Well, last 4th of July I was playing pool volleyball and eating grilled hamburgers with Sarah at a hostel in Las Vegas. We watched the fireworks from the roof of the hostel until they yelled at us to get off.
It's hard to beat that, but last night was still pretty good. I'm in Kyiv now, getting ready to go teach at the Flex Pre-Departure Orientation for Ukrainian students who will go study in America this fall. Yesterday day was spent working, six of us: four Americans and two Ukrainians spent eight hours making flip charts, handouts, activities, everything. Unfortunately we missed the huge cookout the Marines threw, so instead decided to find an Ex-Pat bar and make the best of it.
The bar we went to was O'Briens, an Irish pub that (I found this funny) has it's name spelled out in Cyrillic letters. Inside, joined by two other Americans (I won't name names) we sang American anthems (The Star Spangled Banner; Proud to be and American, America the Beautiful, even the Pledge of Allegience) with glasses held high (Pepsi in my case) and at the top of our lungs. Ukrainians who heard us came by to congradulate us on our holiday. Their independence day is a huge deal, so they respected ours. Frankly, I really did feel proud to be an American. I would often forget the 4th of July while living in America, as it usually came while I was on some road trip or another. But living in another country gives you a solid identity as an American and it's an identity--our foreign policy aside--that I'm proud to have.
I got attacked by a glass: The only sober one at the table, I managed to knock over a glass of beer reaching across the table. I don't know if it had been pressure washed or what, but it didn't even fall, it tipped, and yet it still exploded when it hit the table, slicing my fingers and wrist. Not bad, mind you, but I do have a series of band-aids and feel a bit like the mummy.
After the bar, we made a 2:00 AM food run. It was technically still the 4th of July in America and we were still celebrating (actually, at our 9:00 AM breakfast this morning, we figured it was still the 4th of July in California, which still called for more American singing. Right now, we're figuring it's still the 4th of July in Hawaii, so we can still be proud to be Americans).
In any case, at the restaurant two Ukrainian men and a Ukrainian woman heard us speaking English and came over. The men, it turned out, had served with the Ukrainian army in Iraq (Ukraine had about 2,000 soldiers in Iraq, just behind Britain and the United States as the largest contributer in the "coalition of the willing"). Ironically, and few people know this, most non-American troops are not assigned to combat duty. The Ukrainians we met did guard duty, hated Iraq but loved the pay: about $1,000 per month. To give you an idea, I get paid $200 a month, and that's a lot of money. The salary for a teacher in Ukraine is $50 a month. In any case, he said life was rough for American soldiers there and, while he didn't agree with the war, he respected them.
They bought us drinks, me included, and I didn't want to offend them by refusing. I did two shots of some gold colored liquid they said came from the Czech Republic. Those two shots put me on my ass and I was done for the night. We made our way back to the hotel (which, while not great, is in the middle of Kyiv. Peace Corps usually puts us in a hotel in BFE and getting there would have required a 20 hrivna cab ride. Thank you, American Councils) and called it a night.
Happy 4th of July!