The professor in charge of the event opened the meeting by introducing the guests. The first person he mentioned was the young American who looks just like one of our Moldovan students and whose name, Raspberry, even shows that she is basically one of us. Everyone turned to look at me and I gave a little wave. Then he went on to introduce the ambassador from Russia.
To my surprise, the entire conference was conducted in Russian. I guess this is because they didn't want to hire a translator and some of the guests did not speak Romanian. Most of the roundtables and meetings I have been to have had simultaneous translation but this event was a bit less formal and more like a discussion most of the time then presentations with powerpoint and all that. I was expecting at least a few of the talks to be in Romanian though since the agenda was all in Romanian and of course most of the professors there are publishing their work in Romanian. Not to mention this was a conference about Moldovan identity and the official language of Moldova is Moldovan/Romanian. At any rate, I was glad everything was in Russian so that I could understand the talks.
I have way too much to write about since there were at least 25 talks over the course of the day so I'll just highlight a few points that I thought were interesting. One discussion touched on the fact that Moldovan history is taught in Transnistria but not in the rest of Moldova where the subject is Romanian history and that it is very difficult to find journals that will publish articles about Moldova rather than Romania. One speaker said that his grandson was told he was wrong when he claimed that Stefan cel Mare (The Prince of Moldavia from 1457-1504) was Moldovan, not Romanian. Another speaker said that his granddaughter told him one day that she is Romanian; he asked how that could be since he and his wife are Moldovan as are her parents.
Someone from Transnistria mentioned that 18% of citizens in a poll consider themselves to be Soviet people which is even more interesting than responding that one is a citizen of the world seeings as the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.
A professor proposed the idea of creating a separate term for people who reside in Moldova (including Russians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, etc.) that distinguishes them from ethnic Moldovans. This system is used in Russia where ethnic Russians are "russkiye" and citizens of the Russian federation are "rossiyane." This sparked some debate among the participants but I don't think the guy was able to explain himself as well as he wanted to and it will be interesting to read his paper when it's published.
The most interesting topic of discussion for me focused on migration and Moldovans living abroad. One of the professors has conducted a study of Moldovans living in Portugal. He conducted interviews and found that the migrants there feel that if one wants to integrate into the culture she should let go of her Moldovan identity. He also found that Russian and Romanian speaking Moldovans abroad are divided and if they do meet they tend to speak in Portuguese rather than Russian. Another interesting point he made is that Moldovans who have been living/working abroad come back to Moldova when they are pensioners because they have managed to be able to receive pensions from both countries and it is less expensive to live here.
That's all I have to say about the conference for now other than that we had a nice banquet at the end and I gathered up the courage to give a toast in Russian. I talked to a lot of the students who were excited to meet me because they have either worked in the US or will be going there soon.
On Saturday night I went to a Romanian rap concert with Melissa. While we were waiting outside a guy sitting near us asked if we were speaking English and it turned out that he is visiting Moldova from LA as an aspiring Russian rap artist. He was born in Chisinau; his mom is from Odessa and his dad is from Cameroon but studied medicine in Moldova. I saw that one of the Moldovan rappers who would be performing that night, Guz, was just hanging around outside so I told this guy to go introduce himself to see if they could collaborate on something. Here's one of Guz's videos; it even has some English subtitles. The concert was pretty good overall. There weren't as many people there as I expected and Guess Who, the main act, only performed shortened versions of his songs which was kind of lame. It was a different crowd then we were used to since we usually end up running into Russians but, other than the guy from LA, most of the people there were Romanian-oriented.
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