Highlights Reel

It's been awhile, I know. Here are some highlights from the past few weeks.

I had spring break a couple weeks ago. I traveled to Lviv to visit my friend John, who lives in a town north of the city, and my other two former cluster mates also traveled there. We hung out in John's apartment, watched tv, cooked, went to the bazaar, and went for walks. Basically, we relaxed. We also traveled into Lviv one day to see the city, which is definitely different from most other parts of Ukraine. People actually spoke Ukrainian! It was wonderful. We ended the weekend by going to the Carpathian Mountains with a bunch of other PCVs and Ukrainians to climb Mt. Hoverla, the tallest mountain in Ukraine. It was a lot colder and a tougher hike than all of us were expecting, but I'm happy we went.

I signed up to run a 10k in Berehove/Beregszasz (Ukrainian name/Hungarian name), which is by the border of Hungary. The description says the race takes place in the foothills of the Carpathians, in wine country. After I run, I get a cup to participate in a wine tasting! This is a large part of the reason I signed up. I also conned one of my former cluster mates into volunteering at the event so I have someone to go with. I'm looking forward to the weekend, but not the 20+ hours of train travel it will take to get there.

Which leads me to: I've started running again. The weather is nicer, though still chilly some days, but I'd like to not die during the 10k. Unfortunately, running in my village means avoiding or dealing with the dirt roads that have become muddy and full of puddles, getting barked at, snarled at, and almost bitten by small dogs, lots of people blatantly staring at me, and trying to avoid the smoke from people burning their trash. It's an adventure. Today, for example, I had a german shepherd put his mouth around my arm. In his defense, he didn't actually bite down and I think he just wanted to play. In my defense, I was paying more attention to the two older men with a gun (I think it was a bee-bee gun?) staring at me in the driveway. They called the dog away and laughed. Gotta love Ukrainian men.

Now that it's spring, it's planting season. It's still too cold for a lot of crops but I've noticed more sections of green magically appearing in the fields behind people's houses. I'm excited to learn more about Ukrainian agriculture, it's one of the reasons I wanted to be placed in a village. My landlord is mostly still just planting in a small greenhouse in her yard, and she has flat boxes with sprouting seedlings sitting near the heaters in her kitchen and in the spare room in my house. I told her I'd like to help, and she said when it's time to plant potatoes, everyone works together and I can help then. 

I've realized how much Russian my landlord speaks, and that sometimes she doesn't understand the Ukrainian words I use. I asked her if a certain plant was a strawberry plant using the Ukrainian word, and she said no, it was something else. I asked one of the students at school the next day what that word meant, and he told me it was the Russian word for strawberry. I also used the Ukrainian "Lviv" when I told her I would be traveling, and she looked confused. When I returned, I decided to try the Russian "Lvov" and she understood. I'm trying to learn a few more Russian words, partly to communicate better with my landlord, and because when I travel beyond my village, all the cities are Russian speaking and it's currently making my life difficult. The benefits of a bilingual country? But in truth, Ukraine is more than bilingual. My friend that lives near Lviv hears Ukrainian and Polish, and other areas speak mixtures of Hungarian/Ukrainian and Moldovan/Ukrainian/Russian. I'm sure there are others, too.

I participated in Суботнік [Saturday cleaning] last weekend. People from the community get together in the morning and clean certain "territories". It's like community service but it's just expected that everyone will participate. Teachers and students from my school went to a section of the highway and raked up leaves, grass, branches, and trash. Once everything is raked into piles, it's set on fire. Unfortunately, this is the way most unwanted yard waste and trash is handled and it makes the tree hugger in me sad. There are plenty of things I've gotten used to in Ukraine, but seeing fires burning in yards or field, particularly at night, still always surprises me.