16 October

Sometimes the things I think should be the easiest end up being by far the hardest. Take for instance the task I had today, which was to find a deck of cards. First of all, to complicate the task somewhere along the history of this country a game called Durok (fool) became popular and the game didn’t require any of the cards below six. Maybe other games are played this way as well, but many decks of cards come with the fewer number of cards. For my English club I was hoping to teach them some American cards games, all of the games I know require what I consider to be normal amount of cards at 52, not 36. I have also been told that the larger decks exist in the country. So I was hoping to purchase a couple of these decks to help with my class. Sounds easy enough, right?

Buying a deck of playing cards in the states is about as easy as buying a pack of gum. Most stores have cards of some sort or another. Not so here. I visited probably about eight different stores in the regional center looking for cards, asking at each store and then asking where I may be able to find them. Finally I got to a store that had cards, only to discover it was the smaller deck. At this point I didn’t care and was tired of people looking at me incredulously for asking to buy something as crazy as a deck of cards. I bought two decks and taught a class how to play B.S. Now don’t worry they never figured out what B.S. meant and ended up just saying true, or false. But they did enjoy the game. Took a little while to teach, but they did get the idea after a while.

As for other adventures, I had to go to the capitol Kyiv this past weekend for a meeting of the Environmental Working Group. It was my first meeting with that group and it was rather successful, after meeting the other members, there is promise for some future projects and am looking forward to trying to expand the reach of the group and adding more partnerships within Ukraine. I can’t say I bring any particular experience to the group, but want to look for ways I can be helpful. I’m always amazed at how much I can spend in Kyiv, so I try to keep away as much as I can, everything is just so frickin’ expensive.

So to reduce the amount of time I spent in the city itself I did a little tour and visited my first host family and met some of the new trainees from group 31, who are preparing to teach English. It is a different track from what I took as a Youth Developer, but it was refreshing to see where their language was and realize I was probably at that point too, not really understanding hardly a word of what people were saying and being completely in the dark a lot of the time. A conversation I had later with one of my cluster mates revolved around to how little we did know about our families during training. She (Kelsey) said she found out more about her family in the one day she went back and visited than the entire first three months with them. Can’t quite say the same about mine, they were a little easier to figure out, but they were happy to see me again.

My second trip took me to go visit Kelsey for the day. She allegedly lives about three hours from Kyiv in the adjacent oblast in a small town called Koruykivka, or something like that. My experience started with me catching my first marshrutka at 7 a.m. Sunday morning. I missed the bus in Chernihiv by five minutes and caught a later bus at about 9:45. This bus promptly (I use this word liberally because I don’t think the bus moved faster than about 20 mph) took me on a tour of a good chunk of the countryside and a trip I was told would take about two hours brought me to her town a little after one. Basically adding another hour on. I wasn’t aware I had caught a stone-age bus until it seemed like I wasn’t getting close. Kelsey then realized I was on a big, slow bus and not a fast new(er) marshrutka. I don’t know if any of them those fast ones were running to her town that day. Cause I caught a big slow bus back to Chernihiv at about 4:30 that afternoon that got me back there at about 7:30. My only consolation is I didn’t pay for either of those trips. My typical strategy is to sit down in a vehicle I want a ride in and pay the driver unless I am required to buy a ticket inside. The basic logic for this is drivers tend to be happier if you pay them directly and don’t pay someone else, I think it affects they cut, but am not confident of that. Anyway, I pay drivers, not someone sitting behind a desk when I can. The other thing is her oblast is full of a bunch of Russian speakers, which everyone says is almost the same as Ukrainian, but isn’t, so I was dealing with a new language and when I asked questions people just looked at me funny, sometimes giving me an answer. The bus driver just told me to sit down on the way there. I did. He never asked me for money so I just took in the extra long ride and got off at my destination. In my defense I use this same strategy whenever I go places locally and the driver always walks back and I pay him. It isn’t as if I am against paying. I was starting to get worried as 7:30 rolled around and I hadn’t gotten on a marshrutka to Kyiv yet. It is a popular destination on Sunday night I found out, all the students heading back. Luckily I clambered aboard a marshrutka about 7:40 and was in Kyiv a little before 10. My train left at 10:30. I got there in plenty of time.

Sleep, and eating, all kind of took a back seat the past weekend, but I survived and am here to recount the tale and for those of you who are worrying, I am eating and am healthy as always. Speaking of which, I’m hungry so I’m going to go get some food. Tune in later for more tales that hopefully won’t put you to sleep.