17 September

I’ve been meaning to sit down for several days now to add a new entry, but I finally have something to really write about and even brag about. I have hot water… and I don’t mean that I heat water up on the stove or something like that, it comes out of the tap. (well, ok, it did last night, not this morning) For those of you who live in the United States or elsewhere where hot water is a daily norm it may not seem like much, but it is big news here. For those of you here in the country, I have hot water without the kolonka. When I arrived at the site, I was happy to find out that the town has a centralized hot water system from the local power plant. Unfortunately for the past month and a half, it has been turned off, partly because it is allegedly warm outside (whatever...) and the bigger reason of they were replacing pipes. Now given I saw the pipes that came out of the ground and I am surprised water was still running through them at all. The job was also slowed down by rain a good part of August, much to my chagrin. But after several promised dates of hot water, I returned from a picnic in the forest to see steam rising out of a manhole. When I got home I decided to try my luck, and it was good, having hot water come out. Hurrah! I’m going to take a hot shower sitting in my bathtub, cause that’s the best I can get. It will also make washing clothing easier, but I’ll get to that. To pull people up to date, I’ll try to just work backwards. Earlier today I went out with a bunch of kids from my younger English Club to the forest where we had a picnic and played Frisbee and soccer (football as it is called here). It was a good time and we were out there for about four hours, I’m sure some of them could have been out longer, but a couple girls were wanting to get home, so we took off, it was about time for me to get home anyway.

Yesterday, on Saturday, saw me as the domestic worker. I took a lot of the day off to just sit around and read in the sun, but that evening I knew I needed to do some laundry and was also feeling ambitious in my cooking. So I pulled out my handy-dandy Peace Corps Cook Book and got the recipe for Vareniky, which is basically stuffed dumplings of your choice. Over the course of about three hours I made a lot of vareniky, first making some with mashed potatoes, carrots and onions. When I ran out of that mix, I looked through the fridge, remembering that I had been given some apples. So I cooked those up real quick and stuffed them in with cinnamon and sugar. By real quick, I still mean the whole process took three hours, including me eating somewhere in there. I had extra dough and there are frozen vareniky I made in my freezer right now, with extra dough still in my refrigerator. I’m not going to explain the whole process here, but all the Ukrainians I have told here are impressed I cooked some myself. In my opinion they taste all right too. After cleaning up the kitchen, I actually was in the process of doing that the entire time as well, because I don’t have enough pots and other utensils to dirty a whole lot up, maybe it’s better that way. But my work for the night wasn’t done, since I had put off doing laundry for a while, this will be one of those things I’ll most likely write about only once, since it will soon become routine, but it is interesting one time around, I hope. I had the great luck to be able to use a washing machine when I was living with my host family, they have said I can continue to use it even though I am living on my own now, but last night I wanted to just get it done here. So first part was to heat water up the stove, I didn’t have hot water until last night you probably remember. Then I soaked the clothes for a while before having the pleasure to scrub them with my bare hands like most people do in this country. It isn’t an extremely fast process and it leaves your entire arms sore during the process, but I was able to turn my socks white again and rub out stains in other articles of my clothing. That whole process took another two and a half hours after which I crashed into bed and didn’t wake up until late the next day.

For those of you who read the previous post, you remember that I was a judge for flower arrangements. My work in botany continued on Friday as I was called upon to videotape all the greenery in and around the school with the biology teacher. Exact reasons for this are a little hazy; I think it has something to do with showing how many plants we have in the school. But anyway, it found me first walking around the school grounds with the teacher taping different flower gardens and her occasionally pointing out different types of flowers and plants, thankfully many of them have almost the same names. But we then proceeded to go into class after class filming the plants they had on windowsills and displayed around the room. When we finished that up, I ran to the journalism room, through it all together into one film and deliver to the director. To give you an idea of just how long the tour took and classes we visited, the whole tape was 12 minutes long and I had done a fair amount of editing. It was an all day project I did in about a half day. This just goes along with the idea that my life will constantly throw a curveball at me here. I was planning to just meet with teachers and prepare for my journalism club meeting that afternoon, until I had received a phone call from the director that morning saying it needed to be done that day. It got done and he seemed happy about it, The quality left a little to be desired in my opinion since I just used my camera to do it all, but he needed it the same day, so he got something.

The only other event of note found me back in Sokal for the going away party of a girl there who will be studying in Poland this fall. So we had a nice little shindig, not too much to talk about except the next day I was supposed to meet with my Regional Manager and I either misheard the marshrutka driver when he told me the time he was going to Dobrotvir or there was another problem, because I ended up meeting him in a different town, then went back to Sokal to spend a little more time at Oksana’s house (that’s the girl going to Poland) because my bus didn’t leave for a couple hours. But it was interesting because her parents had some old books with photos of what Lviv looked like back in Soviet times, one of the things I noticed almost right off were the roads were in good condition, and the book printed in the 1970s showed the buses I see on the road now as new. Gotta say, I found that interesting. I hope this country never stops surprising me, cause that would make life so much more boring and would be less for you to all read too.

About that marshrutka driver and non-stop surprises, I almost forgot another incident on the trip there. the driver was attempting to pass what I later saw was a truck, I couldn't see ahead of me at all only to the side, when I heard screeching tires and a car swerving out of the way. It happens, just thought to myself at that moment maybe it is better I can't see where this is going. But the adventure didn't stop there as the driver of that car turned around, forced the marshrutka to pull over and then started verbally berating the driver about how he should be a better driver and there were women and children in the van. I will admit I took what he had with a grain of salt because he was interrupted twice by his cell-phone and as he pulled away was talking on it again, safe driving for sure. But it made for an extra spicy adventure, I guess you can say.

And one last quick note, an elegy to my iPod. It has served me well over the years but it appears to have finally bit the dust, or at least the battery has, or software or something, it doesn't want to work. The full ramifications are still not apparent, but it doesn’t want to play more than a few minutes if at all if not plugged into a power source. I have had a feeling it wasn’t well, but the past few days have shown that. So if anyone is feeling extra generous (I’m not expecting any takers) and wants to buy me a new iPod I’d be most grateful. I know there are some new Nanos on the market now that are pretty cool. I’d even take an older version if someone is upgrading, well I’d take any that works right now to be honest. My faithful silver mini won’t go anywhere, but I doubt I’ll be taking it anywhere either.