Fericit Hristos a inviat! - Adevarat ca a inviat!

I was so lucky to get to celebrate my easter in a small village in the North called Suri. Moldovan Style.

This is the father of my friend showing me how to use a german gun from 2nd WW... I behaved that weekend.
In the back you can see the house where they cooked.  Yes, they had an entire house used for cooking!

It was a beautiful place with alot of cute things around...

corn corn and corn... :)

Dinner. This fellow here is called bacon:)

Beside the house where they cooked, they had a little shed where they had an extra oven. On the picture you see my friends babuska (russian)/Bunika (Rumanien) ( I decided to make this partly a language lesson just in case anyone of my friends and relatives decide to migrate to Eastern Europe).

To scallywags who had great pleasure in trying to teach me Rumanian...  Someone told me that talking to kids was the best way of learning, but I cannot say that they are mersiful teachers! -

homemade wiskey Rakiu or Samogon (depending on where you are in Moldova) and lots of it. It is called  and you get a tremendous headace drinking it which has NOTHING to do with the amount you choose to drink. If you decide to drink you might aswell go all in... Which everyone did..

Holybread. Traditionally this is made very salty, but because of the children - they put some sugarbuttons on top.

"Casa Mare". Tradition dictates that in every house in the countryside there is a special room called Casa Mare, in which only guests sleeps. It is usually very beautiful decorated and has the best blankets and a the bed is on top of an ovenlike thing which warmes the whole bed.
Here is Christina, my Moldovan friend, hanging out...

Christina and Christinas mother showed me the  cellar.

We decided to sleep before going to the church the same evening. In Orthodox tradition you go to church at 12 at night to the early morning. I wanted to experience this but since staying up waiting to go to church not is my forte I had to take a nap before... I blamed all the homemade wiskey...

In the church. It was quite interesting. We went there at 12. The priest blessed us, then each of us got a candle and went out of the church to walk around it 3 times. After that, and the following 4 hrs, the preast repeated something (had no clue what it was..) at the end he blessed the food.
 Christinas Babuska told me that she once had an egg blessed, and she saved it a year and it was still ok to eat.

Ironically I got sick in church...

Me and Christina chilling before all the guests arrived. They had a pond where you could fish..

Karaoke was an integrated part of the festivities.

Food.... mmmm

Red eggs. According to the easter tradition you have to break eggs. So each take an egg, and bang them together, the one egg that survives is a lucky egg or something like that..

In action.

Christina, me, some cousin, and behind is Christinas father.

after a couple of drinks I fells quite comfortable in both Romanian and Russian... judging from our faces I was probably not.

Traditional Moldovan dance:)

They wanted to show me their horse.

Still dancing:)
It was a really cool experience. When we were done with this easter dinner we went to the next family and continued.

Workshop in Romania and rendez-vous with Dracula.

It has been a while since I have updated my blog, but time passes without you really realising. I have just come home from two weeks in Romania, and mates just to give you a heads-up! Romania Rocks! Nice people, good food (read here: wine) and it is really really beautiful.

But before getting into holiday mode again Ill let you know what I was up to before my two mischievous weeks in Romania.

I was lucky enough to go to see a small winery. A friend of a friend´s uncle grows wine - and they invited some friends and I for a small taste. The picture is of the babushka, who looks after the wine production.

Another cool thing worth writing about was an event called " puzzle up chisina" and was a photo exhibition. Puzzle up ChisiNOW is a photo exhibition, standing in the city of Chisinau from 26th March to 16th April. Nine places was  chosen around the city centre, to exhibit the pictures. All pictures have been taken during the six photo workshops some volunteers made.
Their goals were to create a community of amateur photographers in Moldova. Facilitate the exchange of knowledge among the workshop participants. Obviously crosscultural exchange ( sentence everyone in the NGO world is a sucker for) and improving photography-related skills of the participants. The side project and really useful here to was to evaluate the works in constructive way. The main-organiser, a uni student from Germany who is here to kick-off different projects, managed to find a sweet location in an old museum, so everyone was working really hard to clean and paint the place.

