post 24 october

Sunday [18 Oct], as one of the new pictures shows, I went to the English club at the library again. After watching a lesson on how to tell time in English [why do we say half past but not half ‘til the hour?], I watched Matt, another PCT, present about archaeology. Apparently, before joining Peace Corps and coming to my host sister’s birthday party two weeks ago, he worked as an archaeologist in Jordan.

Monday, another lesson. A few more students appeared, possibly due to the wild success of last week’s lesson. :) We didn’t cover as much as we might have liked to, but we definitely engaged them more and had a little more fun, too. Our class included one boy this time, but he was obviously still wildly outnumbered. Only one or two more lessons to go on the American primary and secondary education system!

Tuesday was cooking day at our cluster. Since our second unit was on food, we had to test our skills! I wasn’t really able to capture the entire process in photos, due to the try-to-blend-in philosophy of Peace Corps. I can generally take pictures of what I want to, but it’s definitely a different experience to be a tourist and be able to gawk from a bit more of a distance. When asking babushkas how much their apples cost, it’s pretty awkward to suddenly take out a camera and snap a photo.

Still, we worked our way through the food portions of the bazaar, and then to a store, in order to acquire all of the ingredients for our chosen dish: cyrniki. Cyrniki are cottage cheese pancakes- sweet indeet! The experience of working our way through the bazaar was sort of bizarre—more on display than I’ve ever felt in any other farm-type market! Plus, since our teacher was with us to help us practice the language, she was pointing to lots more than we probably would have pointed to on our own and we were saying the names of lots more things than we would have if we were only shopping on our own. Good practice, but certainly entertainment for the sellers. One of the most interesting buys was the cottage cheese itself, which was one of the items I had signed up to purchase. For this, we went into a big building that featured milk and milk products. For someone used to buying milk products in sealed packages, this was a bit unusual. Everything was very clean, but the cottage cheese was in a pile in front of each seller. The portion that I ordered was scooped up into a plastic bag. Again, nothing wrong with this, but it was a little different for me to see cottage cheese in a bag. Also, one of the items I was buying [baking soda] was the hardest item on our list to pronounce, and one of the harder ones to find, so I think I’ll resolve to reconsider my sign-up enthusiasm if there’s ever a next time. :)

Here’s the rough ingredients, taken from a PC Ukraine cookbook!

1 package cottage cheese домащний сир [domachny ceer]
3 eggs
¼ c sugar
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder розпущувач тиста [rozpooschoovach teesta—of course!]
½ tsp vanilla [we bought vanilla sugar—dry powder]
1 c flour
oil

Stir, fry, and enjoy! Recommended toppings: sour cream, honey, fresh or canned fruits. [We ate ours with sour cream and/or very thinly sliced apples.] Yes, they were smachno, ie, delicious. Please note that in the picture caption, “smachnoho” means bon apetit!

Wednesday was another food-related competency day. We went to a local café as a group, with our teacher, but the menu that they gave us was in Russian. Oh no! We muddled through that vaguely, but Oksana asked if they had any menus in Ukrainian. Nope, just English. Well, then! Another picture shows our results. I had mlintzi [like thin pancakes/ crepes] with poppy seed [paste, inside] and honey on top. Pretty good.

Thursday? Yup. Had one of those. Also had a technical session, in which we met a PC staff member from Morocco, as well as a PCV from western Ukraine who helped to present. She’s with us for a few days to share her experience as part of the adopt-a-cluster program. Also, please note the picture of our cluster’s attempts to differentiate between cold and hunger through diaphragm-related sounds. The point here was that the words for cold [holodno] and hunger [holodno] are pronounced almost exactly the same way, as you can tell from my fabulous transliteration. I’d love to clarify the difference, but it would definitely take an audio file recorded by someone with a better understanding of this alleged difference. :)

Friday was our last day with Oksana before all of the LCFs rotate. We’ll have a different teacher for three weeks, and then she’ll be back. I don’t know too much about our new teacher except that his name is Anton. Also, he’s a man, and he speaks Ukrainian. That’s about it. It’ll be strange to have a different teacher suddenly, but it’s probably a good idea for us to work with different teachers with different styles, etc, with the hope that we’ll learn as efficiently as possible. I’m working hard on the language, I think, but I hope to pick up the pace on my self-directed study a bit more, if possible, in all my loads of free time… I have gotten to the point, though, where I feel like I can make some polite, if very brief, conversation, possibly including one or more complete sentences. One of the best feelings is when my host mother or sister says, in Ukrainian, clearly, “Yes, I understand.” I want to say так! YES! HOORAY!

I also taught with Laura today, spending some entertaining time in a very warm classroom. Hers is a second-year class, full of enthusiastic and smiling students. The general topic was medical treatment, and we talked about dentists, phobias, and things that go bump in the night—that last part in advance of next week’s lesson/ celebration of Halloween!