Wednesday, December 26, 2012

"Mica," the Little One



I first saw her as I was leaving Church one Sunday; she was waiting outside the chapel, hopeful that someone inside would give her something to eat {I suspect the children had already given her some cookie crumbs so her chances were pretty good}. For some reason, she decided she liked me a lot and started following me around as we waited for some friends to come out. She had these horrible crumpled legs, and the worst doggie-dandruff I had ever seen, but she was so, so sweet. It was difficult to part with her, but we left her there because we assumed that her owner lived in the house nearby. But I couldn’t get her gentle little face off my mind the whole week so the next Sunday, I was determined to find out if she, in fact, had an owner and if said owner was properly taking care of her.

After Church, she was there again, and we were able to con our Pastor into talking to a woman who appeared to be the owner in Russian {that’s all she spoke} who turned out was not, but informed us that her name was Jasmin, and that she did have an owner whom we’d likely be able to convince to part with her.  Ownership here, it seems, is a bit of a loose concept that sadly applies to more than just dogs. That being said, that guy wasn’t around and I was told to try coming back a different day.

Our snowy street...

As with Ronald, I can’t say reason had anything to do with my decision to pick up a  little puppy from the cold, wintry streets of Chisinau. We did have a friend who mentioned she was sort of hoping to get a dog at some point, although she wasn’t sure she was ready for one. After happening to notice that the forecast for the week would be down in the single digits and banking on the fact that our friend would take her in, I got in my car the next day and drove straight to where we’d last seen her. I found a guard whom I tried to speak to {in a funny mess of words I like to pretend were intelligible Romanian}, asking if I could take the puppy home. After disappearing into another room and having a  conversation I could overhear but not understand, he said she was mine for the taking. I went out there and found her shivering, wet & cold. To say she was relieved is a bit of an understatement: she greatly welcomed snuggling in my lap, in a warm, dry car as we drove home.

In my lap on our way home...

I arrived home with her, much to Ronald’s chagrin, who was indignant {of course} at my betrayal which I had just brought in our home in my arms. She immediately got a warm bath and got wrapped up in one of Ronald’s towels {shhhh, don’t tell him!}, then ate some of his food, drank out of his water bowl, and even got to sit in our recliner {which he secretly sits in when we’re not looking because he knows he’s not supposed to}.  

In the tub...
All clean!
Sitting pretty in Ronald's Recliner...










We re-named her Mica, Romanian for “little one,” that night, with our friends who came over to see her. It seemed fitting for such a sweet little girl.

While in much better shape than when I originally found her, she still had some issues; a bloated belly, crazy dandruff, and what we discovered is a condition known as “knuckling over”, so I took her to the vet the next day. Aside from the aforementioned issues, he was under the impression she was in pretty good health. The knuckling over often happens in large breeds of dogs or in dogs that are undernourished, but this vet was under the impression that in addition to lacking some key nutrients, since Mica was of mixed parents, she ended up having the front legs of one breed and the back legs of another which could be an added cause for the knuckling over. I hadn’t thought of that {or even knew it to be possible} but when I took a closer look, her front legs were quite different than the back ones and they were probably growing all disproportionately.



He gave me some vitamins to strengthen her little muscles and bones, a de-worming pill and told me the dandruff issue should go away with the improved nutrition but that I could continue to give her baths with doggie shampoo to help. Over the next few days she improved tremendously, was very playful and spent the majority of her time trying to get Ronald to play with her. He's never seemed like more of a grumpy old man than when around her, but I think he forgets that he used to be that way too. When I first got him our family dog White Sox was still around, although pretty old by dog standards (17 years!) and she needed all the help she could get to stand up and walk around. Ronald rudely ignored this by eating all of her beds and knocking her over with his "cone of shame". 









He may be justified in not being pumped about Mica since she decided that the best place to go to the bathroom was Ronald’s favorite bed…so we’re working on that.

Not amused.
Little presents for Ronald, love, Mica.

He has comes to terms with her though...


She follows him around and mimics him sometimes...


