Spring is coming to Pitesti. So says the calendar and all the flowers we keep getting--but actually it was mild today, sixty two degrees at the warmest. Cool waking up weather.
Was reading Flannery O'Connor earlier which always makes me want to write. It makes me think of a friend I had in college and a precarious situation I found myself in this summer, one that still recalls yellow light and yellow wine. And anyway this weather reminds me of German summer. Standing between two blocs a few minutes ago looking up could have been the line of sky we followed through the woods and home.
We'd missed the last tram at nearly midnight--I hope I haven't written about this already--and what had already been a full and lively night became an adventure too. Since the tram didn't follow the streets and we weren't sure how to get back to where we were staying, we decided to follow the tracks, half of the twenty minute ride through the woods.
So we were blind for minutes, holding on to each other, walking in a line, singing out in all different languages. And then the tram appeared coming from the other direction and we had to hide in the trees, crouched down while it cut a line of light in the darkness. I don't think you walk away from something like that in East Germany without becoming thoughtful, without suddenly realizing you probably aren't the first to hide there hoping to go unnoticed.
Once it passed we were blind again, the sky the brightest thing by far, floating voices giving the only dimension not on the vertical. In the end we made it out. Wide smiles flung all between us, already remembering.
That's it, really. It was the first weekend and I was trying to pace myself so I went to bed, half the others obschatsya-ing. (I think it is this word in Russian: общаться. We made our own meaning out of the one we learned, and so for us it meant how we spent our evenings: hanging out, talking while drinking beer/wine.)
Anyway, just thinking. Spring number three, Romanian Spring the familiar one now, moderate continental weather. One of those nights miles away in it.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
article
From this article:
"Your parents might have decided to move into the neighborhood you grew up in as a kid, but Paul told the Athenians you got there because God appointed it as the time and dwelling place for you to live and reach out to find him as the source of your life. This is not a denial of human responsibility or the contingency of history, but a reminder that in biblical thought, contingency and freedom are ultimately realities that are upheld, sustained, and governed by God’s fatherly hand. The point is that God was no more caught off-guard by Ishmael’s birth than by Isaac's."
"Your parents might have decided to move into the neighborhood you grew up in as a kid, but Paul told the Athenians you got there because God appointed it as the time and dwelling place for you to live and reach out to find him as the source of your life. This is not a denial of human responsibility or the contingency of history, but a reminder that in biblical thought, contingency and freedom are ultimately realities that are upheld, sustained, and governed by God’s fatherly hand. The point is that God was no more caught off-guard by Ishmael’s birth than by Isaac's."
Saturday, February 23, 2013
ten things i learned in the last ten days
1. The way to beat jet-lag is drugs. Let's say you're prescribed muscle relaxers and pain killers due to some recent bumps and bruises and let's say their effect on you is to make you floppy and then to pass out. You'll sleep all the way across the Atlantic, through your layover and your next flight and then after making it all the way home, you'll sleep during the night like you're supposed to. Normally I can't take that stuff because it makes me so loopy but I'm telling you, nicest flight ever.
2. If you haven't regularly spoken a language in a good while and have forgotten a few random words, when you relearn the word in a third language (and accompany it with a grinning almost-three-year-old who's got it stuck all over his face), it'll become the better word. Rice became orez and is now pilav.
3. Speaking of language-learning, I knew this one already, but if you get stuck in an apartment (the good kind of stuck) with two people, one big and one itty bitty, the itty bitty with more English than the big one, you will learn quick. Well, relative to what you knew before, anyway. Beautiful to listen to, and nearly incomprehensible to me, which means I can still listen to the music of it.
4. If you ask for 800 grams of pistachios instead of 1000, you will get laughed at.
5. If you get a freakish swollen throat for the space of thirty six hours and then fly with it, something that I think is called your eustachian tube will close up (or get stuck open?) and your ear will feel like it's going to explode mid-flight. Not so fun.
6. Izmir is a crazy beautiful city. And I'm no food expert, but that was really really good too.
7. The call to prayer also sounds beautiful.
8. Fifty minutes is not enough time to make a connection at Sabiha Gokcen in Istanbul on a Friday night. Don't try it. You'll need miracles to get through, and you may get them, but it's frazzling.
9. Leaving a country where you don't know the language and coming back into one that you do still know but used to be as foreign as the other is a unique and wonderful feeling. Who would have ever guessed two years ago that hearing Romanian again I'd relax and be relieved and feel at home in a language I know. It's all relative, I suppose. Grateful for this one.
10. Number ten would be the one where I say something icky about why I was there in the first place and how that went, something that I learned. There was certainly plenty, I will say that. And plenty more, from the looks of things... :)
2. If you haven't regularly spoken a language in a good while and have forgotten a few random words, when you relearn the word in a third language (and accompany it with a grinning almost-three-year-old who's got it stuck all over his face), it'll become the better word. Rice became orez and is now pilav.
3. Speaking of language-learning, I knew this one already, but if you get stuck in an apartment (the good kind of stuck) with two people, one big and one itty bitty, the itty bitty with more English than the big one, you will learn quick. Well, relative to what you knew before, anyway. Beautiful to listen to, and nearly incomprehensible to me, which means I can still listen to the music of it.
4. If you ask for 800 grams of pistachios instead of 1000, you will get laughed at.
5. If you get a freakish swollen throat for the space of thirty six hours and then fly with it, something that I think is called your eustachian tube will close up (or get stuck open?) and your ear will feel like it's going to explode mid-flight. Not so fun.
6. Izmir is a crazy beautiful city. And I'm no food expert, but that was really really good too.
7. The call to prayer also sounds beautiful.
8. Fifty minutes is not enough time to make a connection at Sabiha Gokcen in Istanbul on a Friday night. Don't try it. You'll need miracles to get through, and you may get them, but it's frazzling.
9. Leaving a country where you don't know the language and coming back into one that you do still know but used to be as foreign as the other is a unique and wonderful feeling. Who would have ever guessed two years ago that hearing Romanian again I'd relax and be relieved and feel at home in a language I know. It's all relative, I suppose. Grateful for this one.
10. Number ten would be the one where I say something icky about why I was there in the first place and how that went, something that I learned. There was certainly plenty, I will say that. And plenty more, from the looks of things... :)
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