Ce Fel De Botez?

When I last wrote, I was coming to grips with having students in my English class who are not very talented—or anywhere close to grade-level—in English. That initial shock and worry washed away instantly with one trip to Chisinau and one hell of a baptism.

Saturday was the baptism of Claudio, my 33-year-old brother's two-month-old son. Igor, my host brother, lives in Chisinau, and so the evening's festivities allowed me to come into Chisinau for the day. If you're wondering what festivities can be attached to a baptism other than a lightly social coffee hour with a few presents, then you obviously haven't attended a baptism in Moldova. But more on that later.

Chisinau is a sort of mini-vacation and a breath of sanity in the life of a Moldovan volunteer. Here there are stores (gasp!), restaurants (double-gasp!) and even a small English-language movie theater (asthma-induced panic attack!). You can buy an imported beer (Baltica is a nice brand if you can find it in the States, and a Baltica 9 can wreck you with just 12 oz.), go into a mall and laugh at how you can't afford any of the clothes there, and buy literature from the one English-language book store.

Yes, I did all of these things Saturday, although I had a milder Baltica 5 instead of a 9. I arrived at Peace Corps headquarters at 11 a.m. and watched some of CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It seems that my realization in the past week of how bad the situation was came slower than the president's, if that's possible. This is a dark September for Americans, and being far away from it does not necessarily soften the gloom.

As is always the case with CNN, I could only watch so much in one sitting, so fellow volunteer Krista and I left to run some errands and enjoy ourselves. I was able to buy some books: Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and About a Boy, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Total cost for the books was less than $40, which seemed cheap in America but equates to almost 500 lei, or a month-and-a-half's rent money. I have immersed myself in reading in Moldova to levels that are only rivaled by childhood summers when I had no friends. I read seven books this summer, and I just started J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King Sunday after reading The Two Towers in a week.

Krista reads even more than I do, and over the summer I had teased her for reading the novelization of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie flick. She got the last laugh, however, since Mr. and Mrs. Smith was playing at the English-language movie theater on Saturday, and we each paid 15 lei ($1.20) for a matinee show in an upstairs room about the size of a luxurious home theater with a decent sound system. The movie was standard popcorn fare, and Krista said that she liked the novelization's ending better.

After running a few more errands—I was so excited to find Gillette after-shave and deodorant that I paid $8 for them—I put on some nice clothes and waited for my host family to pick me up outside the Peace Corps office. We arrived at the church for the final 10 minutes of the baptism, but according to the Moldovan traditions, the after-party is the important part; we were there early.

We drove with five other cars to a small but luxurious restaurant that Igor and his wife, Natalia, had rented for the occasion. As I entered the restaurant, three large strings of banquet tables were arranged in the shape of pi, able to sit about 70 in total. The walls were painted a shade of peach, and had various small window-like inlets where objects of art were placed. To the left were the doors to the two indoor bathrooms. A few feet past those doors was a small bar/stationing area and the door to the kitchen. To the right was set the musicians for the evening; a 55-year-old man with a KORG synthesizer, a microphone and a machine that had all of the drum beats and rhythms necessary for the evening's music; a similarly-aged violinist with pick-ups on his bridge to plug the sound into the amplifier mix; a slightly older man playing a hammer dulcimer that was barely audible all night; and a 35-year-old woman who was able to belt out traditional and popular songs from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and America without an accent and with good vocal quality.

But of more immediate attention as I entered was the round table, 4 feet in diameter, with a pitcher of wine and eight glasses placed on a tray. One by one, people presented flowers to Igor and Natalia and drank a token amount of wine to toast to the baby's health. I gave three flowers (very important to have an odd number, although it hasn't been explained to me yet why) and drank some wine, although I evidently have not gotten used to the custom of greeting women whom I've met once before with a kiss, and the discomfort was obvious.

I had noticed that many of the women were holding prayer candles and small bouquets of flowers. While it seemed like a bad idea as they all gave Natalia candles, I assumed that the flowers had enough moisture in them to resist fire. Even if they didn't, what harm could one or two burning flowers do? I didn't realize the other fire hazard until it was too late. As Natalia leaned in to kiss a friend, the friend's candle ignited the hair hanging in front of Natalia's right shoulder—I had forgotten about hair spray. Igor beat the fire out quickly, and another woman was designated the candle-holder so that history would not repeat.

