Winter Adventures in Ukraine

Brrrrr... its so cold here in Ukraine now! It has been between -10 and -20 degrees C in my town, which is definitely a lot colder than winters in Atlanta, GA. Many children are getting the flu, and schools across Ukraine tend to either shorten classes or cancel school altogether when it gets too cold outside. Many of my friends who live in the Donetsk Oblast have quarantine at their schools, meaning that school has been canceled to prevent the students from getting sick from each other. Well, I'm not sure how cold is "too cold" to go to school, but my school is still operating normally for now. My town newspaper published an article about me coming to work at the Lyceum and about my sitemate Sam who works at the Gymnasium in our town. Here are two photos from the newspaper- I uploaded them and can't seem to rotate them back to horizontal (sorry, blogfail!).

My picture from the front page.

In the classroom with a few of my 8th grade students.

This past weekend, I traveled to visit my friend Alison in the neighboring town (about an hour away from me). Alison lives in an apartment building close to her town's Бокзал (vokzal - train station) and right next to a swimming pool! We went swimming with a few teachers from her school, which was quite the adventure... they made us take legit showers (including washing our bodies with soap) before we put on our swimsuits, only then were you allowed to get into the pool area. Most swimming pools have a rule that you should shower before swimming, but this was honestly the first pool that I have been to in many years that strictly enforces the shower before swimming rule.

The pool turned out to be a 3 lane by 20 meter pool, which was completely strange and foreign to me. I've traveled to quite a few countries and swam in their pools, and this is the FIRST pool that I have encountered that hasn't been one of the international standard lengths of 25 meters (short course), 25 yards (American short course), or 50 meters (Olympic size/long course). They only had one lap swim lane, and no T on the bottom or flags... but they did have blocks! I wish I could have taken a photo of the pool, but I forgot to bring my camera with me.

There is also an outdoor skating rink and football stadium near Alison's apartment. While the football field is completely snowed over, the ice skating rink is super cute. You can rent skates and go ice skating there for just $8 UAH (the equivalent of $1 USD) per hour. Alison goes ice skating there frequently with students from her school, and they invited me to go along with them!

Yasa and I - she is one of Alison's cute 6th graders.

Alison and a few more of her students.

Yesterday, Alison's sitemate Tiago met up with us downtown and we went to their Bazaar (open air market) to go shopping for some fresh food. We decided to make pizza using lavash (the Ukrainian version of tortillas) and random toppings such as pineapple, ham, cheese, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, beans, and red bell peppers. The pizza was really easy to make and turned out delicious!

so many toppings!

Today, Alison and Tiago and I decided to go check out the old steel mill on the edge of their town. The Kharkiv region used to be a very busy industrial production area with many factories about 50 or 60 years ago. It used to be one of the biggest steel mills during Soviet times, and they employed around 35,000 workers. I'm not sure what happens in the steel mill now (since my industrial Russian vocabulary is pretty limited), but there are still guards posted at the entrances to the mill and the factory is still surrounded by barbed wire. We were hoping to be able to walk inside and take a look at their production lines or operations, but the factory is closed to the public so here are some photos from our walk around the outside of the steel mill.

This sign says that this is a Soviet factory.

maybe an old shipping/receiving dock of their warehouse?

One of the old gates to the factory.

piles of old materials covered in snow.

A crane and some sort of conveyor belt behind the gate.

This week at school, I taught the Past Continuous tense to my 5th grade class. I wrote out a bunch of different verbs, pronouns, and all the names of the students for them to come up to the board and build a sentence in the Past Continuous tense (disclaimer: the teacher that I work with wrote the stuff on the chalkboard). Also, I applied for Darien Book Aid and my request got approved! That means that 20 lbs of free English books will be shipped to my site soon. I'm really excited to see what they send us :)

Helping one of my students learn Past Continuouse.

5th graders love talking about playing football!

 One of the English teachers that I work with at my school was nice enough to give me a jar of pickles and a jar of pickled squash. Her name is Svetlana and she hosted the Peace Corps volunteer that my school had from 2006-08. She brought me pickles because she remembered that the other PCV girl loved pickles... I love Ukrainian pickles too! The pickles here are all home grown and home-made, canned in glass mason jars. And this reminds me of  The Pickle Project, a project by two girls who worked in Ukraine as Fulbright Scholars. You can check out their project here about the local foodways of Ukraine, including the sustainable food practices of growing and selling produce locally.

