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.