Day Three.

I experienced a rather embarassing restuaraunt ordering session today. We walked into this Pizza cafe (they had American-like pizza, but also a lot of Ukrainian food) in Palats Sportu, all 15 of us, and tried to order. Because their menu is in Cyrillic characters, it's impossible to even sound out the words unless you know the phonetics of the symbols. Of course, we don't. Well, we didn't have any of our native coordinators with us, so Jessica, our head teacher, walked up to the counter and tried to order. Luckily, they very quickly realized she was American and handed her a menu that was in Russian and english. We then had to pick what we wanted, point to it on the menu and hope we got what we ordered. It was quite humiliating, as all of the staff kept coming out of the kitchen and laughing at us. I got my food though- a crepe with mushrooms and cheese, and this fresh cucumber/tomato/cheese/dill salad. With a bottle of water it was all 30.30 Hryvnia, which is roughly 3.60 US dollars. It's quite inexpensive and delicious.s

I wanted to put a picture of what my room looks like. My camera is not very good, so this is about the only decent picture I was able to take this morning. It's little, but so cute. I love the plants, they make me feel better.

So, we were walking in Ploscha L'va Tolstoho (Leo Tolstoy Square) to the Metro today after lunch, and what to my amazment but a Pennsylvania license plate in the Ukraine. Who would have thought? I figured Kendra would appreciate this.

A group of us went to the store today to try to buy necessities, such as toillette paper (some houses apparantly don't have any- mine doesn't have trashcans- that could prove to be an issue...), lotion (though I can recognize some brands, all the details except the brand are in Ukrainian, so distinguishing between soap, body wash and the numerous kinds of lotions is quite the difficult task), water (I've never drunk this little before; everyone has to drink bottled water), and notebooks to plan our lessons (a staple in America, not so much here- I had to search for at least twenty minutes before I found a notebook with lined paper instead of graph paper... who writes on graph paper?) While some items that I consider common are not available here (such as peanut butter- anyone want to send me some?!), there is one thing they have plenty of: Vodka. They really love it.

We have two main native coordinators- Tania and Igor. They're married, and one of the cutest couples ever. This is Igor. They're almost flawlessly fluent in english and entirely devoted to the program. They love it, and us.

There are three schools that are under the Kiev 2 group that I am in. My school is the Pozniaky school. We visited there yesterday. Today we went to the Obolon' school, which is farther north in Kiev. This is a group of us outside of the Metro station in Obolon'.