fall break

I can't believe it's Thursday already...where is my autumn break going??? Well, let's stop and recap...

Sunday was church, then hanging out at the Y house. Apparently there is a Boy (yes, the capital B is intentional) from youth group at the church in the center who is interested in Vlada (age 13). I had suspected something along those lines about a month or so ago, when Vlada and one of her girl cousins had left for youth group long before Oleh and Vitaly were ready. Victor had muttered something about he didn't understand why they had to go so early, but I had my suspicions (having once been a 13-year-old girl who went to youth group). At any rate, the Boy had called to talk to Vlada a few times, and Vlada is rather distraught (to the point of tears and talking back to her mom) that it will now be too dark to walk to youth group on Sunday nights.

I got a chuckle out of Oleh, who was attempting to tell me about all of this in English. "Vlada has is boy. 100 minutes! [which I think refers to the phone call]" I asked Vlada about the Boy later, and was told that he's "just a friend" and that Oleh likes to talk. Hah. As I said, I was once 13 myself. :)

Sunday night Erin arrived, tired from traveling here, there, and everywhere, and stayed for two days. We had a great time, despite rainy weather...amusing my Internet ladies by our attempts to print off photos, Trivial Pursuit (15 hryven at my second-hand store!), Rainier Maria Rilke, pizza in Kharkiv, and lots of talking, both about our lives here in Ukraine and various philosophical/theoretical stuff that I love talking about but never get to. Her visit ROCKED! I love Balaklia and the people I know here, but it was good to spend time with an English-speaking friend.

Yesterday started out as a Bad Day, as it appeared that I would be waiting around home for someone to help me tape my windows for the winter, possibly in vain; the water was turned off; and my mailbox was empty, as it had been for the past week. However, one of the janitors from school did eventually come help me, the water got turned back on, and I was flagged down by one of the post office ladies, who for reasons I don't understand had been collecting my mail in the back room instead of my mailbox and gave it to me in one big pile (four letters, one box, one PC envelope, and one Christian Science Monitor).

Today's adventure was mailing Tif two large boxes of winter clothes she left here when she thought she'd be coming back. It took over an hour, but the post office lady was so nice and helpful. One of the babuskas who was at the post office wanted to know why on earth I'd send a box to America, as that just seemed like doing things backwards.

Stopped at the second-hand store on my way home to see if they had any new books yet. The owner said no, but she was going to Kharkiv tomorrow to pick up a new shipment of stuff, and if she found any books, she'd add them to the stuff. I find it amusing that I am drafting Ukrainians to help me with my book addiction. :)

Tomorrow I'm off to Kharkiv to hang out with the girls; buy train tickets to PST University, where I get to teach about teaching little people; and I just might splurge and buy myself some books at Books, a very nice bookstore with a decent English section. There's a comparative linguistic analysis of Ukrainian and English that looked interesting, plus comic-book-style Shakespeare I want for my 8th form. They're all a bit pricey, but I only spent just over half of my living allowance this past month.