A post because I can...

It was a good Saturday here in Oster. We had our last session with our link cluster (Kozelets). Today's technical session was on what our workload is supposed to look like when we get to site (10ish days!) and how we have to learn how to say no to doing things once we get there. We each had to do a little mini-presentation of this speech that we've been trying to memorize since week 1. It tells who we are, where we came from, what we studied in college, that we work for PC, what PC is, what we have done during pre-service training (teaching and assisting, etc.). All in all it's probably 25 sentences...which is a lot to memorize in any language...let alone a foreign language! But, we've all got it more or less memorized...which will come in very handy when we meet our counterparts for the first time on June 14 and they more than likely will not speak any English.

This is a little preview of the requirements of PC when we get to site:
-1 hour of class observation every day for the first semester
-3 hours of misc. activities in a school, daily
-2 hours per week assisting an English teacher
-3 different extracurricular activities regularly each week

Seeing those numbers down on paper for the first time today was good. I like having a routine...and I learned this past week how much I depend on a routine to make my life better and easier. Because we had summer camp Monday-Thursday, we had Russian language classes in the afternoon. It was just a jumble of not normal meeting times for me...and I completely forgot about my individual tutoring on Tuesday morning...even though I talked about it the night before. I was even awake plenty early Tuesday morning to get ready and go to tutoring...but it just slipped my mind because things were so out of the norm. I'm trying to adjust to this...but it's definitely hard for Lydia's OCD brain.

As pre-service training is coming to an end and we are all trying to cram as much Russian in our brains as can possibly fit, we also have to finish our SDL (self-directed learning) projects. This was something that we were supposed to have been working on all of pre-service training...but in reality it got put on the back-burner for the past few weeks. Since it is due sometime this week, I decided to work on it some today. I am making a picture slideshow of my time during pre-service training with Russian blurbs on each picture. Now all I needed were a few Russian/Ukrainian tunes to go with the slideshow. Cue music video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC7sE-lhVLg

This song gets blasted ALL around Oster. It is so catchy and upbeat that it was instantly the only song we have really been able to recognize. I've been dying to learn it and put it in the video slideshow...and I was finally successful today! Oora (That's Russian for hooray)! I told my host sister how excited I was about it and she of course died laughing at me. All of the kids here LOVE Lady Gaga and it then occurred to me to show my host sister a few of the music videos from Glee. She liked them and was quite intriqued by the idea of it! Sold :) another person addicted. One of my students actually asked me the other day if I listened to Lady Gaga and I said yes. She then asked me what Judas was...I explained that it's a name. At that point, I had no idea that was Lady Gaga's new song out right now...I am COMPLETELY out of the loop on what songs and movies are coming out. Feel free to let me know if there are new songs or movies that I need to download.

I read a book today on my Kindle (can I just say again how absolutely fantastic that machine is). It's called "Heaven is for Real," can't remember who it's by. I had seen it listed before but hadn't downloaded it...but one of my dear and sweet friends Britney told me it was worth downloading. Definitely a quick and uplifting read. It reminded me of the book 90 Minutes in Heaven...also a good one to download (or actually purchase a real copy of, ha).

I'll end with something I figure people might find interesting. Money. Money here in Ukraine is given to us by PC in a bank account each month. We have to travel to a big city to use an ATM (in Russian, bankomat) to get the money out using a debit card. We have a few ATM's here in Oster but it's not suggested that you use them. We give our host family's a monthly allowance for the meals that we receive in addition to the utilities that we use while living with them. It will be so different when we get to site and are completely in charge of our own bills, our own meals, etc. For pre-service training we receive what's called a "walking around allowance" that is for the purchasing of water and other misc. things we might need (a snack, school supplies, etc.) . I think that we get 15 grievnas a day...which is just over $2.00 USD. I can buy a large bottle of water (1.5 liters) for a little over 5 grievnas...just as something to judge by. If I buy a bag of cookies (enough to last my family for 3-4 days)...that might cost around 8 grievna. Just fyi! For lunches (which we as PCVs are in charge of) we receive 15 grievnas. Some clusters have been able to eat at their school cafeteria each day, other clusters eat on their own, while our cluster decided to pool our money together and get sandwich stuff for the week. We each chip in 50 grievnas every week or so to purchase meat, cheese, bread, chips (I would like to think that I contributed to the fact that everyone in my group now eats chips on their sandwiches like little kids...pretty amazing), cookies, coffee, tea, and sugar that is all communal food until we run out. If we want some yogurt or fruit, we each buy that ourselves (a banana or an apple usually costs around 3 grievnas, aka around 40 cents maybe). We also receive a travel allowance each month (not sure if we still will get that when we go to site). I think it was around 90 grievnas this past month...which is supposed to equate for our trips to Kozelets for technical training sessions, a trip to Kiev or Chernihiv, etc. A few prices to note for bus tickets:

one-way bus ticket to Kiev: around 20 grievnas (less than $3.00)...maybe 2 hours?
one-way bus ticket to Kozelets: around 5 grievnas (less than $1.00)...30 minutes
one-way bus ticket to Chernihiv: around 27 grievnas (less than $4.00)...around 2 hours as well

Chernihiv has a very good inner-city bus transit system. I think it costs around 2 grievnas (maybe a quarter USD?) to take a bus around town, and they are constantly going. Kiev has a metro system which I have only navigated once and was still completely overwhelmed by. It also cost 2 grievnas I think.

The exchange rate for the dollar to the grievna is usually around $1.00 (USD) for $7.95 (UAH-aka, grievna). I have exchanged money here in Oster at one of the banks which was a good cross-cultural thing to check off of my list. I think I've talked enough now so I'll go ahead and submit. Enjoy your weekend! Relax a little :) love love.