a little vacation. This is a good step for Moldova in terms of
inching closer to EU membership and increasing its integration in the
global economy. Let's hope that other former-Soviet republics
(especially Russia) will follow suit.

My apologies for somewhere on this blog erroneously reporting that
this new law would take effect later in 2007. Somehow, I don't think
I screwed up anyone's travel plans...

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Damn Good!

Last night for dinner I fried up some potatoes, onions, and garlic,
then topped it with some brinza, the salty Moldovan cheese. I also
cracked open a new jar of manja - the Moldovan mixture of tomatoes,
eggplant, peppers, and onions - that Krista and I canned over the
summer. That was good.

But what was "damn good," was the jar of strawberry jam I popped open
for desert in order to anoint my ice cream with it. Strawberries are
hard to come by just about anywhere in the middle of January, but not
for me. [See Krista, all that hard work until the wee hours of the
morning washing fruit and vegetables, cutting them, cooking them for
hours, pouring steaming hot liquids into glass jars that had only
recently been sterilized in boiling water, and then grunting with the
strain of sealing the lids on top - it was all worth it! Oh wait,
you're in America and gave your share to me! Sucka!]

In other canning news, I finished my first of five 3-liter jars of
brinza. I'm a bit worried that I overdid it when i purchased 10kg,
or was it 20kg? Well, however much it was, I probably should have
purchased about half as much.

One really has to plan when to eat canned foods. I've got my little
section in the basement, and I'm trying to calculate how much I
should have of my remaining stockpile each week until the end of my
service. Eat too much too quickly, and they'll be nothing left for
later. Eat too slowly, and I'll have to fill my suitcase with jars
of fried peppers instead of presents for family and friends. Plus,
since I'm only one person, I have to time the opening of jars so that
I know I'll be around for a while - don't want the food to spoil.
The equation looks something like this:

Brad's hunger x cans / (time left in Moldova - vacation days) =
817.44

I haven't figured out what the 817.44 means yet. Best suggestion
gets a hunk of brinza...

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Another Great Article

Taking Control of Electric Bill, Hour by Hour
by David Cay Johnton
January 8, 2007 - NYTimes

Ten times last year, Judi Kinch, a geologist, got e-mail messages
telling her that the next afternoon any electricity used at her
Chicago apartment would be particularly expensive because hot, steamy
weather was increasing demand for power. Each time, she and her
husband would turn down the air-conditioners — sometimes shutting one
of them off — and let the dinner dishes sit in the washer until
prices fell back late at night.

Most people are not aware that electricity prices fluctuate widely
throughout the day, let alone exactly how much they pay at the moment
they flip a switch. But Ms. Kinch and her husband are among the 1,100
Chicago residents who belong to the Community Energy Cooperative, a
pilot project to encourage energy conservation, and this puts them
among the rare few who are able to save money by shifting their use
of power.

Just as cellphone customers delay personal calls until they become
free at night and on weekends, and just as millions of people fly at
less popular times because air fares are lower, people who know the
price of electricity at any given moment can cut back when prices are
high and use more when prices are low. Participants in the Community
Energy Cooperative program, for example, can check a Web site that
tells them, hour by hour, how much their electricity costs; they get
e-mail alerts when the price is set to rise above 20 cents a kilowatt-
hour.

If just a fraction of all Americans had this information and could
adjust their power use accordingly, the savings would be huge.
Consumers would save nearly $23 billion a year if they shifted just 7
percent of their usage during peak periods to less costly times,
research at Carnegie Mellon University indicates. That is the
equivalent of the entire nation getting a free month of power every
year.

Meters that can read prices every hour or less are widely used in
factories, but are found in only a tiny number of homes, where most
meters are read monthly. The handful of people who do use hourly
meters not only cut their own bills, but also help everyone else by
reducing the need for expensive generating stations that run just a
few days, or hours, each year. Over the long run, such savings could
mean less pollution, because the dirtiest plants could be used less
or not at all.

The vast majority of utility customers know only the average price of
the electricity they used in any given month. But wholesale prices
for electricity are set a day in advance, usually on an hour-by-hour
or quarter-hour basis. Power companies and utilities are keenly aware
of the pricing roller coaster, but they typically blend the numbers
into a single monthly bill for their customers.

