Yesterday, my Swedish friend Mikael complained that my blog is boring because I never post anything new, so I guess I should make more of an effort to keep it updated. Not that anything really exciting happens right now. So to have anything to post, I took a photo of Mikael when we had coffee and he felt compelled to show a chocolate box that he bought from a girl collecting money for after school activities.
This has been a very calm weekend. Mr. M is in Armenia for a few weeks and as usually, that means that I have to put in more of an effort to schedule social activities, which I am a bit too lazy to do. Fortunately, people in my surrounding are more active than me, so I didn’t sit home all weekend. Friday, I was out for drinks and dinner with Mikael, Åsa and Daniel (a Swedish-Swiss couple, which is very confusing for many here as a lot of Americans are not fully aware that Sweden and Switzerland are actually two different countries.), and a few friends of theirs. And yesterday, Fernando came over to my place to practice some songs together. Fernando used to study classical guitar for many years, and so we decided to do something together, with me singing and him playing. Yesterday, we practiced a piece by John Dowland (16:th century). I have never really sung renaissance music before and it was MUCH more difficult than I expected. (Mainly because the guitar does not follow the melody at all and the notes of the melody are often not on the same beat as the chord for the guitar.) But once we started getting some parts together, it sounded great and so it was fun practicing. After the practicing, we met up with Mikael again and went for dinner. Fernando and I were both completely exhausted though, from the concentration during the practice, so it was an early evening.
This is me! Check out Rory (the daughter) packing her school bag. This weekend, I walked out of my house with a novel (Swedish, “Kalla det vad fan du vill”), my Spanish book, my note book, my calendar, and an article on taxation on agriculture in Europe, just in case. And that was kind of a light packing. There is normally a book by some ex. World Banker with a “new” insight on globalization and the world’s poverty gap in that bag too…
I promised Maria S that I would post something on my blog today, so here is a photo from this weekend. The sun finally reached DC!!! Saturday was a beautiful day and Fernando and took a walk down to the Mall while we had our weekly language exchange. Fernando is from Colombia and a friend of Mr. M’s, and once a week, we meet up for a French/Spanish exchange. (I guess I don’t have to explain who of us that is practicing which language?!) After a while, Mr. M met up with us and we went for a late lunch. It was a lovely, lovely day!
Fernando – my very patient Spanish tutor
Pink lemonade and French conversation in the Sculpture Garden
Sunday was of course cloudy and today, the rain has been poring all day. I am hoping for a sunny birthday…
Seems like March is a blog dip. I was just surfing around among my friends’ blogs and with the exception of Almost Molovan Lars, they have all been terrible at writing this past month. And when I look in my archive, it was the same thing in March 2007. I did not manage to post a single text then either.
I blame visitors and a lot of work for taking up my blog time, but it is probably more the fact that spring refuses to really take off. I am sooooo tired of grey, windy, 12-centigrade weather! My energy level is record low and I find little inspiration to do anything creative.
I know, I am complaining about nothing.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I am alive. Like I said, I have had a couple of visitors here since the last time I wrote, and I just came back after a weekend in New York. So photos to come!
Yesterday, I made my fourth visit to IKEA since I came here in November. I know – it is crazy! (And no wonder that I resent this settled, “creating-a-nice-home kind of life.) But I think I can kind of discount one of the visits since it was with a group of au-pairs on our way to a Lucia practice just to eat Swedish meatballs and lingonberries at the IKEA restaurant. Yesterday’s visit was because I actually managed to come home with the wrong bed when I got the furniture in late November. So Mr. M was nice enough to go out with me again. (Since I still do not have a drivers licence, IKEA visits are a bit complicated. On the other hand, it is only when I need to go to IKEA that I actually wished I had a licence, so I am never really motivated to get one.) Of course, IKEA is what it is and so you always get out of there with a lot more stuff than you intended. I also got some food and crackers from the IKEA store, and am now enjoying the Swedish traditional sandwich “caviar” Kalles that the European Commission no longer allows us to call caviar but which is still going strong in the Swedish kitchens.
So my apartment is slowly but surely getting furnished. It is with mixed feelings but I think it is the right thing to do. I will post pics as soon as I get the bed together. I am still a bit jet-lagged, and so I fell asleep at 8 pm yesterday and woke up at 6:30 this morning. But when starting fixing with the bed and some other things that I had bought, it turned out that I need to use a hammer, and I am now trying to be a good neighbour and not start hammering before noon. Am enjoying my Kalles sandwich in the meantime.
I just made my first cup of coffee at home. It is true. Or almost anyway. When I was a kid, my sis Jessica and I used to make an effort to wake up our mom with breakfast on birthdays and on Lucia, and since my parents got divorced when I was eight, I learned to master the coffeemaker at an early age. (This was long before the espresso found its way up to the cold North.) But somewhere in my adolescent, this useful knowledge was forgotten. It was not until I moved to Italy at the age of 30 that I actually acquired a taste for this stimulating beverage, a taste which soon turned into a semi-addiction. Having had the fortune of living in countries with cheap coffee ready available, I have until now avoided making coffee at home. But when I moved here, I realized that buying coffee out is no longer an option (due to price, the fact that most coffee is served in paper-cups, and to be frank: the taste). So when I was in the store the other day, I took the major step to invest in a jar of coffee, and today I made my first cup! And when I pored my first made-by-me cup by the stove in my kitchen, the thought that “I am really adult now” actually popped up in my head. I am not sure why. Perhaps because the smell of coffee at home on a Sunday morning reminded me of my mom and my grandmother and all of a sudden, I felt like I belonged to another generation. Regardless, the coffee was good and I think I started a good habit. Now I can slack around in my PJ for as long as I wish in the weekends!
