Day 327 - Christmas Around the World, Part I

I always found a way to celebrate Christmas while I lived overseas, although I often had to do without the little things that I associate with that holiday. Little things like Christmas trees. And lights. And lefse. And while my biological family was not with me for any of my around-the-world Christmases, I usually had a stand-in family until I got my own family - Alex and his son.

Iranian Christmas Tree

My first Christmas in Iran was colder and bleaker than many I had spent in Minnesota because my roommate Annie and I had moved from our second floor apartment above our landlord's home to a third floor unit in a building with nine apartments. That apartment had central heating, but that didn't mean it was warm. In spite of all that I had learned in science classes about heat rising, the heat in that building seemed to hover right around the ground floor.

There was a doctor's office in the ground floor and we understood that the doctor wanted the temperature in his office to be comfortable for his patients. I don't recall what his specialty was, but it seemed to Annie and me that his patients must not have had to take off many clothes to be examined. Our apartment was so cold that I used to keep my clothes on the top of the bedclothes so I could drag them under the covers in order to dress to avoid having to put my feet onto the cold floor.

We had no tree that first year. Instead, a small evergreen plant that a boyfriend who turned out not to be so reliable had given me served as our holiday tree.

The second year in Iran, Christmas coincided with the most inexplicable Shi'ite holiday of them all, Ashura. That meant everything was closed for Christmas: restaurants, theaters, night clubs, everything that might be construed as providing entertainment. We could get together in our homes, but we had to be careful not to be overheard. I also learned about the difference in the Orthodox calendar which is about two weeks behind our calendar. So while Christmas coincided with Ashura for us, there was another opportunity to observe Christmas just around the corner, on January 7.

I spent that Christmas with my surrogate family - Patty, Cheryl, Neal, Shirley, and Maureen. There may have been others there as well, but those five were the core for me. We exchanged gifts, but mostly for the fun of watching one another open them. For example, Patty received a bottle of White Out because we all knew her alter-ego, Patty Black, who appeared after a few drinks and whose tongue had an acid edge to it. But we loved both Patties and had a good laugh when she opened the package.

by  Resident on Earth 

The following year, I was in Romania where it seemed inevitable that all the foreign lecturers would go somewhere else for Christmas and New Year. Since two of my friends from Iran, Bill and Shellagh, were living in Paris, that is where I headed. Some may claim April is Paris is the best time to be there, but Christmas in Paris is pretty magical.

I saw the Eiffel Tower, Cathédrale Notre Dame, la Basilique du Sacré Coeur de Montmartre, Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, all on the list of the top 10 must-see sights of Paris. Another couple from Iran joined us for Christmas dinner, extending my pleasant experiences of Iran and helping me push away the unpleasant memories.

Next stop: Germany. While Christmas in Paris was magical, Christmas markets in Germany are enchanting. They are a little like a carnival fair with plenty of hawkers selling items such as scarf rings, hand-held vacuum cleaners, and silver polish, but there are so many wonderful and colorful things to see and food and drink to smell and consume that the commercial side isn't distracting. Since my household effects hadn't arrived yet by Christmas, I didn't have my usual Christmas decorations to put up in my apartment. After a couple of afternoons wandering through the Christmas market, I decided I had to have a tree. I bought a very small pine tree and then stocked up on wooden ornaments from the market to fill it with jewels.

by  mv_touristboard  I also was introduced to the Wichtel, Germany's secret Santa, although sometimes a Wichtel is known to play tricks, not just give gifts. My Wichtel must have known my household effects hadn't arrived because I got more and more ornaments for my tree throughout the days leading up to Christmas, My second Christmas in Germany was spent in England where friends from Romania, Gayle and Roger, lived. In addition to getting an introduction to life in England, Gayle and Roger introduced me to their other houseguest, a teacher from China on an exchange program in England for a few months. Having her with us as we traveled in their neighborhood was a good balance for my observations. Every time I noticed something, such as how small many of the homes in England are, she observed the opposite from her Chinese viewpoint, that homes in England are large. She helped keep things in perspective.

Roger let Gayle and me pick out the Christmas tree that year. We got one just the right height, but it had a kink not noticeable from the angle we looked when picking it out, making it lean over ever so slightly.

PJ and Heather in front; Sandra, Zofia, Pete,
and Marge in back

My first Christmas in Doha was spent with my surrogate family in that country: Pete, Zofia and their children PJ and Heather, and Marge. We played Pictionary and I couldn't believe how well those kids understood one another without words. PJ would scribble something on a paper and Heather would announce the word on the first guess. If they were cheating, I never figured out how.

By the second Christmas in Doha, I had met Alex, but he flew back to England to be with his son. I knew they planned to travel through Scotland so when I heard about Pan Am Flight 103 crashing over Lockerbie, I was frantic to know where they were. Alex didn't think to call to let me know they were fine, although on Christmas Day when I was at the house of our friends Alex and Jean, he called five times just to be sure I was OK and we were having a good time.

That's what happens when a telephone guy goes on vacation - he makes phone calls home all the time, except when I want to hear from him.

Day 249 - Perspective Matters

Image of Novi Sad, Voivodina, Yugoslavia,
the city I visited in Yugoslavia in 1976, by P Donovan
via Flickr.com

In the spring of 1976, I traveled from Tehran to Yugoslavia to visit a friend. On my return from Belgrade to Athens by train, I shared a compartment with a young American woman who had traveled through Romania where she spent three days because the Romanians required that she exchange $30 for Romanian lei. Tourists were required to change at least that much or $10 per day of their stay, whichever was more. She didn't have anything nice to say about Romania. I didn't know at the time that I would soon be living in Romania.

When I lived in Romania in the late 1970s, the shops were full, but there was little variety. And some things, no matter that they were on display, could not be purchased at any cost. I heard from others who traveled to Romania in later years that the plenty I experienced disappeared over time. By the time I joined the Foreign Service, Romania was a post that couldn't take care of itself. Bucharest survived because it received assistance from the embassy in Vienna.

