Anyway, there is minimal Romanian practicing here for me, and if I want to get better it would have to be through a tutor or some mainly Romanian speaking friends - which I am working on. Spending time at home in Balti though is interesting because I'm by myself, and have nobody to talk to like I did with a host family. The point and fact of the matter is that my Romanian level is at a halt, and the idea of learning Russian seems ridiculous to me.
I do recognize that I am in a unique opportunity living in a city that speaks Russian, and that I have a year left and if I tried really hard I could pick up a thing or two - outside of the 11.3 words I know at this point. But this is what is discouraging. 1. Russian is really hard, anybody will admit that. 2. I studied Romanian intensively for two months, about 4-5 hours a day, 6 days a week, lived with a host family for a year, and I am about average at Romanian. Now I live by myself, don't have a chance (or am I convincing myself of this???) at intensive classwork, or a family to practice it with. I guess I think of how hard I worked on learning Romanian, and what level I am at now after a year, and then I think of picking up Russian - seems too much.
I have recently decided that I do want to learn another language though. I just think that I would like to learn another Romance language as it would 'click' faster.
Living up here with a site mate has been good. We have been pretty good at holding ourselves to running about four times a week for over a month now which is good. We are expecting another new volunteer up here in Balti with us the around the 6th which will be great. At this point the grant writing process is moving along quite well. We are almost finished writing the proposal in both English and Romanian. Now we need to find possible funders who would be willing to fund the playground for our street children center. Speaking of which, I better go and work on that now.
