Drum fara sfarsit

Recently I had to take my Apple PowerBook to a repair shop in Bucharest (no one knows how to repair them in Moldova) and also take four students on a field trip, all in the same extended weekend. Here's how the schedule went:

Friday:
3 p.m. I finish lunch in my village and hitchhike to Chisinau. 45 minutes of travel.
7 p.m. I depart by bus for Bucharest. The bus is packed, allowing me to sleep very little. A Russian translation of The Nutty Professor, starring Eddie Murphy, is playing on the bus TV.
10 p.m. In the bathroom at the border, a Portuguese man is trying to talk to a Moldovan. I ask him if he speaks English. He does, and we talk during our time at the border and at a later rest stop.

Saturday:
5:25 a.m. We arrive at the bus station in Bucharest after nearly 10 and a half hours on the bus. The sun hasn't risen yet. I look for a bathroom at the bus station, and sneak into one that may or may not be reserved for the shopkeepers next door. I use the bathroom, brush my teeth and take some pills, then open the door. I'm greeted by a middle-aged female shopkeeper, already yelling at me for using the bathroom. I apologize. She demands 5,000 Romanian lei, the equivalent of about 15 cents. I hand it to her. She continues to yell at me. The other shopkeeper starts yelling at me, too. Then a man who evidently also works at the shop yells at me for standing at the wrong entrance. I tell the first woman that I've given her her money and that she should shut up (using the polite form, of course), then walk away, yelling in Romanian to the sky, "I love you, Bucharest!"
6 a.m. The sun has risen, so I begin to make my way into the city. I have no idea where I am, so I start asking people how to get to the center of the city. My inability to understand the Bucharest accent and my inability to remember spoken directions in any language complicate things. After a couple of kilometers of walking and two bus rides, I arrive at Piata Unirii.
8 a.m. I get some money from an ATM and walk into a McDonald's. I buy a quarter-pounder with cheese and a cup of coffee; I only drink coffee about five times a year, but I'm pretty sure I need it right now.
8:20 a.m. Having finished my burger and coffee (what a disgusting-sounding combination), I stare vacantly at the flat-screen TV at the McDonald's, then go to the bathroom to change clothes and wash my face. I'm impressed and pleased that McDonald's offers such clean facilities, and I marvel for a few seconds that life has brought me to stand naked in a McDonald's bathroom in the capital of Romania.
8:40 a.m. The computer repair guys have asked me not to call them until 10 a.m., so I have some time to kill. I buy some credits for my Romanian cell phone account, then go to a MediaGalaxy electronics store. I spend about 30 minutes looking at nothing in particular, then look at my watch and realize that I have even more time before 10 a.m. So I spend a little more time browsing.
10 a.m. I call Tudor at NouMax and arrange for him to pick me up in his car at 11:15. I walk to the nearby park, sit on a bench, and take a nap.
11:10 a.m. Tudor picks me up in his car and takes me to the NouMax office, a small, cluttered apartment with five rooms and dozens of computers and pieces of gear around. Tudor agrees with my diagnosis of the laptop; a jammed CD/DVD drive and a power supply fried by a surge. We discuss Moldova, Romania and America, all in English.
12:30 p.m. Tudor drives me to the Peace Corps Romania office and they allow me in. There are no volunteers there, even though it's a Saturday; Romanian volunteers don't need or want to come into the capital as much as Moldovan volunteers, of whom there are usually 20 in Chisinau on a given weekend. I talk with one of the security guards for about an hour, then ask for directions to the metro system.
3 p.m. After eating shaorma and drinking a beer for lunch, navigating through the subway system to the Bucharest Mall and buying a donut, I buy my ticket for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at the mall's movie theater. I doze off during the first 20 minutes, but wake up quickly enough to understand the movie and watch all the cool fights.
6 p.m. I arrive at the Bucharest train station and buy my ticket back to Chisinau. I have some time before the train leaves at 7:45, so I buy a hot dog and some snacks to eat on the train.
7:50 p.m. My train pulls out of the station.
7:51 p.m. Adrian, another NouMax employee, calls me on my cell phone and tells me that the replacement drive I need won't be ready for at least three weeks, so if I haven't left the city yet, I might want to come pick up my computer before getting on the train. Too late for that.
7:53 p.m. After I finish talking with Adrian, the man sharing a sleeper room in the car with me tells me in English that I speak English very well. "I hope so," I say. "I'm American." We talk for several hours before going to sleep.

