Walking, Picking, Making

We love walking. It is one of our favorite ways to spend time with each other, calm down from a day at school, and enjoy Moldova and Briceni. Shelbi and I find that when we are stressed, missing home, frustrated... etc, a short walk with put life inter perspective, redirect us towards God, give us time to think, remind us we can laugh together, and accomplish so many wonderful things we could never plan to accomplish without moving around outside to see things we wouldn't see inside. It's getting more difficult as the days are getting significantly shorter, but we still manage to go on some walks. We have walked a few times with our host dad to a small forest nearby. Here are some pictures from those walks.

This is "Keep Clean" in Romanian. It's too bad most people here speak Russian. The forests are gorgeous, but there are little areas where people go to have "frigarui" (barbecues) which are covered in trash.

We think this monument used to say, "Asociatia Victoria." It is definitely Soviet-era.

Again with the trash. Shelbi used some photos like this to teach about pollution.

So far the graveyard has always been covered in decorations. The plants (real and fake) adorn grave sites.

Picnic tables like this one can be seen throughout the graveyards. They are used at different times throughout the year, but especially a week after Easter when the tradition is to dine with the deceased relatives.

We currently live in an apartment just off this road about 500 yards further. Did I mention we love walks?

 Visiting PCV Friends!

Here we are in Donduseni with some close friends, Dan and Jana. They are some of the closest Peace Corps Volunteers to us, and it has been awesome to spend some time with them. We hope we can get to know them much more in the future.

 Picking Grapes 'cause we can!

Our host dad, Arcadie, picks grapes in the village.

 We pressed the grapes with our host parents. We used a very old press with a crank-turn.

The gnats/flies were intolerable. Shelbi got a picture just to prove how many there were in the garage where we had stored to grapes.

The wooden spatula/spoon was not so good. It kept getting caught in the teeth of the crank and was rather thin. Our host mom's mother provided a solution when she brought out the empty vodka bottle. This made a rather useful pestle.

This is the post-crank concoction. It includes leaves, stems, seeds, dirt, and anything else that happened to be in the bunch of grapes when we cranked it. It then sat for a week or more, fermenting to create wine.

Gruesome photos/videos follow: the following is not for the faint of heart, stomach, or mind: be warned!!

One of our most memorable moments walking: a dead dog that had thousands of maggots helping it decompose. It smelled a little, but the maggots were very interesting.

Hope you enjoyed. It was a little morbid at the end. All good walks must have their dead dogs, as we like to say.