Image of Bucharest by mariosp, via Flickr.com

When the embassy in Chişinău opened, the perspective on Bucharest changed, as did support roles. For the first time, Bucharest was able to help another embassy. David, the general services officer, went with a driver in a truck to pick up whatever office supplies Bucharest could spare from their warehouse. Those supplies became our supply cupboard stocks.

On my first day, David told me to give him a list of the supplies I needed for my desk. I did. He delivered the cardboard top of a box of photocopier paper as my new inbox. In it, he had placed a handful of paperclips, another handful of rubber bands, two pencils, two pens and one pad of lined paper. We all had to share a stapler, a pair of scissors, and a pencil sharpener.

Bucharest had supplies to spare, but not much.

Image of Chişinău City Hall by whl.travel,
via Flickr.com 

Our first winter in Moldova, the Department sent Walt, a retired management officer, for a month to help us locate and lease housing. The Department wanted us out of hotel rooms because of the cost. Walt played a memory game whenever he went into a shop. He would count up the number of different items in the shop and when he walked out the door, he would try to remember them all. Since he rarely found more than 20 items in a shop, he did very well. For comparison, try counting the number of items on one side of one aisle in a supermarket in your town - every brand and size is a new item.

One Saturday morning Alex and I woke up earlier than usual. It was cold. There was no heat in our building. So we decided to get into our Tavria and drive to Iaşi, the town in Romania where I had spent a year teaching at the university. It was only 60 miles from Chişinău as the crow flies, but closer to 100 miles by car. We had all day, so we took off before 7 a.m. and arrived in Iaşi by 9 a.m. The shops were open until at least noon, so we had three or more hours to shop after which we planned to have lunch at one of the restaurants.

Image of Iaşi City Hall by valyt, via Flickr.com

The first thing we noticed was that the shops in Iaşi were full, and this time the shelves offered variety. There wasn't just long-life regular milk on the shelves, there was also long-life 2% milk, long-life 1% milk and long-life skim milk. There wasn't just tomato juice, there was orange juice, pineapple juice, grapefruit juice, peach juice, and pear juice. There wasn't just salami on the shelves, there were a dozen varieties of salami. There wasn't just cheese, there was caşcaval cheese, Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, feta cheese and half a dozen varieties of soft cheese that resembled brie and ricotta. There were fresh potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, lemons, limes, green beans, squash, apples, oranges, grapefruit, lettuce and several fresh herbs such as basil and rosemary in the shops. There was fresh poultry, beef, lamb, pork and fish. What we didn't see fresh, we saw in cans. We couldn't think of anything that we didn't see in the shops.

Then there was the remarkable difference in the restaurant at lunch. When I lived in Romania, we used to joke that the secret police could always identify the foreigners in the country because we laughed and smiled. Romanians were always so serious. But during our first restaurant meal in Iaşi, the waitress smiled at us. In contrast to the days I lived in Iaşi, the menu represented what we could order and not just what the restaurant hoped one day to be able to provide. While in Romania, the only meat I was sure we could get was chicken. But the new Romanian restaurants offered chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and fish, the same options available in the grocery shops.

By 2 p.m., the shops had all closed, we had eaten a good lunch, and we were on our way back to Chişinău. The following Monday we shared our experiences with our colleagues, perhaps overly enthusiastically as we said we could get everything we wanted there. The following weekend, Becky, the one whose parents were sending her on average a box a day through the pouch to supplement her household effects shipment, her airfreight shipment, and her 2,000 pound consumables shipment, went with two of her friends to Iaşi in search of all that it offered. On their return, Becky made clear that she felt we had misled her because she wasn't able to find the two things she drove all that way to look for - smoked salmon and smoked oysters.

The clearest example of how perspective matters came a few months later when a training session for local employees of the Peace Corps was held in Bucharest. Local staff from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, what was left of Yugoslavia and Moldova all traveled to Bucharest for the week-long training. When those Moldovan local staff returned to Chişinău, they couldn't stop talking about everything that was available in Bucharest. They sounded jealous of their Romanian colleagues. But the next week one of the American staff from Peace Corps in Warsaw came to Chişinău and told us how the Polish Peace Corps staff related how sorry they felt for their poor Romanian colleagues because there was really nothing at all in Bucharest.

Day 247 - I Was Rich Once

Our first Moldovan painting

While in Romania, I received multiple copies of several books to share with my students. The books came from the U.S. Information Agency which was sponsoring a visit by an American exchange visitor who was scheduled to deliver lectures at universities in Romania.  His lecture referred to the themes of the books.

One of those books was John Updike's Bech, A Book. The first line was, "I was rich once." Updike's fictional alter ego, Henry Bech, uttered those words about his month-long visit to the Soviet Union, also as a lecturer sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency, where he was paid in rubles, large quantities of rubles, which he could not take out of the country.  Rubles were not a convertible currency. Bech was rich because he had to spend all his rubles before leaving the country.

That thought - I was rich once - came to me many times during the first year in Moldova. For the first time in my life, I felt rich, so long as I could find something to spend my money on.

Our second weekend in Moldova, we went wandering downtown with no particular purpose, just to see what we could find. One of our finds was a shop selling artwork. There were paintings of all types and sizes. The prices were so low that we walked through the shop pointing first to one painting as we declared, "We'll take this one," followed by another pointing finger and the utterance "and this one," and then another "this one," all without asking the prices. Even with less than $10 worth of rubles in our pockets, we knew we could afford them all. We were rich. For Christmas that year, I gave Alex a set of four watercolors, framed, at a cost of $1 each.

One of a set of four watercolor paintings

Because we didn't have a kitchen in our VIP suite at the Codru Hotel, we had our meals in a private dining room behind the VIP suites. In addition to options for three courses - appetizer, main course, and dessert - we had options for beverages. The bargain was champagne. A bottle of Moldovan champagne cost less than a bottle of Pepsi and it was easier to find.

A visitor from Washington, in town to set up the cleared American guard program which would maintain security during the renovation project that would transform our building punctured with holes in all directions into a secure embassy, joined us for dinner. When he saw the prices on the menu he insisted on paying for our meals. We had soup, we had a main course, we had dessert, we had coffee after the meal, and of course we had champagne. The total bill for the three of us was under $5.00. Our visitor asked if he could keep the bill to take back to Washington to show others how inexpensive life in Moldova was.