After a few photographs (more about the ever-present Moldovan desire to have professional videos and photos made for every important event in some other post), everyone came through the line-up again and gave gifts of clothes, stuffed animals and toys. I, being a teacher, gave several Romanian-language children's books that I bought from a street vendor. Claudio, the baby, was then placed on top of the three-feet-high pile of gifts and hoisted by all of the women as the band played MulИ›i Ani TreascДѓ, or Live Many Years. After removing Claudio from the pile, the men took the gifts into a side room and everyone sat down to eat.

The ordinary Moldova dinner table is a feast by many standards. For a special occasion, families will put many tables together and have a huge masДѓ, which literally means "table" or "feast". But for huge events such as this, nothing beats a professionally catered masДѓ, with wine, champagne, cognac, vodka for the masses and water and orange soda for the light-hearted. All of the food is put out on communal plates on the table, and people serve themselves by putting anything they want at that moment onto the six-inch-diameter plate in front of them (the plate is seemingly always six inches wide, regardless of where you are). With foods that can be stabbed rather than scooped, however, people are more likely to stick their forks in and eat directly off the communal plates. I believe there was a week when I first got here when this bothered me. Now I just notice which pieces of bread my host father touches when his hands are particularly dirty and continue about my meal.

A faint recollection of the foods served:
bread, cheeses and cold cuts;
cucumbers, tomatoes and other vegetables;
fruits ranging from oranges to kiwis;
pastries filled with crab meat;
tomatoes cut in half and topped with cheese;
various salads with egg, corn and other tasty bits;
chicken that had been sat upright with a cartoonish human head in place of the real head, which was a lot cuter than it may read;
sardines and other fish;
the infamous chicken jelly dish that I have still avoided tasting;
lightly battered and fried chicken with mushroom stuffing;
meat kabobs;
sarmale, which are sweet peppers stuffed with or cabbage leaves wrapped around rice and seasonings;
a desert pastry similar to raspberry crepes with whipped cream piled on top;
cake.

That's 14 dishes, and I'm sure that I'm forgetting one or two that didn't make a strong impression on me or weren't close to my seat. Don't worry if this seems like too much food, because we stretched it out from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., being sure to mix in many drinks and a lot of dancing. I lost count of my drinks early on, but I'm sure I clocked in about 10, and it doesn't help that Moldovans don't believe in sipping. This is definitely a Down Your Drink culture, whether it's a shot of wine, champagne, vodka, cognac, a cherry liquor called viИ™inatДѓ or any other homemade liquor loosely called rachiu. Beer isn't taken in one gulp, but it's not given its proper sipping time either.

As for dancing, I must say that it's nice to dance in a country where everyone's white and there aren't any really good dancers. The most complicated dance involves holding hands in a circle and can be picked up in the course of one song. But more often than not, the dancing is free-form and awful, which is great for me. After more than a decade of shame, I can dance simply for hours and throw in something ridiculous now and then; no one will say anything, because they're all bad, too. The Boris the Dancing Bear combination of shimmying and close-fisted disco hand motions is quite common, especially in the case of Dumitru, my 57-year-old host father who stands at about 5'5" and often looks like a pudgy and smiling elf. My host cousin, Ion, who met me for the first time that night, was quite adamant that I dance and that I was in the center circle as often as possible. I was happy to do what he said, until he told me I should dance with his wife. If that's a cultural thing, I haven't heard of it before.

At about 12 a.m., no one had left, and it was time for the cumnatrii, or the child's sponsors, to fulfill another part of their ceremonial duties. For every sponsor, Sergiu (Igor's brother) and Micha (Natalia's brother) walked down the aisle between the two tables, carrying ceremonial bread and a new set of cook-wear for Igor and Natalia. Each sponsor kissed the bread, gave a short speech and presented a gift anywhere between 1000 lei ($80) and 200 Euros. This ceremonial part got a little tiring after five sponsors, mostly because they talked too quietly for everyone to hear. But afterward, there was more drinking, dancing and eating. Most people left at 1:30 a.m., and I stayed with the family at the restaurant until about 2, when we got into Sergiu's car and drove back to sleep a few hours in MereИ™eni.

Was all of this ceremony really necessary? Certainly not. Will Claudio have even the faintest memory of his baptism? Of course not. But was it a great reason to get a lot of family and friends together at a nice restaurant and party hard in a ceremony full of frumos things? You bet it was, and it was a great time.