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