We didn't bother arranging for the shipment of 2,000 pounds of non-perishable food we were entitled to have the government pay to transport because the cost of a can of peas was more than our typical three-course meals. And we had no idea when we would end up with a kitchen.

The circus in Chișinau

Then there was the entertainment. The ambassador was always being given tickets to concerts, operas, and ballets, even the circus. You can't beat the price of a free ticket, except a ticket for a nickel, the full price, wasn't bad either. We saw world famous opera singers who sang in Italian, French, Russian, Romanian, and German.

Fur hat

Everyone in Moldova had a fur hat, even children. We wondered if they were issued in the hospital as mothers took their babies home. So we went off in search of fur hats. When we found them, once again, we were rich. They were right around $2 each so we didn't have to make a choice; we bought as many as we liked, provided that the store would sell them to us. Just like the woman selling liter Coke bottles on Stefan cel Mare Blvd on our first trip around Chișinau, most salespeople weren't willing to sell everything to one customer. Later we discovered at least some of them weren't quite the bargains we had at first thought - the fur fell out much like hair on a balding man.

Being rich lasted through the first year. By the second year, Moldova had started catching up with the rest of Europe with prices rising and a few more consumer goods finding their way onto the shelves. I missed the early days.

Day 244 - Our New Car

Image of a Ukrainian Tavria by order_242,
via Flickr.com

One of the first items on our personal agenda was to buy a car. The embassy had been in operation for six months by the time we got there, although it had been staffed by people on temporary duty until the ambassador, Susan and David, Becky, and then Alex and I arrived. We were the first staff to be assigned to Chișinau. The ambassador had had her Honda shipped from the U.S. David and Susan had shipped a VW Jetta to Moldova. We had sold both of our cars in Barbados (although the Nissan Stanza will reappear in our story) so we needed to find a car in Moldova.

We thought buying a local vehicle would mean fewer maintenance problems because someone in Moldova would know how to repair them. But locating one for sale wasn't simple. There weren't Lada or Zil dealerships on Stefan cel Mare Blvd or any other main street. Only the very wealthy and most powerful were seen in cars, and even many of them may have not owned cars but been driven around in government cars by government drivers. Buying a car meant we first had to find one someone owned and was willing to sell.

We weren't necessarily looking for a new car. A used one would have been fine. But finding any car was difficult enough. And then when we found one, a new Tavria made in the Ukraine, settling on a price was the challenge.

We had cash, and we expected cash to be a desirable means of exchange. That was not to be. Moldova was one big commodity exchange in those days. We asked how much the owner wanted for the car and the response was a certain number, not remembered, of pounds of concrete. We responded that we couldn't put our hands on concrete in those quantities, but we could pay in U.S. dollars. The owner countered with a number, again not remembered, of tons of newsprint. Again, we explained that we could not put our hands on rolls of newsprint in such quantities, but we could pay him 2,000 U.S. dollars. It sounds like a ridiculously small amount of money now, but remember that we had difficulty spending $4.00 on food our first weekend in the country. Eventually the owner agreed to accept cash, perhaps a bit more than we offered. He brought the Tavria to the embassy where Alex looked it over. Alex noticed there were no seat belts. The owner said that was no problem. He jumped into the Tavria and drove away. When he returned, there were seat belts, not installed, just lying on the backseat, ready for us to install them.

The local employees all referred to the Tavria as a town car. This does not mean it looked like one of those black Lincolns that drive the upper crust around Manhatten. It meant it should only be driven around town, and even that should not be undertaken until every nut and every bolt had been tightened to be sure it wouldn't fall apart.

During the two years we had the Tavria, we had not one bit of trouble with it. In contrast, David and Susan had frequent problems with their VW. They had brought with them spare oil and air filters, spare belts, and spare bulbs to minimize problems with maintaining it. I think they went through them all before they left. The official vehicles for the embassy were all American made which meant we had to have someone drive them to Kyiv, Bucharest, or even Vienna when they needed maintenance. Someone in Chișinau treated the American-made car of one of the other staff members who came later, Bob, as a source of spare parts. Each week Bob would discover something had been stole from it - the mirrors, the hood ornament, and even the front bumper. Our Tavria was a bargain in comparison.

Day 240 - Mămăligă, Polenta, and Coucou

I never thought of cornmeal mush as a delicacy as a child. Mom didn't serve it; her cornmeal breakfast dish was Johnny cakes, more like cornbread than porridge. But we made cornmeal mush in Mrs. Farden's home economics in 7th grade where we smothered it in maple syrup to make it go down.

Image of mămăligă with sarmale or stuffed grape leaves
by **emmar**, via Flickr.com

So I was surprised when I landed in Romania and not only discovered the Romanian version of cornmeal mush, served nearly every day in Bucharest homes - mămăligă - but I also discovered that I liked it. There was no maple syrup served with mămăligă. Instead, the condiments that covered it were fried eggs, sour cream, and/or shredded goat cheese similar to feta cheese. I could do without the eggs, but what doesn't taste better smothered in sour cream?

Mămăligă is peasant food, not often served in restaurants in either Romania or Moldova. Perhaps that is just one more reason I like it; it usually meant I was being served it at someone's home, a rare event in Romania during my year there. Making mămăligă took hours, and strong arms, because of the time needed to stir the mixture in the pot to make sure no lumps form. The consistency of mămăligă varies from thin enough to require being served with a spoon to thick enough to be cut with a thread wrapped around the loaf-shaped batch and then pulled tight to slice off a section.

Image of polenta with wild boar stew
 by Rubber Slippers In Italy, via Flickr.com

Nearly every country in southern Europe has a similar cornmeal based dish. In Italy it is polenta, a dish that has a much higher-status reputation than mămăligă. One of the two French lecturers in Iaşi while I was there turned his nose up at mămăligă initially, until he decided to will his brain and stomach to consider it transformed into polenta. I happen to like polenta very much as well although I may never have tried it if I hadn't met the French lecturer in Iaşi.

