Ok, it's a little old, but I haven't had time to write a new one or post this earlier. Hopefully a new one will be out in a few days.

28, September

As what seems like a usual occurrence, I am finding myself trying to catch up on my blog after an eventful week. Days can often feel as though they crawl by, but events seem to pile up. I guess I should start where I left off with a planned trip down through Muckachevo and visiting a fellow volunteer Robert in Irshava. My original plan was to get out of my site Friday afternoon, get a marshrutka in Lviv and be there that evening. Only problem I didn’t take full respect of was that there is about five or six different bus stations in Lviv and I hadn’t been to the one that his left from. To make a long story short, I ended up seeing three different stations, none of them what would give me a straight trip, it got late and I ended up going home and trying again on Saturday. Saturday didn’t end up a whole lot better and I took a marshrutka part of the way to a second town and waited for another bus to take me the rest of the way. The roundabout way ended up taking me a total of almost 12 hours to get to his site and left me exhausted. I took the train back and had a travel time of about six hours.
The most memorable part of the trip, other than riding a lot of marshrutkas around Lviv and standing around bus stations was entering into the Zacarpatska Oblast. They have what you call a checkpoint there where all people have their documents checked. As per the norm, the documents that Peace Corps instructs us to carry around get raised eyebrows and in this case got me asked to follow a nice young army boy to talk to his supervisor cause I didn’t have the normal passport. After a few moments and a rather quickly beating heart of mine the supervisor handed my documents back to me and waved me away. Probably I wasn't worth his dealing with. But I got plenty of strange looks from other passengers on the bus when I re-boarded. Driver asked if that was all and we took off. It was smooth sailing after that.
One remark I can make right off is the people in that Oblast have one of the best placements in this country, it was just gorgeous there, mountains, streams, rivers, wow. I’m jealous of him and I like my site, although the coal power plant isn’t much of a tourist attraction. My time there was short, we hung out, caught up a bit and before I knew it I was back on my way to Muckachevo the next day. Just to make things interesting, we found out the only marshrutka straight to Lviv from his site left at about 7 that morning, I didn’t wake up until 9, nor did we bother to check. So I headed back to the aforementioned city and in the process met a girl who was my guide for the day, Anya. She made sure I had my train ticket (I took a train back, it was just as fast and less hassle) and even ended up in church, first time in this country. Back-story on her was Rob and I were talking in the bus station, she overheard us speaking English, and inquired about it, she has been studying English for about six months, she said, and was eager to talk more. So we struck up a quick friendship. She had been learning English from an American missionary from the Reformed Church, I am not sure about their particular doctrine, but she was eager for me to come to church, even for a little bit, and I confess to being interested in meeting the missionaries. A lot of the service was in Russian from what I could understand, at least the song lyrics were, but I had to boogie out early and catch a cab back to the train station and end up crashing at another volunteer’s place because I didn’t get into Lviv until late. So there is a very brief and cursory glance at that weekend. Other stories I’m sure have been left out, such as an extended explanation of Rob, myself and another volunteer at a disco and talking to school students about studying music in the U.S. But I did warn that plenty has happened and I want to give you the best overall view possible.

Monday had me returning by the first marshrutka home and then preparing for English clubs the same day and trying to wipe the sleep out of my eyes the best I could. Nothing to comment on too much here except I started held a grand total of six different clubs in English this week in two different locations. They met different levels of success, with me still trying to find a balance in one of the clubs to manage the classroom most efficiently and another that they were asking for more. A group of really little kids made cute cards for their favorite teacher, even though they had just met me, somehow they ended up in my box of markers, it was sweet. Journalism club showed more progress and there is a deadline set for publication of the first paper of this year. I had my first pangs of missing writing and running around as a journalist today, for all of the pains, I did enjoy being in the mix of news and running around, it just got to be too much in the job I had. But it is fun getting back to the basics of journalism again.

This Saturday will be Lviv’s 750 birthday so I will plan to be there for that and take pictures if I remember, I forgot to take them when I was down south visiting. I also won’t get a chance to post this before hand so I will have this and probably the post about the anniversary at the same time. Meaning you probably already read the post about that and are just getting to this now. Thank you to those who have sent me slang words, all of them have been helpful and keep them coming.