a bit of grace in our plunder.

A christmas holiday in three parts:

I: Christmas day. I spent the day observing classes in school and then was able to watch a christmas program put on by the younger kids. After the program I got everything ready and took an hour mashrutka ride to Susnivka a village an hour north where I enjoyed a fantastic dinner party with a fellow volunteer in community development annnd her ukrainian co-workers. We laughed, ate, drank limoncello and vodka and had a fabulous time.

II: the day after christmas. I return to Lviv opting to walk home from teh bus station (good choice) the snow was melting and it was puddly and beautiful and there was much teh fresh air. I hung out and skyped with the family in the afternoon and then puttered around the house. Until later in the evening where I dropped my beautiful terabyte harddrive which is now out of commission. I'm taking donations for a new one. My parents called again at 4 in teh morning and I got to hear a little from Amanda my college room mate and the other kiddos in the house. Very very nice.

III: Two days after christmas. I hung out doing chores in teh day like shopping getting ready for a party and other stuff. I did some more laundry etc. etc. etc. ANd then went to Linda's house where I met lots of cool and interesting people and had a fabulous time with fabulous food. I did walk to Linda's which again good choice for teh walk but bad choice forgetting my directions. I got a little lost but nothing too horrible. It ended up taking me an hour and a half to get there instead of about the hour or 1:15 it should have but I'm ok with that. I had a fantastic time. I enjoyed a cab ride back (15 hrivs) aka a third of my daily allowance but worth it for the luxury of a car ride at 10pm. I talked to the homies at the house again on skype and enjoyed a wonderful evening.

With the crashing of my hard drive I've begun to get really creative with my time as i can't sit down and watch a 30 min tv show or movie everyday. I'm budgeting myself with books, draw, clean, read and have started doing pilates and tae bo as they're the only videos I had teh sense to drag over to my computer and aren't on my hard drive. I'm looking into the exciting world of theraband exercises that the peace corps gave us. I haven't brought much else in teh way of hobbies other than crosswords which I'm planning on doing tonite. But we'll see how exciting things can get. I'm on a 45 griv (aka about 6 dollar budget) for each day. So I can't really go and buy things to help me with my hobbies. I have a crochet hook but no yarn. I brainstorm a lot. Any ideas are gladly appreciated. Especially as on Thursday vacation starts and I won't even have classes to fill my days for at least half of it.

Love you all!

Have a Happenin' Holiday

Hope all of you that celebrate are having a wonderful time with family and friends.

I have successfully completed one whole week here at my new site. I've started meeting the kids, and I forgot how much a small child saying hello to you and making the effort to speak English when it's not their native language can brighten your day. Either way, I'm really happy at the new school meeting new teachers. My vice principal even brought me some delicious home made pickles one day. I feel so very safe and taken care of here. Tomorrow, I'm venturing on my first small travel to a village called Susnivka to visit a volunteer there for Christmas. And hopefully, I'll get back on Saturday so that I can go to another christmas party on Sunday with people here in L'viv.

Part Two: New Adventures of Kari and the modern conveniences she lives without.

Today for the first time in my peace corps service I washed my clothes by hand. yes folks that's right by hand. And I didn't even have a bucket or a tub. I have a platform shower and I washed my clothes right in there. Granted at the moment they're hanging on my radiators and other doors in my bathroom to dry. This was my Christmas Eve accomplishment. So while you all are sidled up next to teh fires in your homes I'm hanging with my fresh clean laundry and a crossword puzzle loving life and missing my family.

Part Three: Where Kari learns about Great Britain via the amazing cultural source that is the 8th grade textbook.

