I’ve been back in America for about 2 weeks. I got home on a Friday the 20th, and ate a big Mexican dinner with my family. I partied on Saturday with a bunch of old friends, and moved up to Fort Collins, Colorado, on Sunday. On Monday, the 23rd, I began life as an official [...]
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Run, Joem. Run. I am mid-sprint through the very end of my Peace Corps service. Here’s the brief break-down: I went camping and took an epic 8 hour hike with Harlem, Morrison, and Miner. We drank cherry liqueur, broke teeth, waded freezing rivers, navigated dense fog, caught 14 trout and collected 3 bags of mushrooms, [...]
Peace Corps has taught me so much– about myself, and about the inherent goodness of humanity in others. But were I to draw my greatest lesson, trait, theme, whatever from these last 27 months it would be this: Peace Corps has taught me how to give. I have been relentlessly blessed by this community I [...]
Harlem and I tried to leave Turkey on Monday, July 26th. The bus website listed the time of departure as 5PM. Thereby, Harlem and I showed up at the respective travel office at around 3:40, PM. When we arrived, the place was dark, and its sliding glass door was opened ever so slightly. Bad omens. [...]
“Yeah, Joem is a little bit of a jabber-mouth.” I turned my head over my shoulder and listened to Zeynep’s voice hum a response to Harlem through the phone. He chuckled. I smiled and looked to my right through the passenger window. This hidden harbor just south of Turnuc, Turkey, was lit by full-moon fire [...]
July 1st marked the first day that members of my Peace Corps group could officially close their service (COS) and return to the US. These first few July days, a few Americans began boarding planes in București to ‘light out’ for new adventures, away from Romania. 30,000 feet below, I stood and watched these planes [...]
I was in București on Monday, the 28th, to put my mother and brother on an airplane to London. Thus culminated a 2-week long family marathon of eating and site-seeing. The visit went well– mom and bro made memories, and flew out feeling fulfilled (and exhausted). After a half a month of playing ‘tour guide,’ [...]
The first of my real Romanian ‘goodbyes,’ began this week: on Wednesday, June 09, I gave away my cat, Cosette. I’ve had Cosette since late September/early October of 2008– just a few weeks after I came to Petrila. Thereby, she has lived with me for about 18 months– from kitten to cat-hood. I gave her [...]
I have a weakness for good denim. I admit it. Before I came to Romania, I spent over $600 dollars on three pairs of jeans. Despite this, I don’t really consider myself a big ‘brand-name,’ guy. I’ll take anything from a second hand-shop (except underwear): jackets, boots, t-shirts, shorts, sheets, even towels. Thankfully, Romanian second-hand [...]
The last month and a half I’ve been sleeping one or two nights per week in a hotel– the HP in nearby Petrosani. Frequenting a hotel with my own place nearby would probably only indicate a few possible scenarios– and most of them dubious. One presumes that either: I’m having an affair, or that my [...]
I love class 8b. They can handle advanced topics, and I never EVER have classroom management problems with them. There’s a reason for this: In a given period, only the same five students will show up for class. These are my English all-stars– they are hard-working, focused, and talented. It’s a crap shoot as to [...]
I haven’t always been kind to Romania’s capital city, București (Buc.), in my past posts. I had found the city unwelcoming, dirty, and over-crowded. Aside from Lipscani, I hadn’t really found any good places to pass time while in the city. Thereby, I made my visits as short as possible, and I made my distaste [...]
Harlem and I had planned to meet our students and Domn E in Medias, on Friday, April 9th. Thus would begin a three day trip with students and teachers from my general school, in Petrila, as well as from Harlem’s industrial high school, in Petrosani.
Harlem and I rolled into the Medias train station a little [...]
A kiss goodbye
abruptly ends at a 3AM cabstand–
hi-jacked by Hemingway’s melodrama
that ruins me somber and wet.
In the frail quiet I fixate
on the distance to all light (left
only in street lamps writing
the bloom of the sleet).
Two terrified vagabonds scream
breaking my mid-street reflection–
they shout at my black shape and
they shriek “VOID” into their colorless world.
You bastard saint [...]
Originally written in April, 2009, but never posted. Re-discovered this afternoon:
To lie down, to slither between
the scattered books of her bed–
and she lies with me and then we face
the same way to read a Rumi poem
taped over the front of our faces.
Our bodies become same– so similar
I could misplace my arms against hers.
Is this the [...]
In the last four weeks, I’ve had the blessed opportunity to travel across an astoundingly large amount of this country– in 30 days I was away from Petrila for 22. I’ve rolled repeatedly on rails through the deep grooves in the Carpathian swoosh that huddles Transylvania into a tight corner on this wild edge of [...]
Our Close of Service (COS) conference was two weeks ago. COS explicitly marks the ‘beginning of the end’ of the Peace Corps experience. At this moment, I have less than three months of teaching to complete, and fewer than six months in Romania, overall. Now, more so than ever, I am astonished by how quickly [...]
