Thanksgiving in Ukraine!

I celebrated my first Thanksgiving in Ukraine this week with my friends from my Peace Corps training cluster, our Language Facilitator Larysa and our Technical Facilitator Ludmyla. It was awesome, and we even went around the table to say all that we are thankful for! I am thankful for all of my new friends here in Ukraine, for my health, for my wonderful Ukrainian host family and my family at home in California!

Our little Thanksgiving dinner!

Thanksgiving was a really busy day for us, starting out with Russian class in the morning and then I went with my host mom to see my sister off at the train station. My host sister left to go work in beautiful Crimea :( and I will miss her dearly. She is hilarious and fun to have around the house.

At home with my host mom Sveta and my host sister Inna!

My host mom and sister on the platform, ready to go.

First, we wrote a huge text in Russian explaining what the American traditions for Thanksgiving were. It turned out really cute, and our flipchart explains that eating turkey and giving thanks are two Thanksgiving traditions.  I didn't know that there were so many theories on why we eat turkey on Thanksgiving!

In our Russian language classroom with our Thanksgiving flipcharts…

We also wrote a little recipe for stuffing, adapted to what is available here in Ukraine (meaning that it contains parsley and dill instead of oregano or Italian seasoning). Heather and I made the stuffing from this recipe, and it actually turned out pretty well!

Is my Russian handwriting better than my regular English handwriting?

Mmmmm, stuffing!

For dinner, we cooked 2 chickens instead of a turkey (turkey is expensive here). I wish that I could say that we picked out fresh chickens from the back yard, but our chickens came from the supermarket. We were kind of creative and spread mayonnaise all over the chickens, which actually didn’t turn out as strange as it sounds. Then we spiced them with some packet of chicken seasoning, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, dill and parsley. And when I say we, I mean that Nathan prepared the raw chicken while the rest of us worked on cooking the other dishes.

Nathan hard at work.

Two seasoned chickens.

We made mashed potatoes (without a potato masher), which was really interesting. Since we didn't have a potato masher, we just smashed the boiled potato chunks with a fork first and then a big soup spoon. The potatoes didn’t turn out as smooth, but they were still tasty! We totally forgot about making gravy with the juices from the chicken though.

Monica and Heather peeling potatoes with knives.

Heather and I dicing the potatoes.

Jakob used an old family recipe and cooked an awesome macaroni and cheese casserole! It had layers of macaroni, Colby cheese (or the closest that we could get to Colby here), butter, milk, and some crushed Tuc crackers sprinkled on top. Tuc crackers are just like Ukrainian version of club crackers and they are awesome. Our adopt-a-cluster Margo recommended them to us, and she was right – the crackers are a delicious salty snack.

That casserole has a whole kilogram of cheese!

Laura slicing butter.

“That’s too nostril-y!” snacking on some cheese with Heather and Nathan.

After about three hours of cooking together in Larysa’s kitchen, our food was finally ready! The whole apartment smelled delicious and I’m sure the whole building could smell it too.

The finished mac and cheese casserole and our pot of veggies.

I've never cut a whole chicken before, usually I only buy parts of chicken like thighs, legs, etc. But it really wasn't that hard, there was plenty of chicken to go around and everyone got their preference on light or dark meat. 

Monica and Nathan with the chickens.

We set up the table and ate like a little Peace Corps Ukraine family. I love my cluster :)

We are all ready to eat!

Only 2 more weeks of Training left! We all taught our last lessons at school this week, and our classes all said that they would miss us.

Nathan's class made him a card and put up ballons!

 Monica's 4th form students were so sad to see her go that many of them wrote her thank-you cards and even gave her small gifts :) My last 10th form lesson was a fun one - we played tic tac toe with some of their vocabulary words and also worked on translating the Thanksgiving posters from Russian to English.

My last 10th form class, with my turkey day posters and their turkey hands.

For homework last Wednesday, I assigned my 10th grade class to write 4 sentences about what they were thankful for on the 4 fingers of a hand-traced turkey. I wish I had the resources like colored paper, scissors, crayons, and glue to actually make paper turkeys here... that was one of my favorite things to do in school when I was little, along with making pink and red heart-shaped paper valentines.

Turkey hands are adorable.

Guess what else happened this week? It SNOWED last night!!!! OMG SNOW!! We were all really excited to see snow, and one of my Ukrainian friends from dance class even called me to tell me that it was snowing outside. I haven't seen snow since... last January when there was a random snowstorm in Atlanta. I forgot how beautiful everything is when it is covered with snow.

Two words: snow angel.

The playground in front of my building, all covered with snow!

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!

