First Day, PCT

The Peace Corps is full of many acronyms and I am slowly learning them. In Chicago we were in PCS (Peace Corps Staging) and now that we have arrived in country we are in PCT (Peace Corps Training). For the next 11 weeks we will be in PCT; we will go to class Monday - Friday, 8:30am - 5:00pm. In the mornings we will be in intensive Romanian classes and then the afternoon will be composed of other classes, like health, safety, and education. The evenings and weekends will be spend with our gazdas (host families). Our gazdas have been instructed to speak no English to us and at this point we just know a couple simple phrases like thank you and good afternoon. However, that should soon change as we will have to find to some way to communicate.

Yesterday was our first day in PCT in our training site (for security reasons we aren't supposed to mention the town). I think we were all a little jet lagged after leaving Chicago and essentially traveling for over 18 hours by buses and planes to get here. We got a small break yesterday afternoon and went down to park to stretch our legs before our dinner event. I first went to an electronics store here because somehow in the shuffle of transport I lost my digital camera. Luckily, it wasn't a new camera or a very expensive one. However, it was an extremely frustrating situation because I feel like I am usually a very organized person, but in the chaos of packing for 27 months I lost that. It is a little comforting to know that almost everyone has had one thing they have forgotten or lost along the way. I ended going to the store with another trainee who has also lost his camera in Chicago.

After going to the store we ended up at a park a few blocks from our hotel. In the middle of the park with a pavilion filled with old men playing backgammon, rummikub, and chess. With no Romanian at this point, another trainee decided to use the universal language of chess to get to know a few of the locals.