new shoes

So my Tevas flipflops officially wore out last night. They've been falling apart all summer, but last night they acquired a visible hole in the bottom. Since I wore them for two years (bought mid-summer '05), I think I got my money's worth out of them.

So last night, when our students took us on a walking tour of downtown Donetsk, we stopped at a store and I bought new flipflops. They're blue and white with accents in a lot of bright colors. Hopefully they'll break in easily. Everyone else's comment was, "Wow...colorful!" Well, it seems impossible to buy plain black flipflops for women here.

Afterwards, Lana, Stephanie, and I went to McDonald's for twenty-somethings bonding time, which was much fun. Then we attempted to come home, which involved a) missing the right trolley because I couldn't understand the conductor; b) getting on a trolley that had the number of the route on it that we wanted but in fact went somewhere else; c) watching another correct trolley toodle past our stop without stopping; d) calling Dave at DCU for the correct route number for the marshrutka (mini-bus); e) riding a very crowded marshrutka home. We eventually did get home!

I found out yesterday that half of our beginner class is related. It's an older woman, her son and daughter, and the daughter's husband. All of them, plus the daughter and son-in-law's three little girls, are immigrating to Pennsylvania in September, and they've just started learning English. The classes are going too fast for them (this program is INTENSE!), so they've started showing up to my conversation sessions because I can help them in Ukrainian. They joked yesterday about filling up all my time slots. :)