After staying with us for a few days, our friend decided to take her home for a test run at doggie-parenting to see if she could handle taking care of her and work full-time. Mica had a good time over there...

Sleeping in Hannah's arms...
Snuggling...

She’ll make her final decision once she returns from her Christmas vacation, so in the meantime, Mica is back with us! 










Monday, December 17, 2012

Things I Took for Granted About America


Sometimes it takes being away from home to appreciate little things that used to make your life better without you even knowing it. I have compiled a short list of some of those things for your amusement…

Eggs. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors and levels of cleanliness here, all in the same carton. I’m not one to really care if my eggs are a bit dirty or pooped on, it kind of gives them a rustic feel in a way...which I suppose is part of their earthy charm, but the size thing can lead to complications. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if I were just planning on making omelettes all the time, but when it comes to baking, where precision is a bit more essential, it kind of makes a difference if the recipe calls for 2 eggs and one is giant and the other tiny. I may have to start weighing my eggs…



“Normal-sized” Ovens. It’s kind of a kick in the pants when you discover that half of your baking pans won’t fit in your “European-size” oven. It is also a sad realization when you discover that your oven is smarter than you and you can’t figure out how to make it work on 90% of the settings it has available {why in the world you would need so many is beyond me}, distinguishable only through little unintelligible drawings. This, in turn, forces you to bake everything on the convection setting, thwarting half of your recipes in the process.

Legible Street Signs and Visible Road Markings. In Moldova, if street signs even exist they are often attached to the buildings, and if you're lucky they're actually on the corner building. This, of course, is not generally the case and even when they are there it's not like they're made out of the fancy reflecting material that the signs are made out of back home making it all but impossible to find your way around at night (or during the day for that matter). As far as the Road Markings go, if you're out driving when it's raining or at night, or any time of the day, really, it's also pretty indistinguishable where your lane ends or starts, where pedestrians can cross or anything like that, which adds to the element of surprise while driving around these parts. I tell you what, I have never been more grateful for my little Google Tablet with Google Maps which magically shows me where I am going. 

Emissions Testing. Back home, every time I would receive a notice in the mail about having to have my car tested for emissions my first reaction was always a big groan, then annoyance, then a pending feeling of dread, followed by generalized grumbling and grumpiness until I finally got my act together and took the stupid car to get tested. The grumbling may or may not have continued even after I took it in, accompanied by an air of resigned indignance and defeat. The humanity! All that to say, when you are stuck in traffic here behind a rusty old soviet car emitting toxic gases into your car and nostrils, from which you can’t really escape, you start to recognize there might be some value in having emissions standards.

Seedless/Boneless things. Grapes, cherries {inside pies, specifically, where you would never expect to find a giant cherry pit}, watermelons, limes, fish, chicken, etc. There’s nothing like being surprised by bones or seeds in places where you didn’t expect them…I’m just saying, you should consider yourself lucky to be in America when it comes to eating potentially pokey food items.


Credit Cards. Those things {for better or for worse} are soooo easy to use in America. Everywhere. For everything. While credit cards are accepted here in some places, it is generally advisable to use cash instead for most, if not all, purchases. Getting enough cash out in limited quantities at a time can be tricky around here, especially if you don’t want to pay what Michael Ball has termed “idiot taxes” like the international transaction fees that banks insist upon charging you overseas. Also, when you attempt to pay with a credit card, they tend to look at you, incredulously, like you’re some kind of a nutjob when you try to explain to them that in America one does not need {or even have} a pin number for a credit card, that they are only used for debit cards, and that you are, in fact, not weird or inept for not having one.

Light Switches being in reasonable places. Don’t know how this ended up happening, but the light switches here are in curious places. They mostly like to put them in really inconvenient places like outside of rooms, or on the complete opposite side of the house. In some older apartments {I have been told} they are located up high on the walls {like 5-6 feet high}, while in others, perfectly placed at kid-height so that if there are any little kids present they can wreak havoc have a good time pressing all of them and in the process “turning off” your garage door, unbeknownst to you, leaving your car trapped in the driveway and rendering your clicker useles, forcing you to scramble to find other means of transportation because you were unaware that it was even possible for your garage door to be “turned off”. 