But I was surprised to find a popular cornmeal dish in Barbados, too - coucou. When I heard the name, I thought it might be related to couscous, the north African dish made from very fine pieces of wheat. There might be some linguistic connection between couscous and coucou, and they are both the starch that holds everything else at the meal together, and I like both of them. But they are quite different and coucou is my favorite.

And that's amazing because in addition to cornmeal, coucou is made with okra, that slimy vegetable full of seeds. The okra slime is likely what keeps the meal together when cooked. If I hadn't known okra was an important ingredient, I would never have known it was in coucou. I don't know if that is evidence that okra doesn't have much flavor or if the hot sauce that is usually served with coucou overpowers the okra flavor.

Image of flying fish (bottom left) and coucou (top left)
with vegetables by berzowska, via Flickr.com

Coucou with flying fish is one of the most typical Bajan meals, served in many of the downtown restaurants, especially those catering to the local population. When my parents came down to visit us in Barbados, Dad was surprised to find flying fish on the menus since during his Merchant Marine days in the Caribbean, they used to just sweep those fish off the deck and back into the ocean. The fish were so small they didn't think they were worth cleaning to cook and eat.

I haven't found a restaurant in the United States yet where I can get either mămăligă or coucou. Thankfully, polenta can be found on the menu in Italian restaurants, giving me an occasional opportunity to remember Mrs. Farden's lesson on cornmeal mush for breakfast with pleasant memories.

Day 204 - It's Just A Game

In addition to offering me something to do every spare evening during the rehearsals for upcoming plays, Doha Players introduced me to a Gulf Sunday* afternoon tradition in Doha - team trivia teasers, a two-hour radio program that mixed music and trivia.

Listening to the radio by OZinOH,
via Flickr.com

To take part, people formed teams and picked out silly names for themselves. They gathered each Friday (Gulf Sunday) afternoon by 5 p.m. and tuned in to the English language radio station which posed 12 trivia questions interspersed with music between 5 and 6 p.m. The teams spent the next hour coming to agreement on the answers to the questions, calling in their answers to the radio station before 7 p.m. when the answers were revealed. Chris and Matt kept track of each team's scores, accumulating them each week throughout the school year months. At the end of each season, the radio station hosted a dinner and party where prizes were handed out to the teams with the highest scores.

Not all of the teams were in Doha. The radio station could be heard in Bahrain as well, so at least one team called in from that neighboring country each week. One team was known to call the London Museum each Friday to get help with the answers. Most of us just collected trivia books of all sorts and looked up the answers. Our team had members who specialized in certain subjects so that we could divide up the questions and not spend all our time on the same ones. Phil, for example, was our music specialist. He would record the musical clip each week and go off into a corner of a room far from the rest of us to listen to it over and over again until he thought he had the answer.

Our team took turns hosting the evening. Hosting meant providing the meat - usually grilled - to accompany the pot luck contributions of everyone else. The hosts concentrated on getting the food ready and were excused from trivia duty.

It didn't matter which team won. It only mattered that we have fun. But team trivia teaser only happened during the school year. When summer arrived and so many of the women and children left Doha, we were without a Friday evening activity, until one of our team members figured out how we could play other games as teams, without the radio. We began playing team Scrabble.

Image of Scrabble board by alex_untitled, via Flickr.com

Now back when Chris and I began hosting the English Language Social Club in Iași, I had thought Scrabble would be a great way to get the students to use English in conversation. It didn't take long, however, to discover that word games might involve language, but usually they are accompanied by silence. And only one person at a time is involved in playing the game. Our hosts found a way to change that. Instead of each of us taking a turn at laying out words on a Scrabble board, we worked in couples all with the same tiles to see how many points we could get with the letters drawn within a fixed time limit. When time was up, each couple revealed the word they had put together with the tiles and what was already on the board. The score for each team for the round was the score for the word they added - and the highest scoring word was written onto the oversized version of a Scrabble board that stood on an easel in front of us. Play continued when new tiles were drawn to replace those put down for the high score. Everyone was involved throughout the game, every team received a score for every round, and a level of competition prevailed along with the fun.

Pictionary was also a big hit in Doha. It is another game where everyone in the room is invoved, even if the teams aren't all drawing at the same time and at least the picturist for the team must not speak. We ran into some serious Pictionary players in Doha. The couple Alex and I were teamed with for the international road rally, for instance, observed the rules of not using letters of numbers on their pictures, but they had developed an extensive set of shared symbols that were more helpful than letters or numbers. For example, a large equilateral triangle with a smaller triangle balanced upside down on the tip of the larger one was Great Britain. A dot appropriately placed identified a city or region within England in seconds.

PJ and Heather

The most impressive Pictionary play I recall however was as removed from the Great Britain example as I can think of. Heather and PJ, the children of my friends and neighbors, Pete and Sofia, were teamed up one afternoon when the phrase was Pacific Ocean. One of them drew what I could only describe as an amoeba-shaped scribble at which point the other said immediately, "Pacific Ocean."

If they had been twins, I could better have understood it.

*The work week in Qatar and most of the other countries around the Gulf was Saturday through Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday being the weekend. But since the names of days of the week conjure up specific contexts, many of us used "Gulf" in front of the western day of the week that the actual day of the week was comparable to. Thus, Gulf Sunday was Friday, but since Friday conjures up "end of the work week" to most people, not "day before I go back to work" the Gulf prefix helps convey the context for the events mentioned.

Day 165 - The Road to the Foreign Service

Interpreter image by xmacex, via Flickr.com

It all started in 1965 when Miss Buslee assigned a research paper on careers we were interested in. At that point all I knew was that I wanted to do something with foreign languages. I had started studying German in ninth grade, the earliest time that foreign languages were offered. The alternative was Latin, but I wanted to study a language that was still being spoken. I would have had to wait a year to begin studying French or Spanish. So German it was.

I was a long way from mastery of German then - still am - but I jumped into the research enthusiastically. I learned about the difference between translators and interpreters. I learned that beyond those two career options, nearly every other career that involved foreign languages involved mastery of something else. In fact, the foreign language part was secondary to whatever that something else was. Even translators and interpreters had to understand the subject matter they translated. A musician wouldn't necessarily have the vocabulary or knowledge to be able to translate a medical or engineering paper.