For most Chicagoans, the average summer price last year was 8.25
cents a kilowatt-hour. Although Ms. Kinch and her husband at times
paid as much as 36.5 cents a kilowatt-hour — the peak price on the
humid afternoon of Aug. 2 — they paid less than their neighbors over
all. On 38 days, some of their power cost less than a penny a
kilowatt-hour.

Other consumers who know the hourly price of their electricity have
actually been able to get paid by utilities for power they did not
use. In New York City last July, for instance, when there was a
blackout in Queens, residents of one building on Central Park West
voluntarily cut their demand as much as 42 percent and sold the
capacity back into the electricity market so that it could be used
where it was more needed.

Certainly, such situations are a big exception. The fact that most
people have no idea how much their power costs has emerged as a
sticking point in the ongoing effort to restructure the nation's
electricity business, which the federal government is moving from a
system in which legal monopolies charge rates set by state
regulators, toward a competitive system where the market sets the price.

But how does efficient pricing emerge in a business where access to
information is so lopsided? A market, as defined by the courts, is a
place where willing buyers and sellers who both have reasonable
knowledge agree on a price; in the electricity markets, the advantage
lies distinctly with those who make and distribute power.

Under either the traditional system of utility regulation, with
prices set by government, or in the competitive business now in half
the states, companies that generate and distribute power have little
or no incentive to supply customers with hourly meters, which can cut
into their profits. Meters that encourage people to reduce demand at
peak hours will translate to less need for power plants —
particularly ones that are only called into service during streaks of
hot or cold weather. In states where rates are still regulated,
utilities earn a virtually guaranteed profit on their generating
stations. Even if a power plant runs only one hour a year, the
utility earns a healthy return on its cost. In a competitive market,
it is the spikes in demand that cause prices to soar for brief
periods. Flattening out the peaks would be disastrous for some power
plant owners, which could go bankrupt if the profit they get from
peak prices were to ebb significantly.

But as awareness of "smart meters" grows, so does demand for them,
not only from consumers and environmental groups but also from
government bodies responding to public anger over rising power
prices. In Illinois, for example, the legislature passed a law in
December requiring the program Ms. Kinch joined four years ago to be
expanded from 1,100 customers to 110,000. The law also required that
Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility, hire a third party to run
the program. It chose Comverge Inc., the largest provider of peak-
load energy management systems in North America.

The smart metering programs are not new, but their continued rarity
speaks in part to the success of power-generating companies in
protecting their profit models. Some utilities did install meters in
a small number of homes as early as three decades ago, pushed by the
environmental movement and a spike in energy prices.

Today, the same set of circumstances seems to be prompting a revival
of interest, and even the utility companies seem resigned to the
eventuality of such programs. Anne R. Pramaggiore, the senior vice
president for regulatory affairs at Commonwealth Edison of Chicago,
said that in the past, interest in hourly meter was transitory.

"We really haven't dealt with these issues for 30 years," she said.

But a sustained effort to install more meters is likely now because
of what Ms. Pramaggiore called a "fundamental change" in the energy
markets. Rising fuel costs and environmental concerns are — once
again — front and center. When consumers know the price of their
electricity in advance and can tailor their use, even minor changes
in behavior can lead to lower home utility bills and less reliance on
marginal power plants, said Kathleen Spees, a graduate student in
engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

"Small reductions in demand can produce very large savings," said Ms.
Spees, who analyzed prices charged within the PJM Interconnection
grid, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity for 51
million people from New Jersey to Illinois.

Consumers who cut back on power use at peak times can do more than
just avoid high prices. They can make money, as people in the
building on Central Park West learned last summer.

Peter Funk Jr., an energy partner at the law firm Duane Morris who
lives in the 48-unit co-op, persuaded his neighbors three years ago
to install a single meter to the Consolidated Edison system and then
to operate their own internal metering system. That made the building
big enough to qualify for hour-by-hour pricing. When the next day's
prices are scheduled to soar, the building superintendent and a few
residents get e-mail messages or phone calls. "We have an orderly
plan all worked out to notify people" so they can reduce their power
use during the designated times, Mr. Funk said. The residents save
more than just the money on power not used during peak periods, when
pricing has been as high as almost 50 cents a kilowatt-hour. During
the blackout in July, when parts of Queens were without electricity
for up to nine days, the building cut demand as much as 42 percent
and sold the unused capacity for about $3,000. That money helps the
building offer a valuable benefit: On most weekend mornings,
electricity for residents is free.