Monday, December 10, 2012

Șapte Case


Back in September when Michael Ball & I first went to Bucharest, a few short days after arriving at post, I was so jet-lagged and flustered on the road that I didn’t really take in all the sights along the way. A combination of having a terrible rental car that made it exceedingly difficult to pass even the slowest horse-drawn cart, having to adapt to the crazy Romanian-style of driving, trying not to get lost and a lack of sleep and general disorientation rendered that voyage useless in terms of enjoyment.

Moldovan country side in the Fall...
Moldovan country side in the Winter... 

It’s amazing how much a few months and a functional vehicle can change your perspective. This past week I drove to Bucharest for the second time, and the experience was completely different. You might be wondering why anyone {in their right mind} would make a 7 hour trip on a Wednesday and return immediately, the following day. Well, for those of you who know me well it should seem perfectly normal and come as no surprise that the main reason I went on such a crazy road trip was to give two Brazilian soccer stars who play for the Dacia Chisinau Soccer Team a ride to the airport in Bucharest. It's a good thing Brazilians, in general, are pretty well-liked around these parts of the world and even more so when they are soccer players, because it made crossing the border a piece of cake. I just had to drop the "oh, they're Brazilian Soccer Players" line and the customs officials were totally won over, otherwise they might have thought it strange for an American girl to be driving two foreign dudes across the border into Romania. For the record, I did also have a few other {legitimate} things to take care of while in Bucharest; places to go {IKEA, Starbucks, H&M, an Indian Restaurant}, people to see, you know, perfectly rational reasons to go on a mega road trip by yourself, mid-week, to a foreign land. I'm always surprised how comforting having a sense of familiarity can be. Even though I actually never spent much time at IKEA, Starbucks or H&M in the US, something about those places in a strange location makes you feel at home and draws you to them. When I lived in Cuba for 4 months I remember really longing for something {anything} that reminded me of home {we have a little embargo going on so finding American products is pretty difficult}. The day I found Brazilian Chocolates at the local ice cream parlor I nearly shouted for joy, instead, I barely composed myself and restrained myself to purchasing all of their on-hand stock. 



While dining at said Indian Restaurant {with an Indian friend} we struck up a conversation with another guest who also happened to be Indian who was shocked to discover that my husband was OK with me driving by myself with two Brazilian Soccer stars to Bucharest. He was under the impression that Michael Ball should be entitled to give a ride to two Moldovan Super Models in exchange. 

After I had packed up my car with IKEA goodies, leftover Indian food and Dutch cheese from the Christmas Market, I hit the road and headed back to Moldova. The solitary ride home was actually quite enjoyable. At every turn there were scenic views of horse-drawn carts cutting across hazy hills, giant medieval-looking carts piled high with cabbage, Orthodox Churches dotting every tiny town along the way. The landscape would change every so often from bright green fields of winter wheat to brown wintry plots grazed by sheep, vigilantly watched by their shepherds. Vendors along the road were selling potatoes, onions, cabbage and "must" {aka young wine} in plastic bottles of ambiguous and suspicious character. It had snowed in the region to the east of Bucharest and in Moldova overnight, and everything was covered in a thin, beautiful layer of white. I so wanted to stop around every bend and try to capture all these scenes but the roads in Romania don't usually have a shoulder and stopping could lead to serious consequences. I did manage to snap a few along a lonely stretch of road in Moldova...




My favorite village along the way was a town called Șapte Case, literally, "Seven Houses." I counted them by the way, and there were closer to 12 but who's really keeping track of these things? When you enter the town there is a little sign with the town's name and a reduced speed limit. Typically in Romanian & Moldovan villages there is a well at one end of town or the other, beautifully decorated and made of carved wood; often painted blue. When you exit the town {less than 30 seconds later} there is another sign with an increased speed limit and the town's name with a red line going through it {in case you didn't put two and two together and figure out that you were out of the town already}. Șapte Case perfectly captures the region, a tiny little cluster of homes, surrounded by fields of fertile soil, with a road cutting right through the middle and not much else. There was something that struck me as quaint about it: Simplicity in it's purest form. 

