Salut (Hi)

Buna ziua (Good afternoon),

Welcome to my first attempt at bloggin'. Not quite sure how I feel about labeling myself as a blogger just yet, I probably need to get some vintage black-framed glasses and need to be writing this blog on a Mac in a coffee shop. I may be generalizing. With that I will try my hardest to give you all (by all I mean mom & dad) an informative and hopefully entertaining summary of my Peace Corps adventure.

If you are reading this that means you are probably curious about how my adventures in Moldova are going. Well they haven't started just yet, but I have begun to learn Romanian and am excited to leave. I will be leaving for Washington DC for the initial training on June 10th and will most likely be headed off two days later. I hope to see as many of you as possible before I take off.

As for my new occupation I will be an Agribusiness and Rural Business Development Advisor. My understanding of what that means is that I will be doing consulting work for farmers, small businesses and co-ops. I believe that "consulting" will consist of a lot of strategic planning, cost-benefit analysis and facilitating the usage of newer technology. What I am doing will probably be changing a lot depending on the needs of the friends I am working with.

For those of you who don't know anything about Moldova, I recommend watching the video Places That Don't Exist: Moldova on youtube. It is very interesting and well worth the 25 minutes of oh-so-precious time you devote to it. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrLbTHBV3s


Moldova has also been in the news a lot recently for the riots over possible fraudulent votes for the Communist Party that has been in power since 2001. I suggest reading a few articles on that as well.

With that I need to get back to learning Romanian.

Noroc! (Cheers)

Aaron