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.