First Day Down!

We had a great week with many trips downtown to see the Independence day weekend events and getting to know more people. Unfortunately we didn't buy train tickets in time to get to the black sea but in a couple of weeks we should be able to get somewhere.

The first day of school was yesterday and both Alyssa and I had a pretty good day overall. It is a little different teaching to a class of 5-6 students, the class just seems empty. Overall things went well though and it should be an entertaining year. We did discover that Kiev International School is not like other QSI schools in that there are a lot more local Ukrainian students attending. There is still a diverse group of students though.

After work we were off to meet our OBG at the American Medical center. We discovered that the 417 bus is slow to come and doesn't move much faster once you are on it. Good thing we don't have to take it on the big day! Our doctor's name is Ludmila and she is this wonderful бабушка (grandmother said like babushka) of a lady. She kept saying how Alyssa was God's little gift and that she would be like our mother. She was very caring and told us she had been waiting and waiting for us to come, actually the whole clinic has been wondering who these two Americans are that will be having a baby. The ultrasound looked good and all is well with Rawly. During the ultrasound we saw little Rawls sucking on his toes! What a silly little boy! So we feel very welcome and blessed to have this doctor, she is a wonderful and caring lady.

This is a picture from our boss's apartment on the top floor of a building. On the left side of the picture is our apartment building and the school is just behind the two big buildings. The school sits in a "green zone" so there is a lot of forest nearby. To the right, off the picture, is a big stretch of forest. Just to be clear "green zone" doesn't mean "clean zone" there is a lot of trash since littering is a huge problem in Ukraine. I guess it is better than the concrete jungle of the city. In the distance you can see the Left bank of the city which is divided by the Dinpre River, hopefully I spelled that right.

This is the market by St. Andrews cathedral (the cathedral behind us in the first picture). This was Independence day weekend so there were a lot of Artists from other countries and around Europe. There were also people selling all kinds of goods from textiles to salvaged pawn shop type stuff.
We really enjoyed walking and talking to the vendors. Every normal day the market exists just not down the middle of the street. Even still on this weekend you had to watch out for cars and the occasional bus!

This has been by far the favorite sign of Alyssa. Since everyone smokes it seems, she really enjoyed the smoke free zone.

New Discovery of the week: It's kind of a weird cultural thing but aparently there are other countries that have the same tradition. Here the men also shave their arm pits! I guess it helps because they also don't wear any deodorant.

Until next time America,

Ken and Alyssa

Pizza! Pizza!

Enough about our sleep depravity, what you really want to know is: What's the food like? Right? As the title suggests the cuisine here is simple: Ukrainian or pizza. So far we've liked both, but we definitely ate pizza more in the first four days than we have in the past six months. It's been a constant adventure going to the supermarket to find food. The first milk we bought was buttermilk, the second went bad the day after it was opened (apparently not pasteurized), and now we use boxed milk that tastes alright on cereal, but not plain. We found "Danone" (Dannon) brand mini drinkable yogurts that are probably loaded with corn syrup (sorry dad, you taught me better) but they're hopefully giving us the good enzymes we need. Some Canadians from northern BC are looking for yogurt culture so that we can make our own. As for the produce, it's plentiful for now and we buy it from the market because they do radiation checks on everything that they sell (I'm not joking!) Spaghetti sauce is similar to ketchup, but luckily someone gave us the heads up and we found a decent brand. We just bought some spices and garlic yesterday which helped a lot (I'm not sure if our co-workers will agree). Back to the dairy products, cheese is still a far cry from anything that we're accustomed to and we're a little nervous about what's pasteurized and what's not (for the pregnancy) but our friends the Skousens (also from Caldwell) discovered a great tasting cheese that we tried yesterday and are looking forward to purchasing the next time we go shopping. And as you'll see from the corny picture--I've finally tried cabbage rolls and love them, I think that we can find them frozen in the bulk section...

No towel, need sleepy

We've arrived—tired and unadjusted still, but we're here! Most days feel like we've been hit by a tornado (at least for me). Our days have been full of taking the entire group of 25 new teachers and their families shopping at the MegaMart (Fred Meyerlike) and the Metro (similar to Costco without the samples). With all this commotion, it has left little time for me (Alyssa) to get in the naps I've grown accustomed to over the summer. This marks our fifth day here, Ken's slept through the entire night twice and looks like he may again this morning, I, on the other hand, have this uncanny knack of waking up at 3:30am and not being able to sleep again until seven for an hour or so nap. It's currently 5:30 and I've already tried doing seven things, but it proves difficult when the rest of the world is still sleeping.