That led me to explore careers that involved travel where knowledge of languages would be an advantage. That is how I stumbled on information about the U.S. Department of State and careers in the Foreign Service.

As exciting as such a career sounded, however, what I learned back in 1965 led me to conclude it was not likely a career for me. First, there were the medical requirements. Somehow I had gotten the impression that my eyesight was so bad that I would never be hired for certain jobs, as a flight attendant, for example. And the information available in 1965 about the Foreign Service made it sound like only those with perfect vision could get in. And then there was the fact that until 1972, only single women were accepted into the Foreign Service. It was never in the law that women in the Foreign Service who married would have to resign, but it had become practice. In addition, it was practice that only married Foreign Service Officers would be sent to certain countries of the world, including eastern Europe. As a result, after completing that research paper, I put aside any thoughts of a Foreign Service career. I concentrated on other options for using foreign languges and travel. Teaching English as a Second Language was the path still open.

Ten years after completing that research paper, I rediscovered the Foreign Service. Several people I met in Tehran signed up for the written exam, the first step in what was then a several year process of gaining acceptance into the Foreign Service. The written exam was only given once a year, on the first Saturday of December - in every country of the world on the same day. I heard my friends who took the exam talk about how difficult it was. Everyone seemed to know someone who walked out in the middle of it, giving up at that first step.

I was still devoted to the idea of teaching English around the world, so I didn't sign up for the exam while I was overseas. But after a year of living in Romania where my sense of civic duty was heightened after watching the effect of oppressive practices in both Iran and Romania at the same time as I gained first-hand experience with what those working in an embassy did, I decided I had to try to get into the Foreign Service. I loved teaching English, and I loved the travel it offered, but I was not excited by the lack of certainty such a life offered. Both the job in Iran and the Fulbright position in Romania were temporary options. And in both cases, I didn't know that I was going to get them until less than a month before I needed to ready to leave. A position with the federal government that would transfer me from one place to another seemed the perfect solution.

In 1978, I took the written exam for the first time. There were two separate sections that were graded in addition to a written exercise that was only looked at if the candidate passed the other parts. I passed one of the two graded sections, but not the other. So the following year, I took the exam again. That time, I passed all sections. That meant I would be invited to the second round, the oral assessment.

That year, the oral assessment was offered in Minneapolis where I was living. On each assessment day, six candidates are invited to attend. On my day, only five of us showed up.

The oral assessment involved an-hour long leaderless discussion during which we were observed as we each made a presentation in favor of a proposal that the group would have to decide whether to fund. About half way through the exercise, one of the assessors informed us that we had just had the funding cut, so we would not be able to fund all of any of the proposals. We had to decide how to allocate the smaller amount of money. Most of the candidates seemed to think they would only pass if their proposal was funded. But the exercise was about leadership, and clear thinking, and making sound decisions, not winning or losing.

Discussion image by Writers' Centre Norwich,
via Flickr.com

Another segment involved a two-on-one interview. Two assessors asked questions of each candidate to assess critical thinking, experience, social awareness, and all those things that go into what I recall Dad referring to as "common sense," usually spoken in the sentence, "You don't have any common sense." I recall being asked to describe the Brezhnev Doctrine. I was sure I failed when I admitted right away that I didn't know what the Brezhnev Doctrine was. Later I learned that was the best answer I could have given, unless I knew what it was.

The final segment involved writing - the segment that had been part of the written exam the year before was moved to the oral assessment stage instead - and an in-basket exercise. I enjoyed that part, although I didn't score all that well on it. The scenario was that the candidate had just arrived in country and had one day ahead of the first business day to go through the in box of the predecessor who had left several weeks before. The in box seemed full, but in time I learned what was represented as several weeks of work was more like a day's worth of work. I discovered that all the names of all the people mentioned in the documents were non-gender-specific. That meant that any gender biases in the responses were those of the candidates, not those who wrote the exam. From conversations after this section, it was clear the other four that day hadn't noticed this. They all referred to the ambassador as "he" when the name was a gender-ambiguous Chris.

Interview image by Writers' Centre Norwich,
via Flickr.com

I passed that stage as well, which led to two more stages that could occur simultaneously - the medical and security clearances. Only when they were concluded did I learn that my name was on the register, the list of names, ordered by scores, highest to lowest. Names remain on the register for 18 months. The names move up and down during that time, depending on the scores of those added or dropped off later. Only about half of the people whose names go onto the register are offered entry into the Foreign Service. I knew that my name was in the middle third, but I couldn't learn more. Eighteen months passed. My name never came to the top. And so I started the process again. The second time around, the oral assessment was in Chicago. Other details were similar and familiar. I passed again, and the waiting began again.

Twenty years after Miss Buslee assigned that research project, I had succeeded. I was offered a position as a Foreign Service Officer. It was a long road. More than once during those seven years that I actively sought entry into the Foreign Service I answered that question that was typical during annual assessments - where do you see yourself in five years? - with the admission that I expected to be a Foreign Service Officer by then. It probably wasn't a wise way to answer that question, but when the opportunity came for me to accept the position, I felt the two former bosses I had given that response were as excited for me as I was for myself.

Day 162 - Fashion in Moldova

I just finished reading the memoir of a woman of my parents' generation. Venus Smith was married to Chet Smith whose stage name was Val Eddy, a musician with the U.S. Navy during World War II when they met. The book contained excerpts from several of their letters while Venus remained in Washington, D.C., and Chet was aboard ships in the Pacific. Because Venus frequently mentioned how difficult it was to buy certain items, such as meat, butter, and sugar, it reminded me of my experiences in Romania and Moldova, the two countries where I lived through the shortage of basic foods.

Maxi image by vintspiration, via Flickr.com

But food items weren't the only items in short supply in both Romania and Moldova. I was convinced there was also a shortage of fabric. While women's fashions in the west involved calf-length maxi-skirts, in Romania most women were wearing thigh-length mini-skirts. In Moldova, women seemed to wear long sweaters without even the pretense of a skirt under them. I came up with three theories to explain it.