My Commentary:
It seems that this kind of measuring is not yet available everywhere,
but it is worth a little research or at least a call to one's power
company to see if such a program exists in your area... or better
yet, to start a local campaign to create such a program if it does
not already exist. Also, in a graph not displayed on this blog, the
biggest range of prices, and thus the biggest opportunity to save,
occurred in June, July, and August. Most other months were fairly
flat in their hour by hour rates.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

"Caroling"

Loyal readers of this blog may recall my "caroling" experience from last year. Well, I did it again this year, and I'm pleased to announce that this time I made it through the entire evening. We started to don our cross-dressing costumes and face paint at 7pm on Christmas Eve (Jan 6) and I was asleep in my bed by 6am on Christmas Day (Jan 7). In between, we drove to all the houses of workers in the mayor's office and other VIPs and basically sang and danced and made lots of noise until the inhabitants came out, no matter the hour.

When they came out - and they always did - they brought food and some form of alcohol. Last year, in my desire to be culturally sensitive during a festive holiday, I for the most part accepted any drink that was offered (read: forced) into

my hand. This year, I decided to put self-preservation ahead of cultural sensitivity and only sipped from the communal wine/vodka/cognac/champaign glass when it came my way. This "sipping" is very different than the typical "all in one shot" Moldovan style of drinking any kind of alcohol. To slightly alter one of the great Tom Hanks film lines, "There's no sipping in Moldova." It's all or nothing. But my plan worked, providing enough cultural adaptation so as to not offend the hosts while keeping the brain and liver functioning quite well.

It's also tradition for the hosts to put some money into the mouth of a wooden goat carried by one of the revelers. The goat's mouth opens and closes, and the host has to try to put the money into the mouth without getting his fingers caught. As a well-trusted outsider, I became the "American bank" and kept all the money that we collected from each household. Whenever kids were present, Santa gave 5 or 10 lei (40-90 cents) presents after making a small withdrawal from the bank - which was quite a leap of faith on the bank's part considering Santa had no identification and was wearing a fake beard. When work resumes on Tuesday, I'll bring all the money to the office and we'll decide what to do with it. We actually collected over $100. I don't know how this money has been used in past years, but I'm hoping that it will be spent on something to improve the efficiency of the office - like a new printer - instead of booze and cookies for future office birthday parties. We'll see...

Saturday, January 06, 2007

A Bad Day for Pigs

[Warning: this post is a little more gruesome than my typical
entries. If you're squeamish, you might want to skip reading this.]

Moldovan Christmas, based on the Orthodox calendar, is Jan 7th. On
January 5th, pigs throughout my village were slaughtered for the
holiday feast. When I say slaughtered, I mean the pigs are brought
out of their pens in the backyard, pinned to the ground by several
men, and then a knife is inserted into their jugular and wiggled
around a lot. The pigs squeal/scream (by no means a pleasant sound)
and the blood drains onto the ground. It probably takes about two
minutes for the pig to actually die. I saw my host-brother and
neighbor do this with our pig, and shortly thereafter I heard the
squeals of another pig further down the road. My tutor tells me that
her mother's family also did the same.

I watched the whole slaughtering process [inside joke with DW], which
I will now relay to you. The body is the lifted up on a makeshift
table or grill, and a blowtorch is used to singe off all the hairs.
It takes several rounds of torching, scraping off the skin with a
knife, and rubbing water and salt over the body until the skin is
removed. Then an incision is made along the spine and stomach of the
pig, and several perpendicular cuts between those two create a grid-
like pattern over the pigs body. Pulling at one section with one
hand and cutting the connective tissue with the other, the sections
of fat that surround the pig's body are removed.



This fat is canned
in salt and water, and is eaten throughout the year like you or I
might put cheese on some bread. [I've tried this "sava" and am not a
fan.]

Then the rest of the pig is cut up. Legs are chopped off, the spine
is cut out with an ax, after which (in a pretty amazing way, I
thought), the ribs just fall open revealing all the organs inside.
At least where I was, the heart and lungs were fed to the dogs, but
everything else was saved. The intestines took some doing because
all the digestive juices - which looked like chunky mustard - had to
be cleaned out. They did this by cutting it into 1-meter pieces and
pouring water through it. Then more water was used to turn the
intestine section inside-out and clean it again.

