Spring rains

Another 3 day weekend, and with only 2 weeks left of 'real class,' the semester has gone by very fast so far. Also, the weather has been beautiful the last couple of weeks and its been hard to get my students focused enough to want to learn some new English words...
But other than that life has been pretty good, however, I have had 2 of the strangest encounters with Ukrainians since I have been here. Wednesday night I got a knock on the door to find a friend of my host moms with another friend who supposedly spoke some English, and wanted to learn more, but all i could get out of him was very fast Russian and some random French words (I guess he had lived in Algeria for a while). So we had a broken conversation for about 20 minutes, not really sure what I ended up agreeing to, that is often the way here. Thursday night was even better. After nto really doing anything productive the entire day, i got another knock on the door at about 8 pm. Since my school is a boarding shcool there is a woman who 'guards' the door when the students aren't there. Anyways, this woman (who i think I had only said hi to once before) proceeded to ask me "do you want to drink wine?" or at least thats all i understood the first time. So i asked her, "what, now?" and she said "yes, now"
So, i followed her into the school were I proceeded to sit in the secretary's office and drink home-made wine out of a plastic beer bottle and listen to her explian why NATO WAS a good thing for Ukraine, and how George Bush was the best president ever because he took care of Iraq and Iran (not sure how, but he did...) and also how bad it was that Americans got paid so much more than Ukrainians. Time went by quickly ( i think the wine helped) so i spent an hour there... It was extremely bizarre.
Friday i spent at a picnic with Brian, Adam (another PCV) and a bunch of people from the church Brian goes to. it was a lot of fun, and the first time I have been around that many people the same age as me.
Now i am sitting in an internet cafe in Lugansk following the scores of the Chelsea and Manchester United games to see who win the English league. I was going to go to a Lugansk Zarya game, but the weather is not so great at the moment, again, Spring Rains.
Hope all of you are having a wonderful May, and its great to hear from you.
-Seth