Ukrainian Dance Class and English Week

For the past few weeks, Laura, Nathan and I have been attending a dance class here in Ukraine! I originally wanted to join a traditional Ukrainian dance class, but that class is closed to the public (due to the dance troop is paid to perform at events so they are pretty professional). We attend dance class twice a week in the evenings and its great to have an extracurricular activity to do outside of the classroom. Plus I get the chance to just dance around in my TOMS shoes for a few hours. I don't really have proper dance shoes (the ladies here dance in 2 inch heels) but they don't sell any dance shoes in my little town, so I'd have to find them in Kyiv and I have no idea where to look for dance shoes. 

So far, we have learned the Cha-Cha-Cha, the Rumba, the Samba, the Jive, the Waltz, the Slow Waltz, the viennese Waltz and a hip-hop dance. There are also a few standard dance steps that our instructor calls the New York and the Stop-and-Go.  I love when we dance to familiar American music, and I actually had the opportunity to teach an American hip-hop dance move :) Dance class is also fun because the instructions are all in Russian... and the count is also in Russian - Raz, Dva, Tree etc. So I get to practice my Russian with the other people in the class and they like to practice their English skills with us so it works out well! I've also picked up a few random Russian words that haven't been taught in our Peace Corps Russian language lessons.

Here are a few photos from our dance class. My apologies for not chronicling this as much as I would have liked to - usually I am busy trying to follow dance steps in Russian and therefore I always forget to take photos during class.

One of the ladies is teaching me part of the Rumba dance. Check out my friend Luba's shoes in the background...  I am always impressed with how well she moves in those heels!

Practicing the Cha-Cha-Cha, and watching Laura (in the gray shirt) figure out the steps.

I can't believe we are already done with the Language facilitator rotation! We have been in Ukraine for approximately 6 weeks now, and Russian class is moving along rapidly. Here is Vika, our rotational Language facilitator, and her younger sister who came to visit us!

We got a picture with her sister! She was super sweet and just as excited to practice her English with us, and patient with us when we were trying to practice our Russian with her.

 We have been building our Russian vocabulary and now I can tell the time of day, talk about the weather, speak about dates and birthdays, name buildings within a city, give directions, talk about traveling on public transportation and describe most of the furniture items within my apartment using prepositions. We have learned the 4 different motion verbs in Russian for transportation - walking and traveling by vehicle (for everyday actions, for completed actions/to emphasize the duration of an action, for the beginning of an action, for the ending of an action) in the present, past and future tenses.

We played a board game in Russian class to practice saying where we were coming from and headed to, using common words like school, library, bazaar, etc.

For example, my character is the bear and I am walking from the theater to the park (between circles 24 and 26).

Nathan is practicing how to give directions in Russian while walking within a city.

Have you ever thought about how many different grammatical tenses there are in English? There are 27! Here is a photo of an exercise that we did during one of our technical training sessions.

We should have just watched Schoolhouse Rock and called it a day haha.

Margo, our super awesome Adopt-a-Cluster mentor visited this week! It was really cool to hear about her experiences with training and living on the eastern side of Ukraine. She was actually in an advanced Russian language cluster as well and now she lives in a small coal mining town (and they have a pool in the town!).

We also helped plan after-school activities for English week at school! The theme for English week was "Welcome to America" and it was a great opportunity to work with all different forms and practice English. We grouped the forms (grades) into different days and planned games and activities based on age and skill levels. We also made several posters advertising the schedule for English week.

This is the poster from the front lobby of the school, with my fun little signs about American Holidays!

For 1-4th form, we played games like Duck Duck Goose, Simon Says, and Red Light Green Light. We also sang the Hokey Pokey, I Don't Wanna be a Chicken, and I'm a Little Teapot. Although we had to give some of the instructions in Russian, the kids absolutely loved the games!

Kids love running around in circles for Duck Duck Goose, but watch out because they are super serious about it!

A huge game of Red Light Green light is hilarious with little kids and certainly helps them practice their listening skills in English.

For the older students, we presented about everyday life as a teenager - going to school, working part time, after school clubs/sports, music, etc. I taught the 10/11th form students several popular American dances such as how to do the Cupid Shuffle and Cha-Cha Slide.

The six of us PCTs with my 10th form class :)

And of course last but not least - I just wanted to share what our school lunch looks like. It is a ton of food for $8 UAH (about $1.20 USD). This photo is from last Wednesday, we had mashed potatoes, hot dogs, apple pancakes with honey (not as good as maple syrup but still tasty), bread and cabbage.

Nathan and Monica are ready to chow down.

To My Mind… Halloween in Ukraine and Kyiv Take 2

I would like to take a quick poll: have you ever heard this phrase “to my mind” before? I had never heard this phrase before I moved to Ukraine, instead of using that phrase I would have used “I think that” or perhaps used the phrase “in my opinion”. I have found that “to my mind” is commonly used in Ukraine by English teachers and anyone who has studied English in Ukraine is familiar with this phrase. This is strange to me and everyone else in my cluster, but we suppose it must be a colloquial British English phrase. If you have any insight on this phrase, I would love to hear about it.

