New Students, Sister-Weekend, and Cultural Diversity

I find myself with some spare time to write a post, since I am currently waiting for my Landlady to visit about our broken washing machine... Good thing, because quite a bit has happened that's worth writing about. Since my birthday I've been keeping busy --- Last Sunday I had another "Master Class" on Ukrainian cuisine with a previous student, and this time we made Borsch! It was incredibly delicious, don't worry I'm bringing back a recipe. We also watched a VERY famous Russian film, "The Diamond Arm," and some famous soviet cartoons: A Ukrainian folk-tale as well as The Russian version of Winnie the Pooh (my all-time favorite)


The next day I started a new group class, and my new students are (as always) FANTASTIC! We laugh a lot, and sometimes we go on crazy tangents (like discussing the names of different facial-hair styles) but we have a lot of fun and my students don't complain :) This is a really sweet gig, and I'm very seriously considering moving back to Kiev in the future and working as a REAL English teacher. However, I am missing my family more than ever... My wonderful sister came to visit me in Kiev this past weekend, and we crammed as much Kiev-exploring and sister-bonding time as possible into the 48 hours that we had to work with. I actually cried for about a day after she left, but hopefully I'll end up in France soon. Here we are with a Monkey in the city center (there are always crazy people dressed up for pictures at Independence Square).


The weekend was fantastic, we had a lot of coffees from the coffee trucks (they sell espresso from mobile coffee-shops based out of hatch-back sedans all over the place in Kiev), we went to the Lavra (caves monastery), saw the churches Sofia, Mihailovskij, and Andreevskij, ate Pirozhki, Borsch, Chicken Kiev, and everything else I could think of that was especially Ukrainian. We also ran into some Pizanka (Ukrainian painted eggs)


Also, I am happy to say that last night my Italian roommates invited me to hang out with them for the FIRST TIME, because one of their boyfriends is here and he brought fancy chocolate liqueur from his region in Italy. We had that, some tiramisu ice-cream cake, and Butter cookies from Bretagne. It was a total breakthrough in our roommate relationship. All in all it's been a good week! I have three days left of this group class, and I think I'll be going to Lviv/Lvov this weekend to explore and take more pictures (which means another TRAIN RIDE! MY FAVORITE!) I'll keep you updated.

Good Gravy, I love Kiev!
Sarah