The rest of my days in Chisinau were spent on work and seeing friends. Felt like I mostly run around all the time, but it was great to see everyone and it was a real kick to be closer to the client and our stakeholders; Washington does feel far away at times.
Dinner with Felicia at Pani Pit
Hanging out with Ghenadie
Dinner with Valeriu, Doina, and Liliana at old Admiral (can’t
remember the new name). We laughed the entire evening and it felt
like I haven’t done that in a while – I guess it is easier to laugh with
peole you know well!?
I brought a bunch of gifts over (everyone who knows me knows that I love buying gifts), but I also got a lot of gifts – so nice!!! Felicia gave me a CD with her sister, Mariana Izman, who is an award winning pianist. It is a beautiful CD and very peaceful, so I can really recommend it if you come across it. (You can listen to some of her performances here.) Iuliana gave me a box of delicious chocolate from Moldova’s chocolate factory Bucuria, and Liliana managed to get me a signed CD from Lilian in the Snails (though I have to admit that I asked for it since Liliana knows him through work). Thank you all for the gifts!!!
On my way to get souvenirs at the old Soviet department store, UNIC
(though only gifts for myself – some Moldovan decoration for my Washington apartment).
I am back in Chisinau. It is wonderful!!! (And yes, it is the first time in several days that I am on-line outside of the office – hence the lagging blog posts below.) Everyone here asks how it feels and to be honest, it feels like I am back home. Like I have been travelling for a while and now I am back to stay. Ghenadie was in a way adding to that feeling as he came to meet me at the airport when I arrived, which also made me feel a bit Moldovan. (See my blog from November 9)With one exception though: I am staying at a hotel this time. The same hotel as I stayed at when I first arrived here. It feels a bit strange, thought it is quite familiar to me since I have had business breakfasts and dinner here countless times. But I still want to take a turn on my little street when I walk from the office, and go home to my little house. Actually, guess it is not my little house anymore…
I am here for work, to look into on-going agricultural reforms and my days are thus mainly spent in meetings with counterparts and various stakeholders. But the plan is to take some time in the evenings to hang out with friends. Saturday, I am going on a field trip in the morning to meet with farmers, and in the evening I am going to see a documentary about the children left behind in Moldova, whose parents have moved abroad. It is so good to be back!!
Last weekend was actually quite busy compared with my otherwise tranquillo life in DC. In addition to going to a party, holding a presentation on Moldova for the Romanian Meet-Up Group, working on a background note on Albania and then loosing the document, and exploring my neighborhood, Mr. M and I took a walk in Rock Creek Park. It is one of the main parks in DC and the walk was quite nice. The trail we took actually involved some almost-climbing, but it was still a very urban hike as I managed to balance a frappuccino from Starbucks the whole time (though I did have to put it away in my bag a few times in order to have both hands free when climbing some steep hills). And there was a constant noise from the traffic. It might be as wild as nature gets in DC, but I have to admit that I hope to find a better spot.
My colleague Mr. M and I went and saw Revolutionary Road on Thursday. Being a fan of American Beauty (I know, it’s a bit of a cliché), my expectations were high before going to see Sam Mendes latest. And I was not disappointed. Not at all. But God was I depressed when we left the cinema. I have not read the book so I did not know what to expect really, but I think I thought it would be slightly more uplifting. Instead, it was heavy, heavy, heavy. It was too easy to recognize too many of the sources of their unhappiness for me to distance myself from it properly. But I really recommend it!
For you who have not seen it, the movie is about a couple who when they meet in the 1950s have the idea to just live their lives away from conventions and according to their own wishes. The eternal wish to suck the marrow out of life – to really live and not just let life pass by while adapting to rules that no-one knows who made up. But they get pregnant and end up in Suburbia – she as a housewife and he at job he resents. Many years later, on her initiative, they try to get out of it. They want to go to Paris and just see where life takes them. But their surrounding is sceptical and in the end, breaking up seems too difficult. Because as someone says in the film: Staying in the comfy life is easy, breaking up requires courage. More and more excuses are made up: the children, a good job offer, the necessity of having a nice house to raise a family… They are told that giving up on the stable life just to have time and live is just childish nonsense and not really realistic.
It might be that the movie got to me because this topic of it is basicly the only thing I have thought about since I move over here to Washington. That is, trying to figure out if this life really is for me. Before I came over to DC, I was determined to give it a chance. I felt like it was time to settle down somewhere, like it was the right thing to do at my age. Stop moving around, getting my own place, and getting a normal, adult life. But I had my doubts already on my way over here. I texted Maria S from the business launch at the Vienna airport, expressing my doubts, and she reminded me that Starbucks and Sephora were waiting for me here in DC. But as I wrote back to her, am wondering if I am not more of a 3:rd class train through Siberia-person than Sephora and Starbucks.
So settling in here in the U.S. capital has been surprisingly difficult. I love my apartment but during my first days here, I physically felt like I someone put a rope around my neck every time I walked in through the door. (A symptom of an anxiety attack?) I had an overwhelming feeling of: “This is it. Now the adventure is over!” I hope I am wrong and I am still determined to give DC and the stable life a chance. But if you think that my blog posts have been a bit uninteresting since I moved here, this is the reason. I simply lost some of my inspiration. Fortunately, I really enjoy my job (even though DC sometimes seem very far away from the clients that I work with), and I hope that the more I get into it, the clearer things will get. I also notice that I am less eager to get to know new people now than I was when I moved to Rome and to Chisinau, so from that point of view, it is probably time to stay in one place for a while. I am just not so sure that career-driven Washington DC, the capital of the most consumer-focused country in the world is the right place for me. But I am trying to figure out how to best live my life here. And it was good for me to watch Revolutionary Road and see that I am not the only one questioning these things, even if it sometimes seems like it.