First, there was the "we don't follow your decadent western trends" theory. The Romanian authorities took every opportunity to point out the very worst aspects of western culture. Any Americn TV program or movie that emphasized corruption among police, the military, or federal officials was sure to be big hits there. Most of the TV programs broadcast in Romania were 15 to 20 years old, but when Dallas came out, it was on TV in Romania within a year. There wasn't a better propaganda vehicle for the Romanians to get their negative points across about American culture. So ensuring the clothing available in the country was nothing like American or European styles was another way to make a political statement.

Second, there was the "why waste fabric by making long skirts when short skirts will do" theory. There were plenty of sheep in Romania, so there was plenty of wool available, but Romania also sent nearly everything of quality produced in the country abroad, to earn hard currency. Conserving raw materials by minimizing the amount of fabric needed made good economic sense.

Mini image by fervent-adepte-de-la-mode
via Flickr.com

Third, there was the "we just keep reworking what we already have" theory. With a shortage of fabric, it is inevitable that when something wears out, it will be modified. A long skirt can be remade as a short skirt, but not the other way around.

I didn't spend much time shopping for clothing in Romania, but I did make my way through the one department store in Iași. Later, in Moldova, I spent more time checking out what was available. In both places, I noticed that what was missing in both places was variety. There were clothes, racks and racks of clothes. But just like the aisles of canned tomatoes, entire lengths of aisles filled with just one brand and one size of canned tomatoes, the clothing on the racks were all the same. There were racks of the same style dress in the same purple print fabric, in all the sizes available. And then there were racks of an orange print dress.

Women in Romania turned this lack of variety into a way to make a statement anyway. In contrast to the west, where two women would never want to be seen at the same event wearing the same dress, Romanian women friends would pick out matching dresses, shoes, purses, hats, and anything else that could be seen as they walked down the street together, making a statement about their friendship and also their wealth which allowed them to buy what was newest in the market. Another case of not doing it the way the west does, but still doing what is done in the west - competing with one another.

People really are alike all around the world. It is just the details that differ.

Day 158 - The President's Coming To Town

Romania played an interesting role in the international arena during the time I lived there. It was part of the Warsaw Pact, placing it firmly in the red camp of nations, but President Ceauceșcu wasn't above playing his friends off against one another. In contrast to the Soviet Motherland which emphasized comradeship, commonality, the sameness of everyone, Ceauceșcu encouraged regional diversity among Romanians. There weren't just Romanians, there were Oltenians, Transilvanians, Muntenians, Walachians, Dobrogeans, Bucovinans, Moldovans, Maramureșean, Banațean, the regional groupings of Romanians with their distinctive traditional folk music, folk costumes, and village building styles, all of which could be seen in the Village Museum in Bucharest. Where in Moldova 15 years later, we saw all people in villages and walking along the highways all dressed the same, in Romania, the people outside the cities dressed in traditional clothing of the type that had been worn since Vlad Ţepeș resisted both the Turks and the Hungarians who traded opportunities to rule the geographic area that is now Romania. In Moldova those who had the means to ride on the highways were in cars, trucks, or on tractors while in Romania many still made their way between villages in wagons piled high with straw and pulled by horses or cattle.

Ceauceșcu was pleased to see his people differentiated from all his neighbors.

Politically, Ceauceșcu also sought opportunities to thumb his nose at his neighbors. He liked to be seen as making his own way in the world, not kowtowing to the Soviet Union or other larger nations. One example was his hosting, secretly, talks involving President Anwar Sadat of Egypt that led to Sadat's visit to Israel in late 1977. Those talks occurred in Bucharest early in my time in Romania, on a weekend when I traveled Thursday evening by train from Iasi to Bucharest.

Before I left Iași, my Fulbright researcher friend, Paul, asked how I had managed to get a ticket for that evening. He had gone that morning to buy a ticket, but he was told no one from the university was being allowed to travel that weekend. I must have purchased my ticket several days before, so I went to the train station Thursday evening and had no trouble getting a seat.

When I arrived in Bucharest that Friday morning, many of my friends expressed surprise that I had been able to get on the train. At the university in Bucharest, students weren't allowed to leave their dormitory buildings. No one knew why this was so, but there were, as was always the case in Romania, rumors. That weekend, my life went by quite normally. Most of my friends in Bucharest were connected to the embassy or the American School, and there were no restrictions placed on their movements. There may have been a few more Romanian policemen around the embassy, and they may have been a little more aggressive in demanding to see identification of people passing it on the street. But nothing really interfered.

When I returned to Iași, I learned that others had not been so lucky. In addition to my friend Paul not being able to buy a ticket on Thursday, the students in Iasi were also confined to their dormitories for the weekend. And we heard that one of the American Fulbright lecturers in Cluj-Napoca who wasn't able to get a plane or train ticket decided to drive to Bucharest for the weekend, but she was turned back on the highway. Still we had no knowledge of why.

Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat, www.aljazeera.com

When President Sadat finally did travel to Israel for that historic visit in November of 1977, the reason for the clamp down on the students in the country, especially the foreign students, was clear. Romania was one of the only countries in the world to have official representatives of both Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their capital city. Iran was another. There were large numbers of Arab students in Romania in all university cities. And there were Israeli students, including Israeli Arabs. Given the overwhelmingly negative reaction among the Arab world to President Sadat's visit to Israel, it was clear there were valid security concerns about what would happen in Romania if word got out about President Sadat's presence in Romania and the purpose for his visit.

Four years later, President Sadak was assassinated by one of his people. Eight years later again, Ceauceșcu met a similar fate, though without the same level of surprise.

Day 155 - Traipsing Through Transylvania

Picnic lunch by the side of a stream on our road trip
John, George and Josie

In April, I finally had the opportunity to see more of Romania than Bucharest and Iasi. I had been invited by the Fulbright lecturer in Timișoara, a university town near Yugoslavia, to speak to her students. Instead of flying or taking the train, I rented a car and drove with three Canadian students of Romanian origin to see the Transylvanian Alps, tour some of the Medieval towns in the valleys, especially those associated with Vlad Ţepeș (pronounced tse-pesh), believed to be the model for Dracula, and visit friends in Cluj-Napoca along the way. The Canadians were two brothers from near Toronto, John and George, and a female friend from Montreal, Josie. The three of them had grown up speaking Romanian at home so they were excellent guides for me.