My goal is to spend at least a little more than a day in Bucharest on our next trip there and do more than just eat exotic foods and shop for familiarity's sake...which will probably have to wait till the spring, after the treacherous wintry road conditions are long gone. 

Monday, November 19, 2012

At Post for 2 months...and counting...

Well, two months have come and gone and today I find myself on a gloomy & gray foggy day trying to come up with something interesting to write about. But you see, after the newness of a place wears off it turns out you just revert back to "doing" your normal life and there is nothing particularly glamourous about normal life.

Things like taking your car to the mechanic to get the crack in your windshield repaired {and embarrassing the kind man from the embassy who agreed to accompany you by driving like a crazy foreign lady} just don't seem that noteworthy or blog-worthy.

Lookout!

We kept spotting this type of decal on the backs of cars, or round yellow ones with exclamation marks in the middle which we discovered were designed to alert other drivers as to who's behind the wheel: either new drivers or women or some hybrid of the two. Hilarious. I thought about getting one for myself...

Attempting to mow your lawn which has bushes and plants very inconveniently placed so that your mower doesn't actually fit, therefore forcing you to try to cut most of it with an edge trimmer, then being accused by your {deadbeat} husband that it looks like you gave your grass a "bad haircut" is just not the kind of thing your friends back home are dying to read about.

So you can understand why I have abstained from writing for so long...who really wants to know that you've spent the last 5 weeks getting owned by the Insanity Workout DVD's and are currently procrastinating from doing it by writing this blog entry?

While still on relatively boring topics, the rest of our shipment arrived this past week and while unpacking boxes containing all your belongings may seem exhilarating at first, you very quickly realize you own way too much junk for your own good and spend half the time you're unloading grumbling to yourself and making little promises to yourself {which you secretly know you won't actually keep} that you will downsize before your next move {or else!} But it is nice to finally have things like my mixer and all of my spices/extracts so I can finally get to cooking the exotic things I like.

Seriously though, I do spend some of my time doing interesting things. We went to the Marine Ball two weekends ago which was, actually, glamourous. People got super dressed up and it made me really thankful that I had found a fancy schmancy dress on sale back home a few months ago. It was really fun!

Ronald didn't get to come to the Ball...

This past week I spent some time with some visitors from the US and got to visit a few orphanages with them in the countryside {including one for deaf children}, a soup kitchen for the elderly and a pasta factory in a tiny town in Southern Moldova, almost at the Black Sea. Back in the capital, we spent some time at a rehabilitation home for girls who had been rescued from trafficking and brainstormed various projects for providing employment to women who were rescued or who are at-risk of being trafficked, or re-trafficked as is tragically the case here. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos on these trips and the warmth of the lovely people I met doesn't really transfer well into writing, my apologies. You'll just have to stay tuned for more developments on that front...


Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Our First Official Visitor

Since I last posted, my mom came and went {is actually in transit as I write, having to take a convoluted itinerary home due to Hurricane Sandy} and was officially our first visitor. Luckily, she's up for almost anything and is quite the adventuresome 63-year old Brazilian lady...she even brought me cheese from the Dutch Cheese Factory near her home in Costa Rica!

Mom & me at Orhei Vechi, a historical monastery carved into caves on a cliff.

We took her to a soccer game, the ballet, some historical sites, a few good parks, a few good restaurants, a couple of museums, Malldova {yes, the mall here is called Malldova}, Church, visited the Piața Centrală {the central market which, according to the Moldovans, was too crazy to take anyone there, much less my Mom--we survived just fine for the record}, we handed out candy to all the Embassy kids for Halloween and somehow even managed to get ourselves invited over to our pastor's home for an authentic Moldovan meal which was delicious.

Unfortunately, we never made it to a winery...it was in the plans but we had some technical difficulties so she'll just have to go next time!

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Spare Time

Some of you might wonder what in the world I do with my "spare time" here.

