Spring

SPRING IS HERE!
So, its been a few weeks since I wrote a real entry, so thought I would sit down and try to give you a little of an update about what I have been up to. Last week I was invited by one of the other teachers to tag along with some of the 10th and 11th grade students to go see a very famous monastery in Donetsk Oblast, Svyatogorsk. After a two hour bus ride of watching a Russian movie about boxing and having my students be slight unruly, we pulled up at the parking lot to the monastery. As we crossed over the Donetsk river, you looked ahead of you and saw a huge statue of Artyom (I think his name is, a famous hero of Ukraine) overlooking the river on a bluff, and the monastery to your right. (I will try to add pictures as well.
First of all, churches in Ukraine are a little different than back in the states… they are gorgeous. Not that churches in the states are ugly, they just usually don’t have a lot of color to them, and Ukrainian churches have blues and golds and reds, beautiful. So we met the tour guide and she instructed us on the correct way to cross oneself when you enter the church (3 fingers together to represent the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and they cross top, down, right, left.) not really sure if that’s different than Catholic, but I was told it was. The inside of the church was just as beautiful as the outside. Their was a ceremony going on, so I just walked around, lit a few candles, and then headed out.
We were met by a Orthodox priest, and giving a bit of a history lesson of the monastery, and then told we were going to climb 900 meters up a hillside in an underground tunnel. We all bought candles so that we could see, and then proceeded into the side of the hill. It was a very cool experience, but a little uncomfortable as I didn’t really know what was going on and what I could and couldn’t do (which was apparent when I was directed by the priest to take my hand out of my pocket, nervous habit) When we got to the top off the hill, the view was amazing. We could look down over the river valley and the monastery. It was probably the 2nd most beautiful place I’ve seen in Ukraine (after the Carpathians.) It was a great trip overall.
Then the next day, Thursday, I taught a few classes, but headed out early to catch a train at 6pm to some Peace Corps training in Harkov. Brian, the other volunteer in my city was supposed to accompany me, but he ended up getting sick and wasn’t able to make it. The train I was on was probably the slowest one I’ve ever been on. It takes about 6 hours to get to Harkov by bus, but after a nice conversation about why an American ‘kid’ who doesn’t speak much Russian was teaching English in Ukraine, we arrived in Harkov at 6am the following day. I walked out of the train station with only a few directions as to what metro stop to get off at, but I felt in a walking mood, so that’s just what I did. I started walking away from the station in what I thought was the best direction (slightly downhill.)
A brief history lesson… Harkov used to be the capital of Ukraine when it was a part of the Soviet Union, only for 2 years, but you can still see remnants of its ‘glory day’s’ in the 2nd largest central square in the world (after Red square in Moscow) and the largest Lenin statue I have seen. It also is the largest university town in Ukraine, so it was cool to see many young and foreign people there. After the meeting I hung out with a few other volunteers getting to know the city a little. Then I met up with 2 volunteers that I had been in training with. It was the first time I had seen them in over three months, so it was a great reunion. It was a friend of theirs birthday’s Friday night, so we celebrated it in the typical way. Eating lots of food, drinking a little more vodka then is recommended, and dancing. We took the next morning pretty slow, but then headed to the largest bazaar in Ukraine to get a friend of mine some kickboxing gear. It was a beautiful day so we were able to throw a football around, and I learned the rules to Russian billiards (a lot harder than pool). Because my Russian isn’t so great and I always get nervous when buying train tickets, I mistakenly bought tickets for the train that leaves Harkov at 2am coming from Kiev. So I spent the evening hanging out with my friends and then around 1 walked the short distance to the train station and immediately fell asleep. The conductor also took my ticket before I got on the train, so I kind of forgot what bed number I had, so kept waking up hoping that nobody was going to kick me out cause I was in their seat. The ordeal was finished when I arrived in Lugansk at 9am and was back at my apartment 30 minutes later. Not a whole lot else to report besides my parents are coming to visit me next week! I am very excited to see them.