Mmmm... pickled squash and cucumbers!

Kharkiv Taco Night, Panda Project, and Starting My English Clubs!

Last weekend, I invited a few other Peace Corps Volunteers from my oblast over to my apartment to cook tacos for dinner and watch some American football. It was great to hang out with everyone, and meet some of the older volunteers that weren't able to make it to our oblast's Christmas get-together. We met up and hung out in Kharkiv for the day, then traveled back to my little town.

Grabbing some coffee with Jillian and Erika.

 We walked around the art bazaar, off of the Historical Musem metro stop. All of the artwork being sold was produced by local artists, including these two little snowmen :-)

Or perhaps they are snow-monkeys?

Although night was falling (since it gets dark around 4pm here), we walked down to the Blagoveshchensky (Благовещенский) Cathedral in Karl Marx Plaza. It is a Ukrainian orthodox church, more affectionately known as"The Candy Cane Church".

I'll have to go back to take a picture of the church during the day, so you can actually see the red/white candy cane stripes.

We went inside the church to take a look around. Since it is an Eastern orthodox church, women are required to cover their heads with something such as a scarf while inside the church. I am not a member of the Eastern orthodox church, but according to Wikipedia, this tradition of head covering stems from 1 Corinthians 11.

Alison, Jillian, Erika and I with our scarves covering our heads.

While we were in Kharkov, I participated in my friend Jillian's "Panda Project". The Panda Project is a quest to have many different people photographed with Jillian's black and white hand-knitted panda hat. You can check out her Panda Project photo album on Facebook here.

Fun fact: the word for panda in Russian is also panda!

After walking around Kharkiv, we all hopped on the bus back to my town. We cooked up a storm in my little kitchen- we used ground chicken for the taco meat (it tasted great and not gross like it sounds, I promise!), cooked rice, shredded cheese, made a veggie filling of bell peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers tossed in oil and Italian seasoning, and I sliced up some gigantic squares of lavash (the Ukrainian version of tortillas) into burrito sized pieces. Our Ukrainian friend Vadim impressed us all with his delicious guacamole made with avocados and limes. The tacos turned out great!

Say... Queso!

I started off my English clubs last week at school by teaching my students how to play UNO, duck duck goose, Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, and I also taught the 11th formers how to write informal letters. My 5th form class also wrote their first pen pal letters to America as part of the World Wise Schools correspondence program and we are very excited to be hearing back from our partner school in Florida sometime soon! This week, I plan on getting my older (high school age) students ready to participate in the International Writing Olympics, coming up next month :-)

Back to School and Celebrating Old New Years in Ukraine!

Sorry for the long delay between posts, I was traveling around a bit for the holidays. I went back to my old town in the Kyiv oblast for New Years, which was great. It was nice to be back and to see my host family (including our two pet bunnies). I also had the chance to walk around Kyiv on a sunny day :)

Independence Square at night, with all the holiday festivities.

The view of St. Sophia's church from up in the bell tower.

A mosaic exhibit inside St. Sofia's church entirely made out of the hand-painted eggs! Click the picture to enlarge for a closer view of the eggs.

There is a skylift behind St. Michael's church! I am going to check this out next time I travel to Kyiv.

When I got back to my site, it had snowed! So we did have a white Christmas in Ukraine after all, since most people in Ukraine celebrate Christmas on January 7th. Thank goodness for my Yaktrax, I would have slipped and fallen on the snowy and icy roads without them!

The walkway leading to the front my school, all covered in snow!

The snow is so pretty on the trees.

During the winter break, I also traveled to Kupyansk (a nearby town that is a little bigger than mine) to hang out with a few other American friends. Fun Fact: Kupyansk's claim to fame is that sometime in the period between 1917 – 1934 when Kharkov was the capital of Ukraine, the government apparently moved the capital of Ukraine to Kupyansk for a day. We played Apples to Apples, cooked  homemade hamburgers, and tried a Ukrainian dish - bread and butter topped with fish eggs.

