Little victories.

Some days I get tired of learning Romanian.  I seem to hit these plateaus where I make the same mistakes over and over again, and despite learning what I did wrong and why, when the same type of sentence comes up later, I mess it up again.  And again.  Of course, these tend to not be the same mistakes that Jack makes, which is one of the reasons it's a good thing we're here together -- but it also tends to drive me crazy when he gets it and I don't.  (How's that for a confession?) 

But!  I'm learning to look for little victories in other areas of my life when I feel like my Romanian is foarte, foarte rău (that means "really, really bad," in case there was any doubt).  So here are the list of little things that made me smile today -- our mundane, daily victories.

1.  We put out a trashcan fire!  On our way to the bus stop, we noticed a trashcan smoking wildly, and though other people obviously noticed it too, nobody was doing anything about it.  (To be fair, very few Romanians seem to carry a water bottle with them, so there was probably little anyone could do.)  We had full Nalgenes in our backpacks, so we stopped and Jack dumped his into the smoking can.  The haze soon dissipated and we went on to catch the bus.

2.  We ran mile repeats!  For those of you who have been worried about the amount of tasty Romanian treats we've been consuming in the past two months, this should be good news... we can still run up hills.  And today we did, and it felt great.

3.  We taught a bunch of Romanian tweens how to play telephone pictionary!  For those of you who don't know, this is our favorite game in the world.  It's a mix between its two namesakes, so players write a sentence and then pass it around the circle, alternating between depicting it with drawings or with words, so that the original sentence gets hilariously distorted by the end.  We went to help our Romanian tutor Ramona with her English class for a group of preteen Romanians, and they seemed to like it a lot too.  Victory.

4.  We spoke a lot of Romanian at dinner... including an hour-long conversation with a rather lonely gentleman who asked if he could sit down with us, since the rest of the tables in the restaurant were full.  We heard a lot about his life, listened to him lament the linguistic imperialism of English, and talked for a long time about Canada, even touching on the Mounties.  Weird.  It felt surprisingly normal, as far as conversations with strangers go.  Oddly enough, there was also a basketball team of Americans from Georgia and Florida in the restaurant, which surprised and delighted me -- though it's always funny to rediscover how easy it is to accidentally eavesdrop in your native language!  Oops.

So, mundane and small and maybe not blog- or journal-worthy.  But sometimes on days when it's cloudy and you have a stomachache and you simply can't remember how to properly use an indirect object, it's the little victories that speak as testaments of grace.