Last days of life in the training village

The last half of training flew by like I should have expected it to do so. Thus, the blog postings suffered and for that I apologize. What did I do those weeks? Studied Romanian, walked through sunflower fields (by the way, the word sunflower in Romanian is my archenemies), learned how to prepare placinte (kind of like pie) with my host sister, and took some polka lessons…the list goes on and you aren’t likely to find sleep on it. And like Mom always tells me, “but you like to be busy…” I truly enjoyed this chaos.
My host Mom, who I absolutely adore, thought I was crazy last week when I told her my class and our teachers were going to camp up on the hillside. She had never seen a sleeping bag, and didn’t understand why we would really want to carry the fixings for a barbeque all the way up there. She told me a folk story about a wolf and told me to be careful and stay with my friends. And then…she laughed… and shook her head…and laughed…and said have fun…and laughed when I wandered home the next morning just after day break. However, she failed to laugh later in the day when I came down with a fever (due to an ear infection), but merely concluded, “that’s what happens when you sleep in the hill!”
Our days in the village quickly fell into the routine of language in the morning, followed by singing and dance lessons as we prepared a party to thank our host families for their hospitality. We had a private dance instructor, Vadim, and he was very very patient with us. Imagine 12 Americans of all shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities trying to be fromose (beautiful) while dancing the polka—literally—and you have our group). But I must say, come the performance, we were pretty darn framose! Our families loved it and clapped along…my host niece ran up and gave me a rose when we were done. That response from the audience plus the costume we were wearing made us feel pretty legit right then.
But it was Daniel who put the icing on the cake that night. Daniel is the host brother of one of my colleagues. He speaks perfect English and helped us out with a little language, took us out in the hills, and played Frisbee with us. I suppose you could equate Daniel to the quarterback in an American high school. Everyone just liked hanging out with this cat. But I wasn’t always sure that would be the case. The first day we arrived in the village, Daniel illustrated one of the gender roles quite clearly when he walked over to greet our group and shook only the mens’ hands. But now we are all friends…and now to the point of this story…On our last night in the village, he stuck out his hand and asserted in English, “Melissa, I want to shake your hand.” So I did. And explained in my broken Romanian that his gesture was really significant, but I would still wash my hands before I ate. 
Two days before I left my training village one of my host mom’s daughters came home for a visit. She is working abroad as a caregiver for two children. When she understood that I was from the state of Washington, not the city, I quickly thereafter discovered that she has been working in Whistler! So close to home! We prepared a bunch of food and sat down for dinner around 10 pm in the garden that night. It was just like a movie, one long candle propped up in a jar, tons of food from the carbohydrate group glowing in that candle light, and my host mom with four of her five daughters and two granddaughters just sang beautifully for over an hour. The concept of family doesn’t get much more refined than that. Aşa e viaţa! This is the life!