It's a small world...

I'm home for all of 16 hours on this Sunday before I pack my bags for another trip--this time to Kamianets-Podilskyi which is in the western part of Ukraine.  I left on Friday night at 11:40 pm for Kiev (arriving at 5:40 am on Saturday morning) for an Environmental Working Group meeting which basically occupied most of the day on Saturday.  Had to fit in a run to McDonald's though (duh) and enjoy fries and...get ready for this: a cheeseburger.  I can't believe I ate one either.  It goes against EVERYTHING I am as a human being to eat meat like that.  I honestly don't know when the last time I ate one was (maybe elementary school when Happy Meals had mini-Beanie Babies in them and I had to have every one of them?).

Pause.  As a sidenote to the Beanie Babies story: it cost all of 50 cents more to buy an entire happy meal (with fries and a burger) as opposed to buying just the Beanie Baby itself.  We fed all of our neighbors in the Downs the day that they came out...and our dog, Panda, got to eat fries and hamburgers for what seemed like weeks.  Oh, the craze that was Beanie Babies.  

Anywho, back to McDonald's meat.  Mmm...so, I ate a cheeseburger.  Want to guess what book I'm reading right now also?  The Kind Diet, by Alicia Silverstone.  Want to know what the book is about?  I'm sure I'll have many posts in the future about it, but basically it's her lifestyle change of becoming a vegan and the reasons why our body doesn't actually need meat to survive.  Shocking, I know.  It really is pretty crazy to learn about.  And yes, I ate a cheeseburger after reading about cow farms in America, being fully aware of how the animals are treated and raised on these farms.  I don't think I can become a vegan while I'm in Ukraine (soy products are WAYYYY expensive here and my PC living allowance does not allow for that).  And it's not feasible to say I won't eat meat while I'm here in Ukraine because sometimes you have to eat whatever is placed in front of you.  However, when I cook for myself for the next two years, I want to try to have a more grain-based diet as opposed to one filled with meat (that takes 72 hours to go through our digestive system).  I didn't mean to go off on this tangent, so I'll get back to the title of this blog! :)

Last night (Saturday night) I headed to the Kiev train station around 8:30 pm for my 9:23 pm train.  I found my seat and got my bedding ready when a man came and sat in my compartment with me, letting me know that he had the top bunk above my bottom one.  He was probably in his early 30's and asked if I wanted to go have a smoke break before we left (no, thanks), and it was at that moment that he asked me my name.  I try to avoid talking to people on the trains because I really like to just relax and watch some tv shows on my iphone or read my Kindle.  And sometimes if I know I'll never see a person again, I tell them my name is Anna or something like that.  But, when he asked me my name, Lydia came out before I knew what was going on!  He left to go smoke, came back, and started getting out the shmorgasborg (sp?) of food that he had just bought at the EcoMarket supermarket store.  He had everything from salo (pig fat), to beer, to cucumbers, to cabbage, to tomatoes, to bread, to 2 or 3 different kinds of sausage (mmm), to desserts, and then he pulled out Cognac to top it all off.  Now, for the Americans reading this, this is a totally normal thing to do on a train.  And it is custom that you share the food with your neighbors.  The only thing going through my head at this point was that I was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep and that if he was going to drink Cognac and beer, that I was in for a long night with not much sleep.  I kept reading, waiting for the time when our train would leave, and a few minutes before we were to take off, the other two people in our little "compartment" showed up.  I glanced up from my book and lo and behold I KNEW the person standing there.  Her name is Yana and she is my NEIGHBOR who lives across the hall from me.  I nearly fell out of my seat.  She squealed my name (which is when I was VERY glad I told the man my real name) with delight and we hugged and started talking about our adventures of the day.  She had gone to Kiev for the day with one of her guy friends to go shopping and they had actually been on my train that morning from k-grad.  Such a small, small world.  Yana speaks basically perfect English and I was SO glad to have her company for the rest of the ride home.  We even got to take a taxi back at 4:30 am when our train arrived in k-grad.  If I hadn't been so tired, I would have turned on my laptop and searched for the SOONERS playing Tulsa (since it was only 8:30 pm Central time) but I decided that sleep was more important.

I need to start and finish packing for my train that leaves this evening!  Whoops :)  I will be meeting up with two of my cluster mates (Jamie and Mark--whose birthday is today! Happy birthday Marky Mark!) and 2 of my link-cluster mates (Kym and Maria).  Couldn't be more excited for our reunion at the HIV/AIDS training that we will all be doing.  Happy Sunday :)