I've yet to see exactly how all this will be prepared, but I now know
the first steps.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Driving

Driving in Moldova is a man's thing. I can probably count on one
hand the number of times I've seen a female mini-bus driver in
Chisinau, and I know only a few women in my entire village who even
know how to drive, let alone possess a license. This would seem to
place women in a less independent position than men. If a family
owns a car, the woman must always wait for a man to go anywhere. I
can't help but imagine this situation in my own family in America.
If my Mom needed my Dad to drive her everywhere she wanted to go, one
of two things would happen: (1) my Dad would never go to work because
he would driving Mom all over town, or (2) Mom would never leave the
house because Dad would need the car for his own tasks. From an
economic standpoint, this would seem a waste of time and labor, not
to mention chauvinistic.

Considering this situation, I was excited to learn of at least two 17-
year old women, Anna and Maria, in my village who are attending
classes to learn how to drive. [In Moldova, you can get your license
when you're 18.] However, when I learned the details of the process
from Anna, my excitement ceased. Getting a license here is pretty
damn expensive!

First, the girls had to pay 1200 lei ($90, though the price has since
gone up to 1350) in order to attend a 3-month long course. Each
class is 3-4 hours long and meets 2-3 times per week in a classroom.
Although payment for this class is mandatory, attendance is not.
Several of the students, who believe that they already know the rules
of the road skip the classes. In addition to this classwork, Anna
chose to get optional driving lessons at 75 lei a pop. She's taken
about 10 lessons. Then all students are required to pay about 300
lei for their actual driving exam. The exam is similar to the
driving test that nearly all American teenagers take when they get
their licenses, except a police officer administers the test from the
passenger seat and there's not parallel parking "question."

I've just told you that Anna's family will spend about 2300 lei for
her to get her license - plus there's the possibility that she may
need to give a 200 lei "gift" to the test administrator in order to
make sure she actually passes the test. So, if we assume 2500 lei,
that's about $190 just to get a license. Bear in mind that a
starting teacher makes about 600 lei per month.

In light of this cost, I can understand why a family might choose to
only get a license for one child, or for no children at all. Anna's
parents deserve some applause for breaking with tradition and helping
their daughter learn to drive. Hopefully she will use this privilege
to go places (figuratively, and literally) and leave on the curb her
way of thinking that men are inherently better drivers. [Someone
remind me that I said this the next time I go to make a joke about
women drivers...]

I don't remember exactly how much I paid to get my NJ license, but I
doubt it was so much - and it was nowhere near being over one-third a
starting teacher's salary. I also don't think I spent over 100 hours
in a classroom to learn how to drive.

What I do remember - and I'd welcome some comments here from those
who recall the process more clearly than I - is having a 3-week cycle
of my high school gym class that was devoted to driver education.
Assuming a 40-minute class, 5 days a week for 3 weeks, this means I
spent about 10 hours in a classroom. I, like Anna, also took
optional driving lessons, but I think I only took 2 of them and I
have no idea how much they were. The actual examination and license
was probably around $45.

Good tech advice

This post doesn't have to do with my Peace Corps service, but I found
some great advice by the NYTimes' David Pogue, and I thought I should
share it. Actually, considering the amount of grief that comes to
PCVs after laptops crash, perhaps this does have something to do with
Peace Corps afterall...

Fewer Excuses for Not Doing a PC Backup
by David Pogue

If there's one New Year's resolution even more likely to fail than "I
vow to lose weight," it's "I vow to start backing up my computer."
After all, setting up and remembering to use a backup system is a
huge hassle. The odds are good that you don't have an up-to-date
backup at this very moment.

Fortunately, 2007 may turn out to be the Year of the Backup. Both
Microsoft and Apple have built automated backup software into the
latest versions of their operating systems, both to be introduced
this year. At the same time, an option that was once complex,
limited and expensive is suddenly becoming effortless, capacious and
even free: online backups, where files are shuttled off to the
Internet for safekeeping. Online backup means never having to buy or
manage backup disks. You can have access to your files from any
computer anywhere. And above all, your files are safe even if
disaster should befall your office — like fire, flood, burglary or
marauding children.

As it turns out, the Web is brimming with backup services. Most of
them, however, offer only 1 or 2 gigabytes' worth of free storage.
That may be plenty if all you keep on your PC is recipes and a few
letters to the editor. But if you have even a fledgling photo or
music collection, 2 gigs is peanuts. You can pay for more storage, of
course, but the prices have been outrageous; at Data Deposit Box, for
example, backing up 50 gigabytes of data will cost you $1,200 a
year. Nobody offers unlimited free storage, but lately, they've
gotten a lot closer. Two companies, Xdrive and MediaMax, offer as
much as 25 gigabytes of free backups; two others, Mozy and Carbonite,
offer unlimited storage for less than $55 a year.