With Alison and David.

The interesting new Ukrainian dish... It looks like sushi but definitely does not taste like sushi!

Me and Chris : )

Ukraine also celebrates Old New Years with several traditions (see previous blog post for the explanation of why there is an old new years and a regular new years). On January 13th, Old New Years Eve, children go from door to door and sing Christmas carols in exchange for candies and chocolates. This is very similar to the American Halloween trick-or-treat tradition, though the Ukrainian children do not dress in costumes for Old New Years. On the morning of Old New Years Day, January 14th, men and boys go around knocking on everyone's doors. According to traditions, it is lucky for the first person to enter each room in a house to be a man or boy. Once the man or boy has entered the room, he throws buckwheat or grain onto the floor and recites a rhyme wishing good luck and happiness for the upcoming year. Then as thanks, the men or boys are presented with small gifts such as candies or $1 UAH bills.The last part of this tradition is that you may not clean up the buckwheat grains until the next day, or else you will sweep away your good luck!

4 students from my 5A class came to throw buckwheat in my English classroom.

I started team teaching my English classes last week. I am currently teaching the 3rd, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 10th forms (grades) and working with 3 of the 4 English teachers at my school. My younger students are super excited to have class with me, they always run up to me and say "hello!" in the halls. My older students are a bit more shy to practice their English, but are also excited to be able to talk to an American and learn some more about American culture and lifestyles during English Club.

With some students from the 8B class and my fellow English teacher Larisa Alexandrovna.

With most of the students in my 5A class.

And last but not least, happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Today was a normal school day for us here in Ukraine, but I had the chance to share the famous quote said by Dr. King in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963: "I have a dream that one day, my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character".

Traveling Ukraine by Train and Starting Off the New Year

Happy New Year! I wish you health, happiness, luck, love and success! С Новым Годом! Желаю вам здоровья, счастья, удачи, любви и успехов! 

I went over to my friend Alison's apartment this week, and baked some chocolate-chip cookies with her and her PCV sitemate, Tiago. Alison and Tiago are both also TEFL volunteers who live in the neighboring town, about 30 minutes away from me by bus. They do not sell chocolate chips in Ukraine so Tiago smashed up 3 large chocolate bars inside a gallon-size ziploc bag with a meat hammer. Another interesting thing about baking in Ukraine was that they do not label degrees whatsoever on their ovens, so we just turned it onto high and let the cookies bake until golden brown (completely disregarding the recipe's suggested 7-9 minutes). I love baking, I used to bake like every week while going to school in Atlanta - you can ask my roommates about the seemingly never-ending cookie jar :)

Yum... American cookies were a delicious reminder of home.

 For a Christmas/New Years present to myself, I bought a new cell phone that has Dual Sim Card Standby capabilities... I had never heard of this before I moved to Ukraine. This means that it has 2 sim card slots and that both sim cards are active at the same time (as opposed to Dual Sim Switch, where the phone holds 2 sim cards but only 1 can be active at a time). If you are wondering why the heck I would need 2 sim cards, it is very common in Ukraine for people to carry 2 cell phones with different operators because the service coverage varies by geographic region and it is cheaper or free to call to someone with the same operator. So now I have my Life sim card in this phone, as well as a KyivStar sim card - my town uses mostly KyivStar, even though most cities in our oblast use MTC.

This is a "Fly" brand phone and it cost $375 UAH (about $47 USD). No, I had never heard of it either but it looks just like the Samsung Dual Sim Switch phone and was cheaper (and works well with the Dual Sim Standby). The third slot is actually for a MicroSD memory card, which makes me wish that I had brought mine from my blackberry at home.

My new phone has two dial keys (a phone symbol underlined once and twice), one for dialing with the 1st sim card and one for the 2nd sim card. It also has a dedicated flashlight button, which is convenient at night. And of course one nice thing is that I can text in Russian and read texts in Russian now!