I woke up last week and couldn’t remember anything I did last Spring.
I closed my eyes and let my violet aura spiral around against the dim, and tried to think of distinct events that had occurred. Slowly, I recalled the big things– my week long “best vacation ever,” into Ukraine, and an extended weekend trip [...]
Yesterday, I went “spring skiing,” at Straja with Dan (Leddy’s husband).
It’s technically still the end of Winter, but the conditions were kind of crazy– the likes of which I’ve never really seen in all my years of skiing/riding in my home-state of Colorado. The snow was milky, mashed potatoes. The morning began with dark clouds, [...]
I have recently been really digging a Romanian poet, Nichita Stănescu.
Stănescu was one of Romania’s most beloved contemporaries, and a lot of my Romanian friends (young and old, alike) can easily recall at least a few lines of their favorite Stănescu poem upon request. I’ve been strumming through some of Stănescu’s works online, and I [...]
“Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.”
Mark Kurlansky
In Kurlanksy’s sense, what does our American food attitude say about our culture? In the USA, we happily crowd around full tables for common feasts but a few days per year. My favorite holidays were always Thanksgiving, [...]
From January 3oth until February 5th, I spent a week in the city of Istanbul.
It is the unhesitating “you must go there,” place that volunteers talk about, as we serve in Peace Corps Romania. So, because we were obliged, six other volunteers and I took a twelve hour bus ride into Turkey to fulfill a [...]
I’ve written before that Romania’s dark, fog-covered forests seem to me the birth-place of fairy tales. I celebrated New Year’s Eve at a small cabin in a place called Răscoală, which means uprising. Răscoală is a shepherds’ community settled onto a set of small hills underneath some of the biggest peaks in the Carpathians. Miner, [...]
*Warning: Graphic details.
On Thursday, December 17th, Harlem and I took part in a pig slaughter. I woke up at 7:30 in the morning, and reached over my head to touch the slick, ceramic tiles of the ’soba’ behind me. It’s warmth was passing away– the coal and splintered stumps of wood just memories of heat [...]
‘Tis the season for being touched by the Christmas spirit, but, today, I was sort of molested by it. It was unexpected and sudden–I feel dazed.
Fridays are typically my sleep-in day, as I don’t teach until 3PM. I always take my mornings slow–I prepare a big, warm breakfast, and spend about an hour reading blogs [...]
And because I was out late celebrating an American Thanksgiving, I didn’t make it home until almost 4AM. And because I am a little bit of an OCD boy, and I couldn’t get into bed until I had checked my email and washed the dirty dishes in my sink.
I woke up at 10 so I [...]
People say that Thanksgiving eve is the busiest bar night in America. As a once-upon-a-time (and maybe again someday) service industry boy, I can say that this sounds about right–Thanksgiving eve makes twenty-somethings across America get dance-y and make bad decisions.
Last night, I had an American-style Thanksgiving night.
First, Harlem and I went to Ledy and [...]
There are times when our beautiful web of human interaction makes the world seem so tiny and sacred; yesterday was one of those days.
I woke up to receive an email from Amers, one of my dearest, who is in her first year of Teach for America, in Hawaii. Amers had forwarded me “The Road Less [...]
My last few travels through Bucharest (Bucuresti), Romania’s capital, have brought me to what I consider the best place in the city: Lipscani.
Lipscani was the commercial center of Bucuresti during the middle ages, and its glory days continued onwards into the 20th century. All of Bucuresti was heavily bombed by the allies during World War [...]
This semester I’ve started devoting about six hours per week to martial arts. My school’s sport teacher, Domn Cordea, is a black-belt in two disciplines: Judo and Karate. He holds classes for two hours, four times a week. I usually make three out of the four (the other overlaps my late-Friday teaching schedule).
Domn Cordea is [...]
My post “Tattoos” is my most popular Peace Corps blog post, according to my stats page. I’ve realized that most of its hits come from search traffic that include the phrases “Peace Corps,” and “tattoos.” Hence, it seems pretty clear that potential volunteers are sifting through blog pages trying to find some enlightening words regarding [...]
Part of Romania’s uniqueness is the balancing act it plays between its old-world heritages and its simultaneous attempts to step into modernity. However, it’s clear that mentality moves at a slower pace than industrial progress (for better or for worse), and this leads to some interesting hybrids of that ‘old’ and ‘new’. I’ve written about [...]
This weekend, Harlem and I took a trip to Turda to see AMAC and J-dub. I’ve written before that public transportation in Romania is generally the stuff of crazy adventure: characters are met, novel experiences are had, and ‘patience, patience, patience’ becomes my mantra. This trip, however, aside from the typical ‘outside of your comfort [...]
From August 08 to August 09, Parângul Mare loomed over me, from my kitchen window.
