Buuuuuuut, in my defense, I had to go back to training for a few weeks. This had been something to both look forward to and to dread. The pros being I got to go back to Stauceni with all my original friends as well as live with my original training family. The cons...having to go through more language classes, traveling on public transportation with awkward luggage and being stuck in between seasons so do we dress for summer or cold? Minor inconveniences, I know.
The next day we had to head back to our respective training villages. I went to the Peace Corps headquarters with Andrea and hung out for a while. She didn't feel very well and since it would take some serious effort to travel to Stauceni. After a few hours, we made the trek to the bus tugging all of our luggage up the hill. It was unseasonably hot out so that didn't make it any better. It took a while to get to Stauceni but we made it. I walked into my family's house and was showered with kisses. I truly do love these people and for some reason they love me. Mama Gazda told me to go shower while Papa Gazda took my luggage upstairs and she cooked me dinner. Yeah, it was awesome. When I got to dinner, it was a feast. Mama yelled at me for losing so much weight and she needed to fatten me up. She is so wonderful. I ate a LOT before going to bed.
From there we had a week of language classes and tech training. There was one new feature in Stauceni that made it fun though, we had a bar. While we were there this past summer, whenever we wanted to hang out socially with the rest of our trainees, we had to travel to their sites because there was nowhere to go in Stauceni. They were building this new place but it wasn't open yet. But it was open now...and it was across the street from our school. (Not a lot of zoning laws here...) It was a BEAUTIFUL open wall bar, a coffee shop upstairs and a huge supermarket. It was amazing. And that's where we ended up every day after class. It was just so nice to sit and socialize with these people who 4 months ago were strangers but now are friends. We had to go into Chisinau once for a "gallery walk" where each volunteer presented their organization to all the others so we could all get a sense of what everyone was doing. The boys from Ciorescu in the ARBD program were ALL sick. They were dropping like flies so all of my 'bees' that I was looking forward to seeing were all out sick for the first 4 days of training.
Our first weekend was pretty low key. We mostly hung out at the bar in Stauceni and Lyndsey and I spent some time in the coffee shop using their free Wi-Fi. Another great thing about training was Lindsay and Conrad weren't eating lunch at their host family's house so every day they went to Lyndsey's house. So after I would eat my delicious lunch at home, I would wander up there and the four of us would sit around and bullshit for an hour between classes. It was quite enjoyable. It was anything from us watching stupid You Tube videos for an hour to planning vacations. It was really fun. Lyndsey and I decided to go to Vienna and Prague for Christmas and invited our other friend Maria to come along. Then in the spring, Lyndsey and her boyfriend, Art along with Lindsay and Conrad are traveling to Amsterdam for a music festival. Yes, all that got planned on our lunch breaks.
The second week, the ARBD boys had recovered a little bit and all was well. On our trip to Hub Site we had some sessions of training. On one day me and some of the boys decided to trek to the Kebab House for lunch. It was risky since we only had an hour and it was a 15 minute walk one way and they're usually not the "quickest" at customer service but we were starving. We arrived back late and were chastised but the tastiest of kebabs were worth it. That night in Chisinau, we participated in a trivia contest. I was on a dream team with 3 of the smartest guys i know; Michael, Pat and Jesse. I wanted to do well as I love trivia, but my main goal was to beat my friend, Rich, from the Embassy as he is from my hometown and was the valedictorian of my brother John's class. When I told John I was competing against him, John had said "good luck, that's the smartest dude I've ever met in my life." There were 8 categories. I know my strength was in pop culture so I was happy to see a music category. And we did kick ass in that category. But there was also a 'pictures' category which you don't know what the pictures will be of but they turned out to be stills of movies so we got 9 out of 10 of those. The only one we missed was a Russian movie so I think we did pretty amazing. However, the rest of the categories were pretty difficult. So we wound up placing 5th. Not the greatest, but still the highest of the Peace Corps volunteers that were there. And yes...we beat Rich's team. A small victory, but I'll take it nonetheless. Rich is a great guy. He's been in Moldova for a few years with his wife and their 3 small children. I don't know him very well but it's still nice to have someone from home to be around.

So we survived. It was interesting this time around because through our first training session this past summer we were all strangers and this time around we were all friends and knew each other pretty well. There were some clear segregation as the groups of friends became established. However, conversely, I was able to get to know people I never really got a chance to before. Courtney, Jessica and Maria suddenly became very endearing to me and I barely knew them prior. I was hoping to spend time with some of the boys and but their illness and time constraints prevented that from happening too much. Overall, I am glad it is over even though I miss my friends even more now.
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