Glory Days

The school year is winding down in Ukraine. I am now teaching only two or three lessons a day because my students are busy with school and region exams. With so much free time on my hands, I figure I should update the blog.

Easter in Ukraine happened about three weeks ago. On the Thursday before Easter I baked "Paska" the Easter bread. It is an important tradition here in Ukraine and the bread is then taken to church to be blessed. As most of you know, I am not extremely talented in the kitchen, so my actual job was sprinkling sugar on top of the bread, but it was fun nonetheless. On Friday I went to church with a few of my teachers and watched them kiss Christ's wounds. There was a picture of Jesus in the front of the church. The teachers got down on their knees and crawled towards it, occasionally stopping to pray. When they reached the picture they kissed Jesus three times on each of his wounds, then moved to the side and said another prayer. I didn't exactly understand what was going on, but it was interesting to watch. On Saturday I had planned to attend church again to watch an Easter basket be blessed, but was invited to a professional soccer game in Lviv and decided to do that instead.

The game was awesome. The weather was gorgeous. The game was between the local team Karpaty, and the best team in the country, Shaktar. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Karpaty lost 4-2. The game was not very crowded, probably partly because it was Easter weekend, and there were definitely more cops there than fans. Although I had never heard of Karpaty until the day before, I joined in the cheers of FOO (Ukrainian version of "boo") everytime Shaktar scored.

I went to church in Stry on Easter morning. I had heard that Easter mass began at 5 or 6 am and lasted for up to three hours so I was relieved to hear that I wouldn't be going until 7 and then only for about an hour. The church I went to is actual a very small chapel so I stood outside for the mass. I didn't understand much, and was distracted by my Ukrainian stilletto boots constantly sinking into the mud, but I enjoyed it overall. Like most holidays in Ukraine, Easter celebrations lasted about three days. Because many people strictly observe Lent there was plenty of meat eating and drinking going on the whole time.

The weekend after Easter volunteers in Kirovograd hosted a softball tournament. Kgrad is located in the center of Ukraine, south of Kyiv, a fifteen hour train ride from my site (fuuun!) When I heard about softball weekend I knew I had to attend and see if any of my Diamond Middle School softball skills remained. Coach Sullivan will be happy to hear that in our first game I not only got on base every at bat, I also caught two pop flys in one inning. I was so excited that the next time the ball came to me I botched an easy out by throwing the ball over the first baseman's head and into a tree. Slightly embarassing, but that's alright. If you ignore that slight error (and maybe even if you count it) it was definitely my greatest athletic performance of all time and I really felt that I was reliving my childhood glory days :)

While the softball games were intense (my team lost all three of our games by at least 10 runs haha) the most trying part of the weekend was attempting to buy a train ticket home. People in Kgrad speak Russian and my ticket lady was not exactly pleasant. Although I asked her politely to speak Ukrainain she refused and I simply said, "fine, give me whatever you have that is heading towards Lviv." Luckily I made it home. I then asked another woman working at the snack bar to tell me where the toilet was. She said she was busy working and couldn't talk to me. I got angry and said, "really? you can't tell me where the toilet is?" and then she told me. I was very proud of myself and my growing ability to get angry in Ukrainian :)

There are more adventures in store for this weekend. On Saturday my friend Adam is making buffalo wings for a bunch of us (so good) and on Sunday I am taking a religious pilgrimmage (no joke) to a small chapel about thirty or so kilometers from my site. It is an annual tradition and I have been invited by three separate people so far so it should be really interesting. Look for updates soon.

Hope things are warming up back home and that the end of the school year is going well for everyone. Keep in touch!