It’s the third highest peak in Romania, but I, a self-proclaimed wilds rambler, hadn’t found my way to its summit.
On September 12th, however, I finally found my way there with three other PCVs, and three Romanian friends.
The pictures can be seen [...]
When I left for school this morning, there were three, big, brightly-colored bins lined up in front of my apartment building. They are color coordinated, and there is one for glass, one for paper/cardboard, and one for plastics. These recycling bins have been distributed throughout Petrila as part of a mandatory EU initiative to curb [...]
The sun had only been up an hour, so the shadows were still long and cold as the tiny car bounced along the snaking, dirt road. Speaking Romanian is hard in the early morning, so I tried to stick to specific questions–ones which Doru could answer at length while I sat quietly and listened. As [...]
“Why I Like Peace Corps” reason # eight thousand four hundred and twenty two: it offers bizarre, unexpected moments of deep introspection. For example:
During PST, our language instructors often asked personal questions in efforts to get us to employ such tricky grammatical points as the conditional, or the imperfect. Being the think-too-deep-far-too-intense-at-times dreamer that I [...]
One of my most favoritest things is taking long hikes deep into wild places. I’ve done a few ultra-hikes in England that birthed my love of this sort of thing– sleep in a youth hostel, wake up, eat well, hike all day (seldom stopping), get to a new hostel, eat, wash your socks, repeat.
This past [...]
Two weeks ago, I went to a hotel in a mountain resort town to attend my Mid-Service Conference (MSC), which effectively marks the “one year left” point of my Peace Corps service. It had happy moments–early breakfasts with DP, re-connecting talks with Capsuno and Ben Fren, and arm in arm in arms walking and giggling [...]
In the warm afternoons, I like to take walks through Petrila with VM. VM is a local high school girl, whom I tutored last winter and spring for an national, oral English examination. This fall, VM is headed to the big city for university. She is shy, and soft-spoken, and always encouraging. I will miss [...]
Raw milk is very easy to find, here in Romania. Bunici (grandmas) typically stand on the busy before-noon street corners, and lean against brick walls or warped garden rails. Placed before them are a few ‘recycled’ 2-liter soda bottles filled with warm, raw milk, so white that it glows. If you want the milk, all [...]
These five ‘city posts’ concern a trip I took through central Europe, beginning on July 2nd and ending late in the evening of July 14th.
My brief stay in Vienna felt like my brief stay I once made in San Francisco, when I drove there by myself from Denver. San Francisco was the first time I [...]
I have identified only a single, sort-of-consistent correlation amongst the happy and productive volunteers that I know. This common characteristic is a sense of ‘community’ at site, with host-country colleagues and friends.
Volunteers that feel well integrated are typically the ones that can smile and speak of their service with words like, “love,” “friends,” “happy,” and, [...]
These five ‘city posts’ concern a trip I took through central Europe, beginning on July 2nd and ending late in the evening of July 14th.
Before this trip, I was talking with one of my new favorites, AMAC, about her experiences in Salzburg. “Salzburg is like a fairy-tale,” she said, and so, I rolled into Salzburg [...]
These five ‘city posts’ concern a trip I took through central Europe, beginning on July 2nd and ending late in the evening of July 14th.
I celebrated Prague by enveloping myself in a ridiculous amount of ‘down-time.’
My days were spent dallying, wandering through the tall rafters of English second-hand-book stores. I spent a few hours per [...]
This is the sudden epiphany that over-rushed me as I stood near the Frauenkirch, in Dresden 1. Please read it first. This will then make more sense.
“I can hear the world is whispering–and it is whispering this:
As a race, we are capable of both rise and fall. Look here at this city–it is symbol of [...]
For all of our Peace Corps related training events, we have ‘Travel Days’ immediately before and after. They are appropriately named, as it takes a little while to maneuver around Romania if you don’t have a personal vehicle.
Today, for example, I hopped onto a Bîrlad bus at 5:45 AM (in the east, about two hours [...]
These five ‘city posts’ concern a trip I took through central Europe, beginning on July 2nd and ending late in the evening of July 14th.
I’d always wanted to visit Dresden.
As a sworn student of American literature, the stuff of Kurt Vonnegut has been influential in my life. I wanted to see the the place where [...]
These five ‘city posts’ concern a trip I took through central Europe, beginning on July 2nd and ending late in the evening of July 14th.
I spent July 2nd in Bucuresti, as my begin-by-Berlin flight left at around seven in the morning. The “traveling-through” problem of Bucuresti was heavy on my mind–the airports frown upon sleep [...]
What the almond eaters tasted
was good silence.
Then the dark dried around him,
and dried into this dream:
Demons in deserts where we hang
to rusted trains and pray
to a memory of us
as the little idols.
In the same movement is sacrifice
of the wagons back, and let survive the rest,
but one woman is still snatched
screaming–then eaten alive.
Prometheus, the sleeper,
the sniper [...]
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