By now, I’ve had a chance to make some purchases at some of the shops in my village, and I’ve observed a couple of things. First, if you’re change isn’t very much, the shopkeepers will often give it to you in candy. I also had a clerk give me a travel pack of tissues once, which was great because tissues come in quite handy here. I’ve also seen several shopkeepers use an abacus to calculate a customer’s total.

In the month that I’ve been in Moldova, I’ve discovered that there are two kinds of culture shock. There’s the dull, constant kind that I feel at every meal, every time I use the veceu (outhouse), and every time I navigate my way through piles of manure on a dirt – or muddy – road. Then there are the sudden flashes that feel like a car coming around a corner towards me at night with its brights on. The most recent of these flashes happened last week after a vent cover flew off the ceiling of a rutiera (minibus) that the EEs were on. The next day, the rutiera driver came to the school were we have our training sessions and asked us if we remembered where we’d lost the vent cover. (I guess he was going to try to find it.) We told him that we weren’t sure, but that we knew it was before the sunflower fields. The high beams of this story are not the fact that a bus I was on lost part of its ceiling while traveling at sixty miles an hour (and, yes, Dad, the first thing I thought of when this happened was that Aloha Air 737 whose ceiling ripped off mid-flight), but the fact that a sunflower field was a meaningful landmark. I think that the dull, constant kind of culture shock might decrease with time, but I have a feeling that the sudden, unexpected reminders that I’m in a foreign country will never stop. But don’t worry; the high beams are startling, but they are some of the best moments because they remind me why I’m here.