8 October

I’ve been told that I write too much by one girl who reads my blog, I guess the best I can do is apologize and say I will try to do better, although that can be rather hard to do. What I will try to do is split it up into more bite-size pieces so that you read a little bit at a time.

I need to back up quite a bit to talk about a couple of weekends ago that I haven’t had a chance to enter my own little bit of commentary about. The last weekend of September was Lviv’s 750 birthday, anniversary, whatever you feel like calling it. However you want to attach a label to it, it was a call for a gigantic celebration, massive concerts, fireworks, laser show, four million people in a city of one million. It was kind of a big deal. So I had plans to meet up with a couple of my Ukrainian friends,, one of them said she (Ira) thought I write too much, tough. So I met with them a little after noon, ran into a bunch of other PCVs where we hung out, drank beer and enjoyed a watching a heck-uv-a lot of people. Somehow as we headed to one concert we got separated, from the group, I split off with my Ukrainian friends and to make a long story short. I didn’t see any of the concerts, laser light show and only a nice red glow in the sky from the fireworks. One of the girls I was with came down with a really bad headache and that required talking our way into a dormitory where one of them lived and wasn’t supposed to host guests, drama enough with that and hide out there for the night until the shift changed. Because of that I didn’t exactly see a lot of the festivities Saturday night, although I did have a place to sleep better than the train station, sorry for those of you who did sleep there. But my oft-repeated line that night and my true belief is a person’s health is more important than any celebration, even if it only happens once every 750 years and has some of the biggest bands in Ukraine. Oh well, if I’m supposed to see them while I’m here, I’ll get another chance.

But I did get to see a lot more on Sunday as you can witness from my pictures posted on Flickr. What made the least sense was the enormous cake that we stumbled upon at about 10:30 a.m. or so and gathered wouldn’t be cut until 1 p.m. I don’t have that much patience and I don’t know if I want to try and push my way to the front to get any cake that’s been melting in the sun for that long anyway. Instead I went with Ira to check out a medieval celebration and ended up running into a Canadian and American tour group. Funny who you run into when you speak English in public. One thing I have found out is that part of a PCV’s mission is to inform others about what we do and more about the program in general, there is really too little information about what exactly we do and where we do it. It’s just part of the PR of the job, and I was ok with it. Talked to them for a really long time and I was late for a football game I wanted to make, which happened to be the final, they lost anyway. The funniest part of it was it looked as if I was leading a tour for a while because we were standing in the busiest walkway in the park we were in and the two of us were surrounded by people and I was talking a lot of English, which attracts a crowd anyway, but I probably had at least 15 people (probably more) at one point listening to what I said, whether they all understood me or not, I don’t know.

My week itself wasn’t all that enlightening, it was a typical work of journalism classes, English clubs and trying to be creative in coming up with ideas. The best of those came from an American music lesson where I went into different styles of music and introduced students to some artists they had never heard of before. Any one heard of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles? They hadn’t.

Most recently I found myself in a neighboring town of Sokal again. I had done helped a volunteer who lives there with a summer camp and a project stemming from the summer camp was a sports day that was held this past weekend. Since I had been involved in some obtuse way in the development of the project, they wanted me to be there and I was happy to help out. Side note: they also had developed a film to combat drugs and alcohol during the summer camp. I got a credit at the end of the film, awesome…

Ended up I didn’t need to do a whole lot at the event, it was basically a sports day with different activities, sack race, standing long jump and tug-of-war to name a few. The most I had to do was walk around and take pictures, I can manage that much. Check those out on my Flickr account and I’m sure that Liz will have her own account on her own site.
Ok, she doesn't but maybe she will.