(Note that this roundup doesn't include Web sites that are
exclusively dedicated to sharing photos or videos, like Flickr and
MediaFire. It also omits the services intended for sending huge files
to other people, like YouSendIt and SendThisFile; such sites delete
your files after a couple of weeks — not a great feature in a backup
system.)

XDRIVE This service, owned by AOL, offers 5 gigabytes of free
storage. It's polished, easy to use, and as fully fledged as they
come. Right on the Web site, you can back up entire lists of folders
at a time, a method that works on Macintosh, Windows or Unix. If you
use Windows, however, an even better backup system awaits. You can
download Xdrive Desktop, a full-blown, unattended backup program. It
quietly backs up your computer on a schedule that you specify,
without any additional thought or input from you. Better yet, a new
disk icon appears on your PC (labeled X), that represents your files
on the Web. You can open and use its contents as though it's an
ordinary, if slowish, hard drive. A Mac version of Xdrive Desktop is
in the works. As a bonus, you can share certain backed-up folders,
so that other people can have access to them from their Macs or PCs.
(This requires, however, that they sign up for their own free Xdrive
accounts.) You can view your backed-up photos as an online slideshow,
or organize and play your backed-up music files on the Web page.
Upgrading your storage to 50 gigabytes costs $100 a year, which isn't
such a good deal. But if your Documents folder fits in 5 gigabytes,
then congratulations; you've got yourself a free, effortless,
automatic backup system. Happy New Year.

CARBONITE This one's as pure a backup play as you'll find; there's no
folder sharing, photo viewing or music organizing. The Windows-only
backup software is completely automatic and stays entirely out of
your way, quietly backing up whenever you're not working. You get no
free storage — the service costs $50 a year — but you do get
something else few others offer: an unlimited amount of backup
storage. Carbonite is aimed at nontechnical audiences. It's sold in
computer and office-supply stores, for example, and it's the easiest
online backup software to use — in fact, to not use, since it's
completely automatic. The only change you'll see are small colored
dots on files and folders that have been backed up — and a Carbonite
disk icon in your My Computer window that "contains" all the backed-
up folders and files. At the moment, Carbonite doesn't back up
individual files that are larger than 2 gigabytes. It also doesn't
back up pieces of files, so if your 500-megabyte Outlook e-mail
database changes, the whole database must be backed up again. And, of
course, there's no Macintosh version. The company says that a new
version, due in April, will wipe out all three of these drawbacks.

MOZY In many regards, the recently introduced Mozy is a Carbonite
copycat. The price is $55 a year, storage is unlimited, an automated
background Windows program keeps your PC continuously backed up and a
Mac version is planned. Mozy offers 2 gigabytes of backup at no
charge. If you're willing to do the company's marketing for it, you
can nab another free gig for every four people you persuade to sign
up. Mozy is more flexible, too — and more technical. It can back up
only changed portions of files. You can specify times and dates for
backups (instead of offering only the Continuous option, like
Carbonite). You can view 30 days' worth of backups, too — a feature
that prevents you from deleting a file from your PC accidentally and
then finding its deletion mirrored in your latest backup. And Mozy
offers dozens of novice-hostile options like "Enable Bandwidth
Throttle" and "Don't back up if the CPU is over this % busy."

MEDIAMAX Talk about value. How does 25 gigabytes of free storage
strike you? The service began life with an emphasis on organizing
and sharing photos, video and music — which it still does well. But
its new Windows backup program, now in beta testing, adds automated
unattended backups of any kind of computer files, just like its
rivals. It's pretty bare-bones; for example, it offers no continuous
real-time backup, no choice of weekdays — only an option to back up
every day, every three days, or whatever. And you can back up only
folders, not individual files or file types. In times of disaster,
MediaMax will give you your files back, but won't put them in their
original folders. More important, the free account lets you download
or share only one gigabyte of data a month. That pretty much means
that to restore your hard drive after a crash, you'll have to upgrade
to a paid account. Still, when you're standing there, sobbing over
the smoking remains of your dead hard drive, you probably won't mind
paying $10 or $25 to get your stuff back.

