Monday, July 21, 2014

July 21, 2014

I offered to give piano lessons to a member here who really wants to learn piano.  He's a super cool member who's 26 years old and translates for the church.  He knows like 5 or 6 languages and is working on another 2.  His parents are Hungarian but now they all live in Romania.  For some reason there's a lot of beef here between Hungarians and Romanians, which is really dumb because their feud is based on a land grab that happened a long time ago and they can't get over it.  Tibi (the member I'm teaching piano to) says that their cultures are really similar and they should just get over it and appreciate each other.  Good policy.  The reason he wants to learn piano is because he wants to write a history of jazz in Romania, and he's done a ton of research on it, but now he believes that in order to write a convincing compilation of everything about Romanian jazz, he has to learn how to play jazz.  Really cool but daunting endeavor.  After our piano lesson, we got to talking about space because I love space and also he has a monstrous bookshelf of space books.  Don't know where I was going with that tangent.  Okay well, onward.  So my companion found out that I offered to teach piano lessons to Tibi, so then he went and offered it to everyone in the beginner English class, without asking me of course.  So I got roped into doing 3 other sets of piano lessons.  I don't even teach piano!  I only offered to teach piano to Tibi because he specifically asked me.  Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Just Romanian Things
So this week in church, the speaker before the rest hymn ended really early and I wasn't expecting it, and the conductor said we would sing a sacrament hymn on accident.  So I was surprised as I made my way up to the organ to play the rest hymn.  The director was messing around with the book as I started to play the prelude to There Is Sunshine In My Soul Today.  Then, she looked over at me and reached over to put a book on the organ or something and I thought she was telling me to stop, so I did, then I realized that's not what she was doing, so I kept going.  For some reason after all this confusion, I forgot that Sunshine is played in G major, and not D major.  So I played the intro in D major before realizing my horrible error and hiccupping hardcore near the end of the intro.  And of course, the intro is the only time people actually pay attention to the organ, so that's great.  Needless to say, I biffed hard on the song.  It wasn't that I couldn't play it, I just thought it was in a different key.  The past couple weeks after I played piano, one member would come up to me and tell me I was wonderful and that I was a pianist and how great it was and all that jazz.  Well this week he comes up to me and goes you're no longer good, man.  You're varza.  Varza is the romanian word for cabbage.  I was called cabbage.  It's actually used colloquially to me lame or bad or something like that.  It's funny though, because they love cabbage here.  So shouldn't cabbage be a great thing?  I mean, in a culture where if something isn't wrapped in cabbage, it's got cabbage inside, wouldn't cabbage be a compliment?  Just Romanian things.

Sorry, I don't have chef to do two truths and a lie this time.  The lie last time was the dogs though.  Also, I forgot my card reader so pictures will have to wait till next week.  Sorry for being cabbage guys.

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