The End of Winter...

We had a celebration a week ago for the end of the winter. The first day of spring and the end of winter are back to back. Women's day and men's day also and they are big holidays around here. We celebrated women's day for a week. That was last week. We also got out of work for 2 days! The end of winter celebrations revolve around pancakes. I am not sure why. We had an event in the city center. Concerts and all kinds of people and a pole. I don't know the significance of the pole but it is essentially a tree shaved down and greased and men compete by seeing who can make it to the top. Very interesting tradition. They also have to strip down to their underwear before attempting to climb it. One of my site mates a fellow American Peace Corps Volunteer tried to climb. He gets an A for effort but unfortunately he didn't make it to the top. In fact, he didn't make it off the ground. You may have seen some pictures of this on my facebook page.

So today was the third session in my career development program. Today we talked about resumes and cover letters. This has to be the most boring of all the topics! You can't even really do anything fun when you talk about resumes and cover letters. My translator/counterpart said she was ready to lead the class. She did ok. I really need to figure out how to open her up. There really is this awful mentality here where students aren't very engaged and teachers aren't very engaging. I don't think of myself as a great and powerful teacher but when I teach I try to get the students involved. I feel that it makes it interesting for them. You could be talking about the most boring of subjects but when you get people involved they pay attention and then everyone has fun and you just might learn something. I wasn't impressed with class today. Only 4 out of 8 people showed up and they basically read the material verbatim. I almost took over in the end. That was the American coming out of me and then I stopped myself and thought, she will never learn if I keep saving her. So I left her to figure it out. Not sure if that was the right way to go about it. We talked about the next session in more detail this time so she would have some ideas on how to engage the participants. We went over it step by step. I think she gets it now. I am almost sad I will miss the next class.

I have been fighting a cold for the first time in Ukraine. I have been beating myself up by working out almost everyday and I don't know if that is making it worse or better. Anyway I decided to go home after class to try and sleep it off and I ran into a man on the marshrutka who speaks pure Russian because he is from Russia and was just here for the day. He was looking for a specific store in my town and he asked me where it was. I was surprised how much I could understand of what he was saying and I had just met him. I started to talk to him in Russian and then I said something in English and he immediately caught me. He asked me where I was from and I said America. He was surprised.

I enjoy meeting new people and I feel so handicapped not knowing the language enough to spark up conversations like that on a regular basis. I still do it as often as possible but sometimes I feel like people don't want to talk to you when they realize you sound like a 5 year old. But I have had some good luck so far. I have sparked up some random conversations with people on trains and buses and I always feel good afterwards no matter what the outcome. What have you got to lose?