Imposing Castle Bran

One of our first stops was the town of Sinaia where the embassy had a cottage for its staff to use on weekends. John and I had spent a weekend there earlier with my friend Gayle, a teacher at the American School, and her boyfriend Roger, and a few others connected to the embassy through the American School. Sinaia looks like a movie set. It is perched at the edge of the mountains with all the buildings looking like they came from Heidi or The Sound of Music. We didn't spend time in Sinaia; our destination for that day was Castle Bran, an imposing building that looks like it was carved right out of the mountain it sits on. It has often been featured - from a distance - in films as Dracula's castle. But as imposing and dreadful its appearance is from a distance, Castle Bran is one of the friendliest looking castles on the inside. There were lots of narrow staircases, but none held the foreboding atmosphere promised by the exterior. The bedrooms looked cozy, bright and light. The bed in one of the rooms looked as though someone had just gotten up. The was a body-shaped indentation on one side.

The courtyard reminded me of what I had seen in films of Italian villas. There were curves and arches everywhere, with plants in cubbyholes that looked like they had been designed for just that purpose. When breezes blew overhead, an eerie whistling could be heard as if pipes for an organ were being played by the breath of the wind.

Staircase in Castle Bran with George
and Josie

But as charming as Castle Bran was, we couldn't spend the night there, so we headed toward the larger city in the neighborhood, Brașov, in search of hotel rooms. When we got there, we learned there was a conference in town that day so there were no rooms available, it was still light, so we considered our options for routes to our destination of the next day, Cluj-Napoca. There were two possible routes, one that hugged the northern edge of the Transylvanian Alps and one that hugged the southern edge. Once we set out on one of them, there was no opportunity to change our minds because there were no roads over the Alps to connect them. We choose the southern route, through Hungarian territory. All the signs on this road were in Hungarian, not Romanian. Suddenly it didn't seem that any of us had a linguistic advantage.

It was getting late with the sun nearly ready to set when we pulled into the first town that was big enough to have a hotel. In addition, we were getting low on gas, so the option of continuing to drive had expired. Our first stop was at a Tourist Center, the source for information about hotels and restaurants in the area. We were certain that the staff there would speak Romanian in spite of our being in Hungarian-speaking territory. Because Josie and I knew that women in Romania would likely be ignored, George and John went into the center. They returned with the addresses of the three hotels in town. We headed for the first one. This time, we all four went in to see if they had rooms. The clerk behind the desk barely looked at us and sent us away, telling us they had no rooms.

Balcony off upper floor of Castle Bran

On to the second hotel. This time George and Josie went in, figuring maybe four of us appearing all at once was overwhelming. They returned with the same news. There were no rooms. At the the third hotel, John and I went in together. Again, there were no rooms.

So there we were, in a small town in Hungarian-speaking Transylvania, in a car so small it would have been difficult for even one person to sleep in, without enough gas to be certain we would reach another town. We decided we needed to head back to the Tourist Center, this time to find out if there might be a house in town where we could rent a room for the night. This was a common way for students to travel throughout the country, but in recent years the government had banned Romanians from allowing foreigners from staying in their homes. But we didn't see any other choice.

Since George and John had gone into the center the first time, the only ones of us the staff hadn't seen were Josie and me. Since Josie's Romanian was fluent, she did the talking. Even though I couldn't understand everything, I could tell that there were some people in town who had rooms to rent and the woman Josie spoke with walked to a desk with a phone to make arrangements for us. While she was on the phone, Josie filled me in on the whole conversation. The house had only one room with two double beds. Josie had told her that we would be happy with that arrangement since there wasn't really any option. As Josie was filling me in, the woman realized that I wasn't Romanian. She put her hand over the receiver, looked up at Josie, and asked her if I was a foreigner. Josie told her that all four of us were foreigners. At that point, she hung up the phone and told us we had to stay in a hotel; we couldn't stay in the home of Romanians. Josie told her that we had already checked with all the hotels and none of them had rooms. In response, the woman picked up the phone again and began dialing as she told us that if the first class hotel in town didn't have any rooms, they woud have to make a room available, even if it meant telling guests in the room they would have to move out. She completed her call and told us we shoud go back to the first class hotel - the one we had gone to first - where they would have two rooms for us.

We went back to the hotel. And this time, they were happy to provide us with two rooms. Foreigners were more welcome as guests than Romanians, I guess.

Day 152 - The Students Who Never Came To Class

empty classroom image by earthisthering, via Flickr.com

Another purpose for that big book in the English Department was to record grades of students. At the end of the first term, I learned that the members of each class would be listed in the book for the teachers to record their grades. Grades in Romanian universities ranged from 1 to 10 with 5 or higher passing.  Since my classes were Conversation or American Culture, the grades I gave were admittedly subjective. I didn't have tests or papers with grades to total up and average.

The first term, all of my classes were second-year English majors. The second term, only three of my classes were second-year English majors. One class was third-year French majors with English as their minor. And one class was a fourth-year elective course developing writing skills in English.

Three of those classes met in the evening. It was inevitable that some of the classes were held in the evenings, given the number of hours students spent in the classroom. It was challenging to get all the students to attend the evening classes. They followed a break of at least two hours, long enough for the students to get back to their dorm rooms or their apartments at the other end of town. Sometimes they just didn't make it back for that evening class.

The third-year French majors and English minors were one of those evening classes. Most evenings at least two of them showed up. Sometimes there were as many as five. Once none of them showed up, but I think that was one of the classes who heard I had gone to Bucharest.

It was very difficult to figure out what activities to plan for when it wasn't clear how many students would be in attendance. One of my favorite activities was something we also did in Iran called Dialog Cards. This exercise involved an ambiguous dialog written with only one half on each of two cards. The class would decide ahead of time if the dialog would be spoken by two men, two women, or a man and a woman. The class would decide which emotions the two speakers would put into their half of the conversation. The two speakers would look at one another while they spoke the words on their cards to one another, using the emotions the class had decided on.  The results were always hilarious. And the same cards could be used over and over again with different results just by switching the emotions and combination of speakers. But with only one pair of speakers, a class planned for this activity ended pretty quickly.