 Even though I waited until it was too late to buy a train ticket to Kyiv to be back in time for New Years Eve, I successfully traveled back to the Kyiv Oblast to visit my old host family and it is wonderful to be back home. Buying the train tickets at the train station (Вокзал -Vokzal) wasn't too bad, I told the cashier that I had only studied Russian for 3 months and asked her to please excuse my Russian. She was really kind and helped me book roundtrip tickets succesfully, then walked me through all the information printed in Ukrainian on the actual ticket. Even though almost everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian and Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian so things like documents are printed in Ukrainian (including street signs, train tickets, and classes are taught in Ukrainian in schools).

Here is a picture of my train ticket. My apologies, I have no idea why it decided to rotate itself - I tried to reformat it unsuccessfully :(

 For my first time traveling within Ukraine by myself, I didn't do too bad! I traveled in a third class car on the train, called the "platzcart wagon". First class is the luxury car (which I've never been in), and second class is called "coupe".  The only difference between second and third class is that the second class compartments consist of 4 beds in 1 room that has a sliding door with a lock. I traveled by "coupe" when I moved from Kyiv to my permanent site with my Ukrainian counterpart, and Peace Corps was nice enough to purchase all 4 tickets inside 1 compartment. Peace Corps recommends that volunteers travel by third class "platzcart" if they are traveling by themselves, and I can definitely understand - it could be a little awkward to be inside a compartment with 3 strangers for 11 hours (or more on an overnight train).

To start off the new year, my landlady came over to my apartment earlier this week and showed me two bags of books that were hidden away in a corner of my room, behind an armchair. These two bags of books turned out to hold some hidden treasures: English grammar books,including some with Russian translations! 

Yes, I laid out all of these books on top of my map of Ukraine.

 Apparently the previous tenant had been a young man studying something like construction/gas engineering (according to Mama Lyda, my landlady) at a university in nearby Kharkiv and he left behind these two bags of books when he moved out. The landlady told me that she didn't know what to do with the books, and I was welcome to use them if I wanted. The first few books were about AutoCAD and engineering physics in Russian (which of course I thought was interesting because I'm a nerd) but I was pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of English books - apparently he was studying English as well as engineering! This was very exciting, because finding a bunch of books that will be useful while teaching English was like Christmas!

Here is a list of the books that I found in my room:

• Право и Бизнес (Law and Business English)
• 2000 Русских 2000 Английский идиом (2000 English Idioms with Russian Variants)
• Английскиий язык с Мюриэль Спарк (Short stories in English)
• Русско-Английский Разговорник (A Russian/English Phrasebook)
• Англо-Русски Тематический иллюстрированный Словарь (An English-Russian Thematic Pictorial Encyclopedic Dictionary)
• Реалный АнглийскийЖ Диалогом в Актуальных Ситуациях (Living English in Real Situations: with Exercises, Keys and a Glossary)
• 100 Англсйский Существительн(100 English Nouns and 1000 Idioms) 
• English Grammar in Use (blue cover) and Essential Grammar in Use (red cover) by Raymond Murphy (I know my Technical Faciliator (TCF) would be very excited to know that I have the infamous blue AND red grammar books from our PST resource center)
• Безопасность и Качество в Строитульстве: Основные Термины и Оределния (Safety and Quality in Construction: Basic Terms and Definitions)

Nerd Alert: The last book is one of the ones that I am extremely impressed and excited about using - it has a lot of technical terms that are relevant to what I studied at Georgia Tech as an Industrial Engineering major. Some of the topics covered in this book include how to construct flowcharts, database maintenance, basic indexed sequential access method, resource allocation, what a delimiter is, break-even analysis, fixed-rate loan, production cycle, explanations of venture capital and investments, and statistic analysis of process accuracy and stability. All of these topics are explained in Russian, to define key words and phrases in English... but this book will definitely be useful in improving my technical Russian vocabulary :)

I'm also pleased to be able to announce that I have been matched with a gifted third grade class from an elementary school in Florida for the World Wise Schools Correspondence Program through Peace Corps! If you want to find out more information about this program (and learn how to get involved), check out the World Wise page on the Peace Corps website. 

So my students in Ukraine will be writing and receiving letters from actual American students! I will be teaching 3rd, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 10th forms (grades) at my school. Since my school is on vacation from classes until January 10th, I haven't had the chance to tell the students about this yet, but I'm sure that they will be absolutely thrilled about this program and the opportunity to become pen pals with someone halfway across the world.