We celebrated our first American holiday in Ukraine by traveling to Обухів (Obuhov in Russian) for Halloween last weekend. Обухів is a town of about 40,000 people and many Peace Corps Trainees are located close by. We met up with about 20 PCTs from other towns and had fun hanging out with all together for the day. Ukrainians do not celebrate Halloween, but they do learn about it in school.

My claim to fame – I taught all the PCTs how to properly do the asian tourist pose.

First stop was the local park. I like the swings that they have here, they all have seat-backs (kind of like those red swings in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta).

Catherine and Nathan rocked out the spinning wheel thing.

Everybody loves a sandbox!

After the park, we decided to take a walk into the woods. Being in the woods was a nice change of pace since my town is mostly agricultural and we do not have any sort of woods or foresty areas nearby.

Chilling on a log in the woods.

The PCTs from around Obuhiuv plus Nicole.

Monica, Nathan and Catherine.

My friend Warren used his Eagle Scout skills to start a bonfire for us, with the help of Nitai and a couple of the other guys. I haven’t been to a bonfire in forever, I wish we had brought marshmellows to make s’mores! That would have been a fun American traditition to celebrate Halloween with.

Warren building the kindling into a little pyramid to start the fire. 

Nitai decided to take over and show us how to start a fire!

Nathan went foraging for firewood!
It was great getting to see some of my friends from the 40 Ѕ Staging group and meeting people from  the original Group 40 that staged a week before us. It was interesting to hear about everyone’s different experiences with their host families and teaching English!

Warren, Allyson, Katie, Cary, Monica and Laura.

Adam, Nicole, me, Nathan, Catherine and Nitai.

Gotta represent.
The standard jump photo (this was the best out of like 10 attempts, I’ve apparently gotten rusty at jumping since the summer).

Warren and Nitai, two of my good friends from Staging.

The 4 of us from my cluster!

Although we didn’t get to celebrate Halloween the traditional way with costumes and trick-or-treating, I told Nathan that he should be a Babushka (grandmother) for Halloween. Fun fact: the phrase “trick-or-treat” is apparently translated into Ukrainian as “candy-or-die!”

See? Nathan would make a great Babs, he just needs a few gold teeth.

We went to Kyiv again with our new Language Facilitator for bank day, which was fun but it made me a little nervous to walk around while carrying $2500 UAH in cash. We also went to visit the Peace Corps head office downtown.

Yay Peace Corps Ukraine!
Here are some more photos from walking around Kyiv. There were quite a few other PCT groups that went to Kyiv on Monday, and it was fun running into fellow Peace Corps people randomly around the city. We took the metro train a few more times and guess what? A young lady about our age was kind enough to give up her seat on the crowded train for Monica, since Monica is wearing a boot for her broken foot. That was a surprisingly nice gesture and definitely a Cultural Moment here in Ukraine!

This is contemporary art at its crunchiest… it is a cat made out of plastic forks!

I love the architecture of the older buildings in Kyiv.

We ran into Andrew and Avital while they were looking for the Golden Gate on their scavenger hunt.

 This is what is known as the Golden Gate. It is an old church and also has a metro stop nearby.

For lunch, we went to a little place called The Drum (or ??????????) and I had a cheeseburger and fries! Well, I guess this isn’t as exciting because I could have gotten a cheeseburger at McDonalds by the train station but this burger actually was pretty good.

 NOMS!

We also picked up hard copies of the Kyiv Post in English at this restaurant!

We walked around Independence Square again and stopped by the big post office there so Monica could mail a parcel home. Actually, we had a small task assigned by our Langage Facilitator to take pictures of street signs and advertisements with endings in different grammatical cases, but those pictures are boring so I won't post them up here. 

Standing on top of the Globus shopping center and across the street from Independence Square.

 Did you know that they have mini coopers over here? This is the 1st one that  I’ve seen!

On the way home from Kyiv, we apparently bought tickets for the slow train that took us almost 5 hours to get back to our town. It should only have taken us 3 hours, but we kept stopping for 30 minute intervals. I have no idea why we kept stopping, the intercom was so fuzzy and I could only make out a few words in Russian (though they were probably speaking in Ukrainian anyways). It is hard to believe that it took us 5 hours to travel 100 km (or about 65 miles) because that is absolutely ridiculous. To top that, the train wasn’t heated so we were freezing in addition to being exhausted from walking around Kyiv all day.

Is that a bum on the train? Nope, its just Monica all bundled up!

But after I got home at like 11pm instead of 9pm as expected, my host mom told me that the route we took was longer than it appeared on the map at the train station. Nerd Alert: Maybe this is why I wasn't so good at Optimization, I should have found the shortest path by calculating the weight of each arc by distance instead of just eyeballing the number of stops shown on the map. Moral of the story: always consult your local Ukrainian host mom when it comes to traveling around Ukraine by public transportation!

Don't those two paths look about equal to you?