Festival of Languages

Another busy weekend in Chisinau. On Friday night I went to the Bach Festival at the organ hall with Fulbrighters and listened to some great music. The prime minister's wife was a patron of the event so he was there with her and as a result there was a lot of security. The German, Polish, and French ambassadors were also there and they all gave speeches to kick off the concert.

On Saturday morning I went to Winrock to check out a training for new Moldovan and American volunteers who will conduct trainings on business and entrepreneurial skills for students in the villages. After that I met up with a student from my conversation group for tea and headed to a photo exhibition that was taking place at an old abandoned museum near my house. That place is extremely creepy. Here's a link to some more info about the event that opened the exhibit. http://chisinow.blogspot.com/.

The final event of the weekend for me was the Festival of Languages that took place on Sunday at the Jewish Community Center. The festival was organized by the Tolerance Club to celebrate the International Day for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. There were 20 languages taught in 40 minute sessions over the course of the afternoon. During the first cycle you chose one European language to learn (French, German, Turkish, Finnish, Portuguese, etc.), in the second a language that is spoken in Moldova (Romanian, Russian, Gagauzian, Bulgarian, etc.), and in the last cycle some more exotic languages (Urdu, Chinese, Swahili, Japanese and more.) I attended the lessons on Turkish, Gagauzian, and Swahili. It was very cool that they found native speakers of so many languages to attend and teach basic phrases as well as share information about their cultures.