another week bites the dust

4 months down (20-22 months to go)! This is also the start of my 4th week of teaching. I will be showing all my students the current grade they are getting in class, so that should be pretty interesting. Also, started an English Club last week, where we played Bingo. Not sure what I will be doing with them this Wednesday, but I will think of something.
People back in Minnesota, has the weather warmed up at all this week for you? Yesterday the temperature here must have at least gotten up to 40f, and I was thinking, what the heck, this is February!! Ohwell, at least it hasn’t been pouring or anything out here.
So this weekend I headed over to Servodonetsk, which is a city of about 150,000 two hours northwest of Lugansk. There is another volunteer from my group posted there and she invited me and two other volunteers up for the weekend. I only have one class on Fridays so I headed up there at about 12pm. Got in at 2, and she showed me around the main city for a bit. She had recently picked up a small puppy off the streets and decided to adopt it. There are tons of stray dogs here, and I have definitely started to like cats a lot more than I ever thought possible, since dogs are just not so friendly over here.
Anyways, she showed me a wonderful indoor market that reminded me of the one in downtown Budapest, and then just walked around for a bit more.
At 7ish we went back to the bus stop to pick up another volunteer, and spent that night eating pasta, drinking beer, and listening to some good bluegrass. The next morning we woke up about 3 different times for the little puppy to be taken outside (every time I was very glad that I had not let my occasional loneliness to make me so rash as to get a dog) and then at 11ish we hopped on a marshutka to go horseback riding. Marnie (the volunteer in Servodonetsk) know a teacher at her school who’s daughter rides about once a week, so headed out to the stables. While I worked in the stable at my summer camp off and on this summer I still don’t know exactly what I am doing on a horse, so luckily I got a good one that just kind of plodded along. We got tested first to see if we were good enough riders to go take a walk through the woods, and luckily we were cause we got to walk down a sandy path through aspens and Jack Pines… very beautiful. Was the occasional group of Ukrainians having a little picnic in the woods, and even got my picture taking by one such group. Was kind of funny.
Spent most of the rest of the day just relaxing, and in the evening went to pick up one final volunteer who came late cause he had to teach classes on Saturday. We all went out to a very nice restaurant that had cheese balls, and buffalo wings (it was a nice break from borsch and vareniky) and then went to the movie theater that was close-by and after some hesitation decided to go see Alien Vs. Predator 2 (for all of those who don’t know, this is a series that started off with just Alien, then just predartor (with Arnold schwarzinager) and is basically Hollywood horror at its worst) but it was a cultural experience watching it in a huge theater and having everything be in Russian. IT was strange going to bed that night, thinking, THIS IS NOT WHAT I EXPECTED THE PEACE CORPS TO BE. Horseback riding, nice restaurants and American movies, its surreal at times, but always interesting. Took off early the next morning to get back to Lugansk and spent most of yesterday just reading and getting ready for the week.
Will write more soon. Miss you all.
Love,
Seth