Visiting Obuhiev Again and More Dance Class Photos

I traveled to Obuhiev again last weekend with Monica and Nathan to visit Vika, our old rotational LCF (Language Facilitator). We went shopping at their giant supermarket and bought food to cook fried rice with. I was really excited to find some real ginger root, I miss cooking with ginger and my host mom had no idea where I could buy it in our town. And then as soon as we walked out of the supermarket, I saw a bunch of Babushka stands on the street with much fresher produce and then kind of regretted buying vegetables inside the supermarket. But no worries, the fried rice still turned out well!

Catherine (from Vika's Obuhiev group of PCTs) joined us for lunch.

Dara joined us after her run

After lunch, we walked around town a bit and checked out one of their second-hand stores. Apparently the word for second-hand in Russsian is also second-hand. The shop owners were very nice and curious about where all of us Americans had come from. While walking around, I found a GIANT cell phone!! I'm sure all the locals in Obuhiev judged me hardcore for taking this photo but this was definitely the highlight of my day :)

ZOMG! Can you hear me now?

There was a Ukrainian traditional dance show in our town this week, but it was on Friday during school hours so unfortunately we weren't able to go. However, Laura and I did get to try on their headdresses during our dance class.

With Laura and her Ukrainian host mom.

My friends from dance class were really excited about taking photos with us, so we took the first 15 minutes of class to snap a few photos.

Laura, Nathan and I with our Ukrainian friends Luba, Marie and Tanya.

Dance mama Sveta (our dance teacher, below in the gray sweater) arranged us all for an artsy dance class photo!

Cha-cha ras, cha-cha ras.

During dance class, we worked some more on the Cha-cha-cha. There are a lot of complicated steps to this dance including twirling around (and I can never remember which way to spin, clockwise or CCW). But it is fun to learn and we're getting better at it each week.

Yes, I dance in my TOMS shoes because I don't have any other shoes that would work (besides maybe my sneakers).

Then I taught the American hip-hop dance to a song that was very popular and swept across the country a few years ago. We've tacked it onto the end of the hip-hop dance that we learned, and the ladies love learning this dance because apparently they rarely do hip-hop dancing in class. I'll let you guess the song that we are dancing to...

The first part of this dance is to kind of jump up slightly and cross your right foot over your left and then jump back to your original position.

Next you punch with your right hand, then left hand, and snap with both hands. I taught this part first using the song "Snap Yo Fingers". 

There are a few more moves inbetween, but the last part of this dance is to crank it - also known as the motorcycle, a dance move which originated in ATL :)

We only have about 3 more weeks left until Swearing-In! I can't believe that I've already been in Ukraine for almost 2 months. I'm going to miss my cluster very much when we are all sent to our different permanent sites!