Much has gone on since my last post. Last week was rather busy. I had just gotten back from camp and then I was heading to Odesa last weekend. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Not much was getting accomplished but I was definitely meeting with people. Two nights before I was leaving for Odesa I couldn't get into my apartment. The key just decided not to work anymore. After messing with it for several minutes I called my counterpart and her husband came over and basically broke my door apart to get into it. Thank goodness! The next day someone came and gave me a brand new lock...whewww.
I finally got to ride the train long distance. I was very much looking forward to 16 hours on the train...weird! That is life in Ukraine. So I headed down to Odesa with three other volunteers from my oblast. We got on the train at 8am from Konotop. Now in order to get to Odesa this weekend we had to buy tickets from another train station so we were essentially heading North to go South. This probably won't make a lot of sense for you so let me try to explain. It was like me driving to Boston from NYC to get to Delaware. So we hop on the train headed North the train is 45 minutes late and we are pretty certain we are missing our connection. So we are trying to devise a plan in the event we do miss our connecting train that we will take a taxi to the next stop and try to beat the train. Which is entirely possible because their trains don't go that fast! We talk to the conductor in our poor Russian and he is looking at us like we have eight heads and we don't know why but he helps us and we are off.
So we take off. We make it to our next stop in time to jump on our connection. And hour later guess where we end up....that is right back in Konotop! All that and we could have just got on the train in Konotop at 11am instead of 8am! And we wouldn't have had to worry about missing our connection. Not sure if you understood that but when you don't understand the language these are the kinds of things you encounter. No wonder the conductor thought we were crazy. He couldn't figure out why we would take one train to Tereshenska (north) to hop on another train that was coming right back here. Well lesson learned. Go home and study Russian. If we could understand the language we would have known that the train would eventually come back to Konotop and we could just go on there. And we couldnt get tickets from Konotop in the first place because they were too expensive. Oy!
Odesa is like a mini version of Miami or Vegas and kind of reminded me of the Greek Islands too. It has clubs that are really cool and not hard to get into at all! So without the velvet rope crap. Lots of energy in the bars and clubs and in the center it is very live with all the cafes and such. It was a cute town. Had fun getting around there too. Again...language barrier. But it all worked out. It only took us three hours to get to Arkadia Beach...but we found it!!
Unfortunately, our last night I lost my phone at the bar and dropped my camera so many times it doesn't work anymore! We met a lot of fun foreigners though and all in all it was a great experience.
Back to work and reality of site... So with all the things I have to deal with in my new life I didn't think a break up would be one of them. So for those who are curious it is over. That's ok but I might have lost a friend in the process and right now friends are really important.
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