Why did the turkey cross the road?

To follow the rest of the wild turkey family to the other side! This is crazy, there is a family of like 10 wild turkeys that randomly wander around my neighborhood. This should not be normal, considering that I definitely live in a suburb and nowhere near any turkey (or chicken) farms haha. The car in front of me stopped suddenly and started honking to get the turkeys out of the way, and luckily I had my camera in the front seat next to me to snap this photo of the turkeys!

Mom, dad... wait up for us! We're still in the middle of the road!

I had a great last weekend here in the Bay area! I went downtown to a couple places on Polk Street and met up with Saethang and Priya, a few of my friends from Georgia Tech that were here visiting family for the weekend.

We represent the diversity of Georgia Tech really well :)

My friend Samantha is actually going to law school at UC Hastings. UC Hastings is in downtown San Francisco and pretty close to the Union Square area.

Me and Samantha.

And then my friend Kseniya invited me to attend her going-away-party! Her family is awesome, they are from Latvia and they all speak Russian. Kseniya is another Peace Corps Volunteer heading to Ukraine with me. We are actually on the same exact flight to Staging, flying out from the San Francisco airport ridiculously early this Thursday. Her parents decorated their back yard in yellow and blue (the colors of the Ukrainian flag) and made tons of Russian food.

The two vegetable dishes were delicious with string beans and eggplant. And the pierogie things were also great, they came with a cabbage/mushroom filling and a pork filling.

I kind of already forgot what the names of all the foods were in Russian... mostly because I would just point at it and say, "что это?" (schtoy etta), to ask what is that? So much for learning useful Russian nouns from Rosetta Stone, it doesn't help if I can't string together phrases in Russian. 

The garden salad came from Kseniya's backyard and the purple dish has 3 layers of  fish on the bottom, then beets, then hard-boiled eggs and pomegranate seeds.

 So I'm wondering how similar Ukrainian food will be to Russian food. And I've heard a lot of dishes have mayonnaise, which is one of my least favorite foods (along with peanut butter, curry, and soymilk). I guess I have 2 years and 3 months to find out what the food is like over there.... so stay posted! 
 
Kseniya's бабушка (babushka, or grandma in Russian) was super nice, I sat next to her at lunch to practice some of my Russian words and so she could practice some of her English words : ) And then she had me try on her traditional red scarf-thing. I'm sure this has a proper name in Russian and translated into English, but I've yet to learn it so I'll just stick with scarf-thing for now. Which reminds me, I can't wait to buy a Russian furry hat with ear flaps for the winter! I hope they are cheap in the Ukrainian bazaars!

Kseniya, me and Babushka.

I hope my Ukrainian host family is as nice and welcoming as Kseniya's family! I can't wait to meet them when I get to Ukraine on Saturday! Only 3 more days at home until I leave for Staging in DC!