Yesterday was the first snow in Zhytomyr. This might be more welcome if we had heat in my apartment building. Some parts of Zhytomyr have heat, some don’t and no one seems to know when the rest of the city will get theirs (this is the favorite topic of conversation at the institute, though). I have a space heater that keeps my bedroom warm and otherwise I just stay in my three layers of clothes. Yesterday I even managed my first multi-layer quick change. Since I had pulled off my “casual” layers (long-sleeve shirt, fleece, Harley-Davidson hoodie) all at once, they were still intact on the chair when I stripped off my “nice” layers (long sleeve shirt, dress shirt and tie, nice sweater) all at once and pulled on my casual layers as if it were one item of clothing.
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Sarah left just ahead of the real cold, and now she’s back in the states. Soon she’ll be going to India where she has a seasonal job as a kitchen manager at a yoga retreat. In India, I don’t think they have a word for cold.
Since I was teaching we really couldn’t leave Zhytomyr, but here’s some of what we did:
Sarah was missing yoga while she was here, so we went with my friend Tatyana to her yoga class one evening. The instructor had not shown up (for the second class in a row) and an 18 year-old girl who said she knew a lot of yoga volunteered to teach it. What she was showing us was more of a warm-up for a dance class, though, including kicks. We’d be in a dance stretch and someone would ask what the pose was called and she say “I don’t really know, but it’s good for your legs.” The most yoga it got was mid-way through when she asked us to sit in a lotus position and chant “Om”. The problem was that one of the older guys in the class (who was one of several that spent the entire class telling her that she was doing this or that wrong) was trying to convince her that she was doing her “Om”s too quickly. Of course we’re following her, but then while we’re all going “Oooom” he’s doing “Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom”. He was literally trying to out om her. Finally the class broke down entirely due to their tug of war and Tatyana suggested that Sarah show us some things since she was very into yoga and had been doing it for a while. This is how Sarah, who speaks only English, ended up teaching a half-hour yoga class to Ukrainians…and doing a good job, too.
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All the decked-out Ukrainian women convinced Sarah to attempt to beautify. Since they're so cheap, she got a facial, a pedicure and a manicure while here. My friend Irina took her to all these things and then taught her about the joys of make-up.
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On my one day off we took a day-trip to Kyiv to see the Percheska Lavra (Caves Monastary)
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I took both Sarah and Amy to visit both an old USSR collective farm and to the mass graves from the Holocaust. Above and the next three below are the remains of the farm, where villagers still graze their horses. During Soviet times, farmers were required to keep all their livestock and mill all their grain here. It was unproductive, but let the Soviets be able to take their cut.
Above and below are pictures of the mass graves
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I got interviewed on television. The local news station had a camera set up by a statue of Sergei Korolov that’s near my apartment. Korolov, if you’ve never heard of him, designed Mir, the first manmade object in space, and also designed the ship that let Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space (yes, we did loose that part of the space race). Having been raised in Zhytomyr, Korolov is my city’s favorite son. They stopped Sarah and I as we walked past and asked me if I knew who the statue was of. It was Korolov’s birthday, and they were doing a piece on him, seeing what Zhytomyr residents did and did not know about him. I said I did and said who he was and they could tell from my accent that I wasn’t Ukrainian. They asked where I was from and I told them and they seemed excited to interview an American. They then asked if I knew why Korolov was famous. Here, my Russian ran into trouble. I didn’t know the word for “design” or “spaceship”, so what the citizens of Zhytomyr heard last night was an American telling them that their local hero had “prepared the first car to go into space.”
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Sarah and I took two of the bikes we got with the grant and did a circuit across the condemned bridge, down to a path by the river, along the river to the man-made waterfall/dam (where sewage is also dumped) and then we carried the bikes across the river to ride up to the WWII momument (with the eternal flame that wasn't burning) and then back to my apartment. Done at sunset, the whole route was gorgeous.
Here you can see the WWII memorial in the distance as we bike along the Teatriv River
Me, carrying my bike in front of the waterfall
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Sarah was kind enough to talk to a English-education group at the local library. She brought photos and told them about her work as a wilderness ranger in Alaska
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This is what I have been doing since Sarah left:
It is the entire British Councils Recertification Curriculum (what we teach at the Institute), re-written. Since almost every teacher attending courses at the institute has already done the curriculm (they have to get recertified every five years), we needed a new one, which is essentially the results of me developing my lesson plans over the past two years. It took a week to get everything typed up and organized, but there you go: one copy for me, one for Peace Corps, one for the institute and three for the new Teacher Trainers that just arrived in Ukraine last month (and whom I worked with and gave feedback to when they came to give practice lessons at the institute two days ago)
Here's some pics from my lastest group of teachers:
Doing a reading/creative thinking exercise
Rewriting a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip
Working with flashcards
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And that's about it! I'll leave with one final photo:
My friend Amy wanted to visit Zhytomyr to hang out and climb and asked to bring a friend. "Is she cute?" I asked, jokingly. Turned out she was. She was a New Zealander (Kiwi) named Livvy who was living in Prague and met Amy, who lives in Ukraine, when Amy was in New Zealand. Confused yet? Anyway, it turns out she actually was cute and I got to make out with my first Kiwi. Between her and "Lord of The Rings", I'd really like to visit New Zealand now.
Me, Livvy and Amy before going to a club