Nothing says I love English speaking culture like reading a textbook about learning English. I always like to see the differences between what I find in my own actual experience and what the textbook describes. This being said the characters in my French textbook in high school were pretty lame. And most of the people I know can agree about their foreign language texts. However, here at my school we have pretty recent books aka published after 2000. I mean let's be honest they aren't the most acurate and they are concentrated on Great Britain but I'll take it. My favourite quote being one describing the differences between the types of bands you listen to and how to tell if you're rap, pop, indie, metal etc. The indie description: you listen to new british bands that not everyone likes. you buy your clothes at a street fair or second hand store (this makes me laugh) the Rap description: You listen to black bands. You wear bright sunglasses and a hat. (this makes me laugh harder). All in all, I probably couldn't encapsulate the essence of those musical and thus cultural styles in a sentence, but I can't help but get a good giggle out of what was presented.

well happy ribbons and decoration and all that. I miss you all ! xx

A new home for all

Hello everyone! Well, it's official i'm sworn in as a peace corps volunteer and I'm at my new site!! so, the drum roll for all including me last week is where is my new site. WELL, I live in LVIV! Not many of you know about Lviv, understandable, i don't know anything really. Other than the fact that, when I was doing research about Ukraine i found all these articles about the interesting and artful city in the west.

for the record here's my new address:
Kari Stromberg
м. Львів
бул. Липиського 16
індекс 79058
Ukraine

So, what can i tell you in only a few short minutes? i live in an apartment attached to the cantine/cafeteria of the school where all my basic needs are met. The staff here is wonderful and friendly and glad to have me and I'm glad to have them as well. My room is cold, but beyond anything I could have hoped for. I'm grateful to have running hot water and a flush toilet and use of the cafeteria kitchen when i need to cook. They provide me with everything including letting me use the school internet whenever i need. I am the luckiest PCV this side of the Dniper. So, in short, I'm happy I'm excited and I'm spending my birthday today with the PCV in my town who has been here for three years as I venture out and try to navigate the bus system to get to the center of town using limited ukrainian.
love and hugs to all

So here we are. . .

Here it is, my last blog before heading to Kyiv for swearing-in and site announcement where I will become a so-called official peace corps volunteer.

Not much has changed in the last few days, only that I wanted to post some pictures before time ran out. Oh yes, well, I've passed all my tests save for one big one tomorrow. The Language Proficiency Interview. Other than that, life moves and undulates and keeps me busy and I continually miss you all.

Here's a pic of my host family to keep things interesting: that's my host father Yuri, host mom nina and host sister Nastiya

the silver storms that lie ahead

So, I'm coming down to my last week in training here in Nosivka. I will soon be leaving the comfort of my host family, cluster and overly planned schedule and will be heading into the real unknown.

Yesterday, I went to the "Big" city of нижин with Linnea in search for shoes as mine, (the ones babusiya took earlier) are falling apart. The thing about it is, I have big feet. even for the US, I mean a size ten is pretty standard and you can find it anywhere, but still selections etc. can be limited. I knew coming into the Ukraine deal, as I did going in to France, that finding shoes to fit my said large feet would not be easy. But I had been lead to believe that if I made the trip to the big city I would be able to have said larger sized shoes. So, let us begin with getting to the city. We got off at what we thought was THE bazaar, turns out it was a tiny bazaar about a 30 minute walk away from teh bazaar we really wanted to go to. This being said, we walked the rest of teh way to the bazaar, no big deal. Along the way, a woman walking by us tripped, in my sadistic humor of laughing at her, instant karma came along and I ALMOSt, and by almost I mean my foot was less than an inch away, I almost stepped on a dead cat. Yes, a dead cat, on the sidewalk. I took this as well as one can when they almost step on a dead cat. I will say that the day was considerably better than if I had actually stepped on dead cat. All the same, I have learned my lesson in indulging my desire to laugh at others for tripping, now all I see is dead cats.

Second, we go to the bazaar. There are so many booths. I am so excited I see lots of different kinds of boots in so many colors and styles. This is a good day, there are so many more boots than I have ever seen at the bazaar in my home city. After finding a couple booths with styles I liked I asked for a size 10. No luck, I try a few more, still too expensive or no size 10s. I go to the last booth and ask for a boot in a size 10. She legit says to me, "Size 10 (or in this case 40 b/c it's europe) no I don't have that, seriously, go to a store" awesome. So no luck in the shoe department.

