Monasteries

As I promised, the post about our visit to three monasteries in Moldova. By now this trip happened several weeks ago, but I have pictures that are asking to be posted. Also, I should preempt this post with a short history lesson:

Moldova has their own version of George Washington, and his name was Stephan cel Mare or Stephan the Great (Prince and Saint). He lived about 1450-1500 and fought to keep Moldova independent of the many other empires in the area. As you can guess, he fought a lot of battles, and he actually won a lot of them. As I understand it, after each battle that he won he would build a church or monastery in Moldova. So as a result there are a lot of (very beautiful) churches and monasteries dotting the country.

This is the first one we visited:

There was a modern church with an older one behind it being restored. Some volunteers, myself included, went into the basement/sanctuary of the older one to find some sort of a service in progress. The nuns there were singing in a choir, the music was very beautiful, and people were lighting candles in the dim light under paintings of saints. I was able to catch a couple of pictures of the nuns. I'm not sure what the difference in their habits are, but I think it is the older women who wear the ones in the second picture.

Also, if you happened to forget to wear a skirt that day, you could borrow one from where they were selling headscarves. Our language professor said that women are supposed to wear headscarves in order to discourage them from wearing fancy hairstyles at church.


The second monastery we visited was very nice. Here we met up with some guys from the capital (that spoke English) and told us they biked out there that day. I'm not sure where this monastery was, so I'm not sure how long of a bike ride it was, but good on them. Here I was able to snap a picture of some priests or monks, not entirely sure which they are. This monastery also had beautiful art inside.





This is the last one we visited and was also the one with the least amount of reconstruction done to it. You can see some scaffolding on the right side of the first picture. The second picture is of a nun manning the shop. Most monasteries here has some sort of a little shop where people can buy candles to light, cross necklaces, holy water, pictures of saints and the such.




Outside the grounds were a little worse for wear. It looked like not much landscaping had been done in a while here, while the first two monasteries had very lovely gardens. There was also one lonely headstone; I can't help but wonder who it belongs to.
There was also a gazebo/well with some art painted on the ceiling. You can see Mary holding baby Jesus. Now what I think is interesting is that Renaissance painters would paint children with adult proportions (whereas in real life babies have giant heads, just ask any woman who has given birth, they'll attest to this). In this picture you can see that baby Jesus has these adult proportions. Also in the gazebo we were given bread by some random guy who then walked off (we did eat the bread, we were all pretty hungry by then) and got a history lesson from a random theology student, who confirmed that this monastery was from the Renaissance era.



A lot of the churches and monasteries in Moldova are under reconstruction. During the Soviet era they were either boarded up and left abandoned or used for some other purpose. I can understand how some aspects of communism might work in theory, but I'll never understand why some people think it is okay to strip others of their religions and individuality.

Alright, so here you have some gorgeous pictures. Enjoy.

This will be really funny in about two years

For the last two weeks the health trainees have had practice school. Last Saturday some of us in Rusestii Noi decided to go to Bardar to hang out with the rest of the health trainees and have some pizza and drinks. By the way, pizza here usually comes with mayo on it. Not sure why. Anyway, it came time for us to leave and it came down to we had to walk back to our village.

This didn't seem so bad at the beginning of the trip. We had an older volunteer with us and there was allegedly a path between the two villages that took about 30 minutes to walk. So we set out, got some directions from some locals and found the path.
Or so we thought.

First the path ended in a gate that we thought was locked, but Mia discovered was not by simply pushing on it. So we continued along the path that probably had been somebody's driveway, but we kept walking anyway not really realizing this. After going for a bit more Jessica promptly fell in a ditch. There was a fence on the other side so we got her out of it and the rest of us hopped over. All except for Ahmad (our older volunteer/ male escort for the evening) who also fell in the ditch and then asked "Why is this so hard?" We all climbed over the fence with each others' help (good job team) and continued along the semi-path.

Which promptly ended as a corn field.

We could see the street and cars across the field, but there was absolutely no way through it. So after back-tracking two more times and Jessica falling in another ditch we found what we all figured was probably one of the streams that runs through our village and decided to follow it. This involved fording it, and it was mostly a muddy sink hole. So those of us in back learned from the troubles of those in front and took off our shoes so as not to loose them in this gigantic mud puddle. Mia's shoes were pretty much eaten by the thing and, while she got them back, she was not able to wear them for most of the rest of the trip. While I was crossing the river/ mud some plant decided to have a disagreement with me and ripped into my arm. I'd say it was a similar experience to when I had that nail go through my foot. 1/3 surprise, 1/3 frustration, 1/3 actual physical pain. I don't know how the other girls who walked though the field of thorns barefoot did it, but kudos to them.

Long story short, when we started to see discarded beer bottles on the ground we knew we were getting close to something. I had never before been so excited about trash. That something turned out to be the actual path we should have started on in the first place. We made it back to town, washed ourselves off at the school well, and all got home about an hour and a half later than we planed.

Good times. Kind of.