For the first time in seven years, J and I decided to celebrate Halloween by dressing up. We had an invite to a friend's party, and needed to put together a last minute costume. I went to the internets for some inspiration, and we came up with this: I was the lady-in-curlers lucky winner of $10,000,000!!! And J put on a suit and tie for the occasion. ;) You can't quite see his name tag here, but he was moonlighting as Ed McMahon. We had fun! Before we left the party, other folks insisted that I take the curlers out to see what it did to my hair. In case you were wondering... here's the proof that my hair isn't always straight as a pin.
Lietuviškai: For the past nine weeks, I have been studying Lithuanian in class, five hours a day, five days a week. It is exhausting! And then, of course, there's homework. I'm about one-third of the way through this course. J also took a shorter version of the course so that he will be able to get around Vilnius and handle day-to-day interactions in the native language. Boy, is he glad to be done with the intense language learning, although he's going to study on his own and talk with me to keep up what he has learned.
So, about the Lithuanian language itself: I've been surprised at how similar the language is structured to Russian. Both Russian and Lithuanian also have the concept of process verbs versus completed action verbs (a.k.a. perfective and imperfective). Both languages have five cases of nouns (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental) that decline in masculine, feminine, singular and plural. The reason this is so hard is because the endings on nouns keep changing, depending if the noun is the subject, object, indirect object, etc of the sentence. Before I can say a sentence, I have to remember whether the nouns in the sentence are masculine or feminine, and then think about what case they should be in, and what ending that type of noun takes in the case I want it to be in, and then maybe I can speak, although I've probably messed something up somewhere. So... I bet none of this makes sense, but all I really wanted to say is that they call it a "hard language" with good reason!
I have trouble hearing the differences between vowel sounds. For instance, last week I was reading part of a dialogue out loud on giving directions. I was supposed to say "pereikite" which is an instruction to cross the street, but instead I said "perekite," which is a command to lay eggs! Who knew?
My favorite phrase in Lithuanian is "va" (sounds like "vah"). This is the best all-purpose phrase ever! Basically, it means "there you go." Want dinner? Va. Looking for your other sock? Va. Huh, I never knew that! Well... va.
In addition to language training, we get three hours a week of area studies instruction. While I knew that Lithuania was a Soviet Republic, I didn't have a good understanding of the atrocities that Stalin and other Soviet leaders committed against Lithuanians. They conducted mass deportations during World War II, sending politicians, the educated, and anyone considered a threat to the new communist regime to Siberia before Hitler invaded. The Soviets conducted more deportations after WWII when they declared Lithuania a Soviet republic. Lithuanian was banned from schools and no books could be written in Lithuanian. Lithuania kept up one of the strongest resistance movements, and they were the first to declare independence in 1991.
Lithuanians were pretty creative in the peaceful protests and demonstrations that took place before independence. They showed solidarity with the other Baltic states (Latvia and Estonia) by forming a human chain of people holding hands all the way from the tip of northern Estonia down to Vilnius in southern Lithuania. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union was not always peaceful in its response, and in January 1991, tanks attempted to put down the uprising and killed 13 Lithuanians. In the end, the Soviet violence spurred the Baltic states towards independence and the fall of the Soviet Union. Both of our instructors have first-hand accounts of these events, including deportation to Siberia and being part of the human chain.
As I learn more, I'll share more details of their history. The more I learn, the more excited I am about going to live in this little European country. Can't wait to get there!
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