After that, Linnea and I went onto the street where there were three men dressed up in furry costumes. One as ALF (yes the 80s tv show puppet), one as from what linnea tells me the squirrel from Ice Age and the other as spiderman. I'm not sure if any of you know this, but I do not in any way appreciate people dressed in furry animal costumes, masks freak me out and I don't know what they're thinking or doing and I just don't like it. I've found that furry people can sense this fear and thus always come after me. I hate this. Alf snuck up on me and I ran away like a three year old child scared of santa. They were trying to pass out puppet show tickets, but i was not having it. Oh well, we did have a nice time at the cafe afterward.

Let's see that's life for now. My final week. A lot of tests etc. coming up. My final lesson with my favourite 6th grade class. AND other awesome stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at our swearing in retreat in Kyiv and I'm sure that all will be well and happy. I'll try and post just once more before i leave Nosivka or Kyiv in case of no internet at teh site.

How long will you ramble?

OK, so an update a tad overdue. Well, here we are in December. What has changed? Not much. We're all off quarantine now so it's back to the grindstone of language class, teaching class, teaching sessions, our community project (which went off yesterday!) and any other thing they decide to dump on us.

I am happy to say that I have made wonderful friends and am getting along quite well with my host family. I have enjoyed another thanksgiving abroad, for which (with the help of others of course) I made a full thanksgiving dinner, minus gravy because we didn't have any drippings from our obviously free range turkey. As I told my mother, free range is the only option. I try to cancel out the bad environmental policies of Ukraine with the good ones. No one is near as wasteful here as in the US. For the most part, it's all locally grown food, as everyone pretty much supports themselves in the vegetable in fruit department. Everyone composts. And most people walk or bike wherever they may be needing to go.

Beyond that, the redo of our kitchen and most of the downstairs of my host family's house is almost finished. This is great because it means there's a chance that I won't have to stare at topless women as I make my way down to the bathroom. Apparently, Ukrainian papers are filled with topless ads which are now littering and protecting the woodfloor of the bottom floor of teh house.

Ah yes, my host mother and I have had many great conversations over the past few weeks where she has begun to joke with me. A couple days ago when there were no lights and I went into the root cellar to find a jar of pickles she joked with a friend to close the door on me and then she said, "bye bye kari!" Thanks Nina, you're a peach. Actually, she makes me laugh a lot and I am pretty happy to have her around!

In the boring department for you and exciting department for me, I finished my interview and will soon find out where I will be placed. By soon I mean, I'm actually leaving in two weeks so I have to find out where I'm moving because I can't live here anymore. They tell us three days before we leave for our new site where we are to live. Again, I said this before I leave. In peace corps, I know pretty much everything that's going to happen it's just a matter of specifics like where, when, etc. These specifics are very important to American life, and I'm learning to live without them in my life here. Also, in my interview I stressed I wanted to be somewhere creative and so I'm hoping an art like school pops up my way. Harder to place us TEFLers in some ways. Specialized schools in arts etc, like the YD people get generally also don't specialize in English and thus don't need us. But I really would like to be somewhere with some kind of art or music program. Drawing albeit corny and middle school pictures has become a great stress relief here.

The highlight of my day, I received a package from my parents containing wool socks and another containing Emergen C of teh raspberry variety. I consider this a small victory over the Ukrainian mail system which I'm not going to lie I have a hate hate relationship with. I appreciate teh fact that it gets mail out and all but my thoughts on pricing and effectiveness have yet to be addressed. I don't plan on changing this, but it's one of those things I'm finding harder to adapt to.

So that's that, a small post about nothing really at all. Oh yeah, I mean, I'll probably post pictures before I leave this city as I won't necessarily have internet at my new site, I'll work on it. I'm slow it happens!
love and hugs