Kiev and back again...a Erin's tale

So, this has been an exciting and exhausting week! On Tuesday, after class, we went to the arts and music school to learn how to make Ukrainian Easter Eggs. We thought they would take maybe an hour to make.....we thought wrong. They took 4 hours to make and we didn't even finish them! Ukrainians put a whole lot more effort into their Easter Eggs!! First, we picked out a pattern for our eggs. Then, we sketched the patterns with pencils. After that, we went over the lines with these pens. You would fill the top with wax and then hold it over a flame and it would drip slowly out of the bottom. It was pretty cool! As you can imagine, an intricate design would take forever to draw symmetrically, not to mention again with wax! We not only learned what some of the symbols meant, we learned something about Ukrainian teachers. At this point, Laura holds up her egg to the art teacher and says (in Ukrainian), "my egg is pretty, isn't it?" and then the teacher looks at the egg and says ".....no." Then she walks away. Haha, it was pretty amazing. Of course, Laura's egg was pretty, it just had to real Ukrainian symbols on it.

After we finished redrawing our patterns in wax, we dropped the eggs in dye. I was told I had to use red because it has crowns and crowns must be red. THEN we have to wait until the eggs dry and then cover whatever we want to stay red with wax. After that, we redyed the eggs another color. At this point, we had been at the art school for 4 hours, so we decided to come back to take the wax off and take our eggs home.

On Wednesday, we went to Kiev!!!! Well, first we went to Obukhiv for our Safety and Security session and THEN we went to Kiev. So of course after hearing all the horror stories about people who weren't smart about their stuff on the metro, I clutched my purse to myself and gave the evil eye to any babushka who looked at me.

Kiev was fun! It was definitely more of a business trip than a sightseeing trip. The point was to show us how to navigate and survive Kiev. Now that our group has gone to Kiev with Ira once, we can go alone. When we first got there, we learned how to use the metro and we found the main branch of the bank we will be using. Then we went by the train station and then visited the PC headquarters and had a tour of the building. Now comes the best part. We took the metro to the main street and then we had.........SUSHI!!!!!!

I don't know if you guys know how I feel about sushi, but it's just about my favorite thing in the world. It was happy hour so everything that you bought was buy 1 get 1 free. So much sushi!!! And so yummy!! It was very reasonably priced too for being right in the middle of Kiev. For 6 people, the total about about 500 HR or $62.50 or about $10/person. I love some things about Ukraine!

I'm excited to go back to Kiev sometimes soon and do some more real sightseeing.

Today was also exciting because we had our first Russian lesson! The PC decided it would be important for everybody to know at least a little of the language they are not studying (Russian or Ukrainian) because the entire country is basically bilingual. In the east and south, Russian is mostly spoken, but road signs will be in English. In the west, Ukrainian is spoken, but most everybody will speak Russian and it is possible you'll end up in a Russian speaking town or that your counterpart will only speak Russian. I'm already in Ukraine and I am still in the dark about some things in my near future!

Today, we also began planning our summer camp and community project. As of now, we're planning on have a 4 or 5 day summer camp dedicated to health and the environment. We will probably apply for a HIV/AID awareness grant to help fund one day dedicated to educating the students about the HIV/AIDs problem as Ukraine has the highest rate of HIV in all post-Soviet countries. We are thinking that our community project will be to record some dialogs and maybe some songs onto CDs so that the school will have permanent access to native English speakers for listening activities.

Tomorrow will be fun too! We won't be teaching classes because the school is having a sports day. We'll go to the school and hopefully play kickball with the kids. Then just 2 hours of Ukrainian lessons and 1 of Russian.

This weekend is also full of events! At about 3am on Easter Sunday, we will get up and go to the church to have the food blessed by the priests. After that, we'll come home and sleep and then wake up and eat and drink bahato (a lot) with the whole family. I think some of my host family's cousins are coming and they go to the school I teach at, so hopefully I'll have somebody to speak a little English with. I'll definitely update again after I come out of my food coma on Sunday.

That's all for now!