Sunday:
8:20 a.m. My train arrives in Chisinau after more than 12 hours, and I head to the Peace Corps office to take a shower. I watch some TV and eat breakfast.
2 p.m. I take a bus back to Mereseni.
3 p.m. I arrive at my house, unpack my backpack and pack another bag, because my traveling isn't even close to finished.
4 p.m. I meet up with four of my ninth grade students, whom I am taking to the southern city of Cahul so they can take the FLEX entrance exam. FLEX is a U.S. State Department program that allows hundreds of high schoolers in former Soviet countries to attend high school in America for a year for free. The most convenient test location from our village is nearly three hours away by bus, so we are going down a day early and staying with Krista, another volunteer who has her own house.
4:45 p.m. The bus stops at our village and the students and I board.
6:45 p.m. I send Krista the following text message: "We just entered Cahul raion. We should be at the station pretty soon. It's a good thing, since my kids are getting a little antsy; one of them is giving the finger to caruta drivers we pass." A caruta, for the uninitiated, is a horse-drawn carriage.
7:05 p.m. We arrive in Cahul. Krista greets us and takes us to her house. We go out to a pizza parlor for dinner, where Krista shocks my kids and me by telling them that they need to speak English around her. After dinner we stop by an outdoor gathering, where hundreds of teenagers and young adults are dancing the hora to live traditional music. By the time I study the local steps, which are different from and more complicated than the standard Mereseni steps, and am confident enough to try, the music stops and the event ends.
9 p.m. We come back to Krista's house and the kids watch a Russian bootleg of Bridgett Jones 2 on Krista's laptop with Russian dubbing and English sub-titles. Krista and I hang out in the kitchen. Denis, one of the students, takes an immense liking to Krista's cat and calls it with the same high-pitched voice and baby-talk that Krista does.
11 p.m. Krista and I begin to enforce the kids' 11 p.m. bed-time, which is a welcome relief for me, not having slept much in the previous two nights. Diana, the only girl in the group, sleeps in Krista's bed and Krista takes the floor. The boys' room is a little more crowded; Denis and Victor share a double bed, Eugen has a sleeping bag and a thin mat on the ground, and I sleep on the floor between two blankets. This is the third night in a row that I've slept with a Moldovan within a meter of me. I'm going to enjoy my sleeping space when this trip is over.
11:15 p.m. The boys have gotten into bed, and Victor and Denis have begun to fight for space, wrestling and punching each other in the bed. Moldovan boys tend not to wear pajamas in early October, so the two boys are pushing each other around while wearing nothing but briefs. Every once in a while, their fighting is punctuated by either Victor falling out of the bed and landing within a foot of mine and Eugen's heads or Denis saying, "Hey, where are you putting your hand?!" I don't tell them to stop, partly because they'll settle down naturally and partly because it's really funny.
11:30 p.m. The boys finally quiet down and everyone is asleep within five minutes.

Monday:
7 a.m. The alarm clock on my cell phone goes off, and it's as if the boys had been waiting for the starter's pistol. They immediately get up, wash their faces and get dressed. Krista and I force them to eat something for breakfast, and I make scrambled eggs. It's the first meal I've ever cooked in Moldova. Krista leaves for school, and the kids and I play frisbee outside until Samantha, another volunteer in Cahul, picks us up and takes us to a different school for the FLEX test.
9 a.m. FLEX registration begins. Since I'm American, people automatically assume I know what's going on. I find the American, Dan, and the Moldovan, Gabriela, who are actually in charge, and they put me to work. The biggest challenge in my job is cutting applicants' photos to the proper size and gluing the pictures onto their application form. Actually, that's my entire job. Other than that, I spend my time talking to any kids who want to hang out with a native speaker. Some of the kids are really impressive, and I begin to realize how outclassed my kids probably are in this competition.
12:30 p.m. My students' turn comes, and they have 30 minutes to take the 20-question test. They finish the test and come out saying that they hadn't realized there was a second side of the test until it was too late. My guess, which is confirmed a week later, is that the students were told about the second part in English, but not every student's English level was high enough to understand.
1 p.m. My students and I meet Sam again and get some lunch. Since results won't be posted until 3 p.m., the kids ask me if they can go off exploring Cahul on their own. Diana wants to stay with some girls that she met, and the boys want to use the internet. In America, I would never allow the kids out of my sight in a city they'd never visited before. But for some reason it seems okay in Moldova. I tell them to meet me at the school at 3, and Sam and I get some ice cream.
3 p.m. I meet my students at the school as they're walking away. None of them passed the first stage. I have done a good job of prepping them for something like this, and they already know before I open my mouth what I'm going to say; "At least you tried, there's always next year, and hey, at least you got to see a new part of Moldova you'd never seen before." Diana, the student who had the highest hopes for herself, says that she'll try again at the more difficult Chisinau test center a month later, and says to the boys, "Did you see some of the English fanatics that were here today?" I realize only then that this trip has served another purpose; my students have seen how seriously some students at other schools take English.
4 p.m. We board the bus home. The kids and I are much more tired than we were on the way down, and all of us nap at some point during the ride home.
6:45 p.m. The bus drops us off in Mereseni, and I say goodbye to the kids.
7 p.m. I arrive back home, this time for good. I make some calculations. In the past 76 hours, I have traveled in a inter-city train or bus for 29.5 hours. That means that 38.8 percent of my previous three days were spent in some form of mass transit, not including private cars, subways systems or rutieras inside cities. I eat dinner and go to sleep early.