One big change is that I have moved place. On reason for living with locals was that I wanted to learn language and learn about their culture. Since this was not going very well and the need to have a sociallife got bigger I decided to move into a flat with other international volunteers. This will probably not be the best thing for my Russian, but at least I can invite friends over for dinner now. I am really happy I did it, although it means that I have to put a bit more effort into speaking either Russian or Romanian.

And then there was the workshop and training I went for in Romania, in something called Baile Tusnad (in transylvania) The workshop was called Living Library and was actually started in Denmark at Roskilde festival. The concept is instead of renting a book - you rent a person, who represents different steriotypes and prejudices you might have. As an example at the Living Library we attended I got to rent an ex-convict, a Roma and a politician. The idea is that you through dialogue under controlled circumstances get to confront some of your prejudices. It was really cool, and I am looking forward to start a similar project here in Moldova.

The LL took place in a café in St. Georgie - a small town near baile tusnad

These are some of the other participants from Latvia, Serbia, Romania, France, Holland, Macedonia, Italy etc. It was lots of fun and Transylviania is an amazing place. To my suprice there where a lot of Hungarian speaking ppl - so much for history lessons but reading up on it, it has to do with the old habsburg rule. It is still funny though that it is one place you cannot cope with Romanian and English.

View from a hill (I know: obviously)

After my week in Transylvia I travelled back to Bucharest to meet up with Lisa, a friend I was going to travel with. We found a pretty cool place to couchsurf right in center and we met up with a new friend, Andrea who showed us around. I loved this town. Mostly because it had an old part with cobblestone and outdoor cafés and a variaty of food. It was amazing and we even had good weather some of the days.
This picture was taken of me after walking around for two hrs in "casa de mafia" - the name of the parlament building. Most locals I met hated that building and many have never been in there. Apparently it has not been open to the public before 3 years ago.
But yes I was tired...

One our trip we went from bucharest to Brasov where we went to see the Bran Castle (the home of dracula) and a monestary on the way. This is Lisa on her way up the tower. It was really cool and there were not a lot of people when we were there, since turist season has not kicked in yet.
But Dracula was not home, so we probably have to come back another time.

This is a picture of the alleged blood-sucker Vlad the Impaler. It is worth going there if only for the beautiful surroundings! as you can see on the picture below.

We had to hike a bit to get this view, but it was worth it.

Bran castle

A picture of the training in Baile Tusnad. Speaking of beautiful places.

Brasov is also an amazing city. Romania is a really nice place to travel around. People are very friendly especially when you try to speak Romanian! Coming from Moldova you learn to appriciate anything that is not concrete ;)
I will defently come back. Hitch-hiking is really easy and living is cheap! 

Sun. I like.

A guy trying to catch his dinner.

On our way home from a wicked week in Romania. The bus-ride is always a bit of and adventure since you don't know how long you are going to stay at the border and what kind of people are on the bus. This time it was a bus full of Romanien speaking teenagers, who had been on something that seemed like spring-break. The bus driver was a grumpy Russian speaker which culminated with the teenagers wanting to watch movies. This ment 6 hrs of LOUD badly russian dubed english movies, which no one really understood. What a joy-ride...

I hope everyone is doing great back home whereever that is! I will try to update more frequently, but time flies.

A small story about Moldova.

Just a small story someone told me in order for me to understand how things work here in Moldova.

There lived three brothers in a small village in Romania. Two of them had a car, but the third one did not have one. The two men who were lucky enough to have cars decided to help the third man buy a motorbike, so that he would be able to get around faster.
Across the boarder in Moldova, there also lived three brothers, but only one of them had a car. The two other brothers were jealous about this, and decided to burn their brothers car.

Rusmanian or Romussian?

Привет!Как дела? This time I will have to write some now, and write the rest later. I am going on some on-arrival training tomorrow, and I am sure I will have lots to tell when I get back!