While I never saw them all at the same time, in all there were probably seven students in that class. I kept thinking about what I could have done during the term if they had all attended. So when the term ended and I opened up the big book to provide grades for those seven students, I was shocked to discover that there were 14 members of that class. Seven students came at least once. but seven more never showed up at all.

I gave them all 0's.

Within a week, one of those missing students came to the American/British reading library with a large bouquet of flowers and an explanation. She apologized for not attending any of my classes. She said she was married and had an infant. Once she got back to their apartment after her daytime classes, she had to take care of the baby and it was just too difficult to leave the baby behind for her to return to the university for the evening class. I asked her a number of other questions to get a better sense of her English ability. At the end of the conversation, I told her I would think about what she had told me and would consider changing her grade.

The next day, another of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and asked to talk with me. She said she had heard from her colleague that if she asked me, I would change her grade. I countered by explaining that her colleague had come to me, showing more courage than any of the other members of the class, that she had apologized to me for not showing me the courtesy of attending my classes, and that she had explained her reasons for not coming back to the university in the evening. Based on those factors, I had assured her that I would think about whether or not I would change her grade. I did not tell her I would change her grade. I told her I would consider it.

The following day, a third of the missing students appeared outside the English Department and told me she wanted me to change her grade. I was a bit surprised at the abruptness of the request so I told her I didn't have any reason to change her grade. Her counter to that was to tell me that if I didn't change her grade, she would have to retake the class in the summer and that meant that I would have to stay for the summer to teach the class again. I replied that whether she had to retake the class had nothing to do with whether I had to remain to teach it. But still she didn't give up. She said I had to change the grade because 0 wasn't a grade. So I replied, "And that is just what you got - no grade."

In the end, I changed the grade of the first student who came to explain and apologize, but I don't think I made it a passing grade. I didn't change the other grades. But I did add a note in the big book to explain why I had given the seven students who never came to my class a grade of 0. And I explained that I had been asked by some of the students to change that grade, but that I didn't feel I could in good conscience change grades of students who had never attended a class. But, since I didn't know all the implications of my decision, I would understand if someone on the faculty felt it necessary to change the grades in my place.

Day 151 - Rumor Has It

Rumor image by brookenovac, via Flickr.com

In contrast to my understanding that Iran is a shame-based society, I came to think of Romania as a rumor-based society.  One of the greatest sources of amusement and frustration for me in Romania was dealing with the fact that communication wasn't straightforward. I always thought of myself as saying what I meant and meaning what I said, but no one else seemed to follow that pattern in Romania.

More than once I went to conduct my class and discovered no one in the classroom. But later in the day, I would run into one of the students from that class. When I asked why no one had come to the class, the reply was most often, "We heard you went to Bucharest." My reply, "Yes, I went to Bucharest -- last weekend. But I came back to Iași in time for the class today."

I guess when most people traveled to Bucharest, they made a long trip out of it. The idea of flying - or taking the train - to Bucharest for a weekend was so beyond what was normal for my students that they assumed I wouldn't be back in just a few days.

Then there was that big book in the English Department where the teachers left notes for one another. I didn't leave notes in it often, but when I had a message I wanted more than one teacher to get, I wrote it down. I found it humorous - and also a bit on the annoying end of curious - that my British lecturer colleague Chris would end up telling me that the other staff members would ask him what I meant by what I had written. It seemed so clear to me  - I meant what I wrote. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Then there was the occasion of the death of the husband of one of our colleagues. The details of the funeral service were written in the book in the Department, for everyone to read. I planned to attend and as I was heading to the Casa Universitarilor for lunch, I ran into one of my Romanian colleagues who asked me if I was going to the funeral. When I told him I was, he told me the time had changed. It was an hour earlier. And that meant I was going to have to skip lunch in order to attend the funeral.

I reached the church where the funeral would be held in time for the hour earlier changed time, but I found the number of people in attendance to be very small. But I didn't know if that meant anything because this was Romania during the time of Nicolai Ceaucescu and the Communist party, so I didn't have much to go on regarding the number of people who would feel comfortable attending a funeral in a church. So I waited.

Churches in Romania didn't have plush pews to sit in. In fact, I don't remember any pews, plush or otherwise, to sit in. I recall standing while I waited. And I waited. And I waited. People trickled in throughout the time I waited. I felt a little conspicuous because I didn't know anyone else in the church. And I felt as though everyone was looking at me, wondering who I was and why I was there.

candle image by juliadeb, via Flickr.com

The service eventually got started about the time I had initially been told it would start. I recall feeling safe enough thinking I would just watch those around me to figure out what I was supposed to do since I didn't understand any of the service. It might have been in Romanian, but for all I understood it might have been in Latin or "Old Romanian" a variant of the language I assumed existed just as the King James' version of English was still read at times in modern church services in the West. Watching others was a good strategy for most of the event, but when we were all given candles that we held during the service, I noticed that mine was burning down much more quickly than those around me. As the flame got closer and closer to my fingers, I had to blow it out, not knowing if this was acceptable. Others kept theirs, still burning, until the service ended.

When I got back to the university, I realized another lesson about rumors: in a rumor-based society, everyone believes what they heard last, even if what they heard last happened earlier. The time of the funeral had been changed. But the time in the book at the Department was the time it had been changed to, not from. That explained the sparse group of mourners when I arrived at the church. It also explained the long wait before the funeral began. And it probably also explained why I felt people watching me, wondering why I, a stranger, had arrived so early, at the time close family members of the deceased arrived.

On reflection, it wasn't difficult to understand why Romania was a rumor-based society. It was a society where discretion, the need to protect your own privacy as well as the privacy of others, could be a matter of "freedom" or imprisonment, of life or death. In such a society, it is often important not to speak freely and directly but rather to speak in riddles or by leaving certain ideas unspoken. And that explained why the question of what I really meant by what I wrote was a normal response.