Well, for starters I have been reading more than I had been able to before we moved. I just finished an awesome book about Wal-Mart written by a few AEI Scholars, The Prodigal God by Tim Keller and am just about done with a book about Sex-Trafficking. Next on the list: The Brothers Karamazov & The Master & His Emissary.

As you might imagine, figuring out how to do life in Moldova takes up some of my time, more than one would suspect it would take, but it has been enjoyable.

But if you are on Pinterest at all, you have probably figured out that I spend half my time pinning mostly mouth-watering photos of food {and you may have also been growing concerned for me and the state of my mental health}. I would like to explain myself: it's not entirely that I am some sort of crazy food-obsessed person or that the food here is so terrible that I have to spend my free time daydreaming about delicacies {it isn't, it's pretty decent albeit limited in variety}, my obsessive-compulsive pinning actually serves two main purposes: culinary inspiration {for personal & professional reasons} & photographic inspiration {for personal & professional reasons}. Right before we left, I picked up a book on food photography, some software {that has yet to arrive} & I also downloaded a digital photography course in my attempt to accomplish one of my goals: to become a better photographer. And why not pick one of my favorite things ever {i.e. eating/making/drooling over amazing food} as a test subject?

Here is attempt #1, the "before" photo {I will post "after" photos once I am able to complete the aforementioned training}:

Pumpkin Cupcakes

Of course, in order to practice taking beautiful photos, I need to practice making delicious-looking food. So here is my bucket list of things to attempt to make {& photograph}:

  • Homemade Marshmallows {torched in certain dishes for special effect}.
Chocolate Marshmallows

  • Crackers. Good ones, with fancy herbs and whatnot.
Graham Crackers
Martha Stewart Sesame Crackers
Honey, Thyme & Sea Salt Flatbreads

  • Gourmet Pizza Crust. Maybe even on the grill.
Blackberry & Fennel

  • Pie & by default awesome pie crust. Can you believe I've never made a pie crust before? And I call myself some kind of baker...it's embarrassing, really.
Perfect
Cake-in-a-Jar

  • Ice Cream. Because I am a true "Scott" at heart and by blood: my great-great-grandparents used to run an ice cream shop in Mt. Healthy, OH, back in the day when they cut giant chunks of ice out of the lake to put in their "Ice Boxes". Also, I read in some culinary magazine that homemade/artisanal ice cream was the next big thing, so it is only reasonable to experiment with this.
Book
Blackberry Ice Cream

  • Fancy finger foods for all my entertaining needs.
F-A-N-C-Y 
Mushroom Tartlets

  • Homemade Artisanal Bread. Already have 3 books coming in the mail on this subject.

Sourdough
Tartine Bakery

  • Vegetable "Chips" of all kinds {Kale, Beet, Zucchini, Apple, etc.}
Beet Chips

  • Reductions of all sorts. Mostly Balsamic...since I burnt the whole batch on my first attempt...
Balsamic Reduction

  • Something with Figs. Anything with figs. I don't even like figs that much but they look so pretty and taste great when in cahoots with salty things and gorgonzola cheese.
Fig Tart

  • Cakes & more precisely, fancier ways of decorating them.
Oooooh...

  • Good corn tortillas from "scratch", my first attempt was mediocre...
  • Experiment with Panko Bread Crumbs.
Panko Crusted Shrimp

  • Thai/Asian Dishes of all sorts.
Thai Green Curry
Lettuce Wraps

  • Tarts. Croissants. Anything puffy and buttery.
Asparagus & Gruyere
Puff

  • Canning. Awesome produce is available here but on a very limited time frame...so I have to learn to stock up and salvage what I can for the wintry months.
Step by Step
Sour Cherry Jam

  • Let me add that I would have an entire section dedicated solely to avocados and another one to fancy cheese probably {maybe even crazily trying to make my own}, but those two things seem to be a little tough to come by in these parts of the world. I have found avocados but they were utterly disappointing and tasted really funky for lack of a better term. I'd rather have none than subject myself to those. The cheese here is OK, there's just not a great variety.