But I can tell you a bit about what has been going down:)
I have started my Russian lessons, so hopefully I´ll be a proper Gogol soon.

Getting around: The best thing about Moldova is that it is so cheap to travel. I went to Gagauzia (not sure how it is spelt but I´ll tjeck  later), and it was only 15 d.kr. You never have to be scared of not being able to get on a bus here, because the max limit here usually means that you can fit 17 more people in a in. They just get  small chairs to sit in the ile in the middle (and then Danmark is so concerned about wearing a seatbelt - who needs it, when you can´t even move an inch;) Gagauzia is a autonomous provins in the south of Moldova. They have their own language (similar to Tyrkish) and Garguzians originates from Christian Tyrks. This is an amazing place, and actually very different from Chisinau. This is the special thing about Moldova. All the different parts are very unique.

Love these cars!So I just had to show you a photo.

@ Work: there are two sentences you have to get use to, if you want to work in Eastern Europe: "I will think about it..." and "We will see". I am beginning to understand the difference: I will see usually means: " I am not sure what you are on about, but I´ll read the 5 emails you have sent on the subject and then I will probably answer you" and "we will see" usually means "this is not how we do it here, so maybe if I ignore you long enough you will go away". Both sentences are used when people are trying to postpone doing things: Why do things now, when you might not have to do them, because people forget about it;) But as most of you already know: I will not go away, just because you ignore me - so eventually I get some things done anyways:)

For Valentines day a couple of volunteers organised a kiss-in which was a cover-up for a demonstration pro gay-rights. It went well - a lot of local people showed up, and I had my first public humiliation on national TV. The guy on the photo was a cranky old man, who kept telling us that we were worse than terrorists. I was dressed as cupid and was handing out hearts where it said: love is diverse. An interesting job when I couldn´t really speak with people. We had gathered Amnesty and other organisations just in case. The next day there was a anti-demonstration and some religious programs went crazy about our flash-mob!
If you are interested here is a link about it: http://curaj.tv/reportaj/cultural/dragostea-este-diferita-flashmob-la-stefan/

Here ya go:)

Someone has decided that it is un-cool for me to use their internet, so I have had a bit of a struggle going online. Hopefully this will be solved in the nearest future – but you never know☺
Now I have to been here a bit over a week, and things are grand(I am not eating as much cabbage anymore though) The first culture shock has been the French. Is there some invasion going on from both France and Germany that the rest of Europe just doesn’t know anything about? I am telling you Denmark - get on it! Moldova is obviously the new black! As a treat I get to improve my French though, so it is all good.
I have started work and it has been an interesting week for me. Most interesting is the fact that we work 5 people at the office, and that we only have 2.5 computers to work with. That is to say 1 and 0.5 - depending on how bad your Russian is that day (the 2nd comp. is only in Russian). The picture below is the ADVIT office.

Another big event was celebrating my birthday in Chisinau. It actually started around 23 am on the 1st when Clem, the French girl who lives here popped by with some cake. So that was a nice start. After work on the 2nd I meet with Clem and another girl for some beers (Chisinau local draft - gotta love ´em!) before heading off to my Couchsurfing meeting. Off cause I got lost on my way there, but met some nice people on the way, whom I am actually meeting up with again. This lack of orientation seems to have become my way of creating a network. It was a fun night, entailing some killer bloody marys and my first hangover in Moldova.

This is Clem with birthday cake:)

This is Oxana, a girl I met through CS.

This weekend I went to a winery called Purcari. It was started in 1827 and internationally recognised in 1847 in France. I am not sure about the facts since that is what I thought I understood from the Russian documentary. For those of you who has an actual interest in wine and wineries I am sure google will help ( I have been told this is a good place for random information). The wine was good and they let us finish the bottle which was very nice of them.

The view from the winery. Pretty wicked although it was very cold.

Me trying to be creative.

I like wine:)

Random church.

So does Daria ( A girl I work with)