SUMMING UP Now, there are some disadvantages to all of these
services. One of them is time: even with a high-speed Internet
connection, the first backup can take days to complete. Maintaining
your backup is much faster, of course, because only new or changed
files are uploaded to the Web. But if disaster ever strikes,
retrieving your files can also take days. (Mozy offers a solution
that gets you your files faster: a DVD of your files, shipped
overnight for an added fee. For example, to FedEx a 50-gigabyte
backup to you on DVDs, Mozy charges about $90.)

Then there's the security thing. All four companies insist that your
files are encrypted before they even leave your computer. But if you
still can't shake the image of backup-company employees rooting
through your files and laughing their heads off, then this may not be
the backup method for you. Corporate longevity may be a more
realistic worry. Since the Internet itself is very young, no Web-
based outfit has a particularly long track record. Any of these
services could be discontinued or sold at any time, which makes it
wise to make the occasional on-site backup, too.

In any case, the main thing is to have some kind of backup. After
all, there are only two kinds of people: Those who back up their
computers, and those who will.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Parties at School and At Home






Admittedly, my December 25th was a muted affair here in Moldova. Considering everyone else in my village holds December 25th to be a normal day, my quiet Christmas shouldn't come a big surprise. To expect carolers and feasts and presents under the tree would be like expecting to see a group of Native Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

However, the following week the Moldovan holidays arrived and the party scene really started to heat up. Let's start at the school. My host brother, Vitalik, and his best friend, Seroj, were tapped to alternate dressing up as Деть Морож (dyet moroj), sort of the Moldovan equivalent to Santa Claus, and my friend Anna and Maria were Снегорчка (snegorichka), translated as snow-girl, who is supposed to be the grand-daughter of Dyet Moroj. They all had to memorize this long poem that they would recite for children who came to school for a few hours worth of games, singing, and dancing. It was a little like Halloween, with most of the children wearing costumes - the girls as princesses and the boys as everything from Spider-man to a doctor.

December 28 and 29, the school hosted a kind of winter ball for the high school juniors and seniors. It was nice to see everyone all dressed up, though I felt sorry for the girls who sometimes wore their coats over their strapless dresses. The dance differed from what I remember of American proms and such in a couple ways. First, there were games. Volunteers were picked from the crowd to compete in funny competitions. These were interspersed with the prerequisite lengthy (sometimes seemingly endless and melodramatic) toasts and then dancing to one song. Then everyone would sit down again and start the next round of game/toast/dance. Second, all the teachers were there. It seemed to be just as gala an event for them as it was for the kids. They also dressed up and participated in the games. Third, the evening was over pretty early - I think by 8 or 9pm.

Lastly, I'd like to talk about New Year's in Copceac. This was my second time in the village, and despite not having anyone to kiss at midnight, I enjoyed this time around better than the first. Why, you ask? Well, first of all the weather was a lot warmer this year. That meant more people came to the center for meeting and greeting, dancing, and watching the fireworks. It also meant I didn't have to sleep with all my clothes still on. Second, I was invited to a party this year at the home of one of the village teachers, who prepared a real feast. There were all these salads and cakes and two roast chickens. Vitalik asked me to prepare some games to play - Moldovans really like party games. I MCed (1) charades, (2) a race between two girls to open a matchbox wrapped in multiple layers of paper while wearing oven mits, and (3) a kind of dating game where all the couples had to answer nine questions about their respective partners - like favorite color, where he/she wants to live, favorite meal, etc. - and then they had to see how well they actually knew one another. And we danced. Before the girls arrived, it was just me and three other dudes, but that didn't stop us from cutting up the rug. It was actually really nice to be in a place where it is acceptable - or rather completely normal - for men to dance. In America, particularly in high schools, I always felt like it was somehow uncool or feminine to dance.

I called it a night around 3am, and everyone asked me if I had somehow been offended and that was why I was leaving early. EARLY?! It was three in the morning! Of course, having lived here for a year-and-a-half, I was prepared for this. I know that Moldovan celebrations, particularly at weddings, usually go until sunrise. I just don't have the energy for it. I think my hosts know that as an American, I have different standards and likes and dislikes and I told them I was definitely not offended and had had a great time. [And I wanted to do laundry and clean up before my host-mother returned from her month-long vacation the following day...]

That about sums up. Hope you all had a happy and healthy New Year's. С Новым Годом!!!