Dear Friends and Family, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We are so thrilled to be celebrating the Holidays in America again! We’ve been enjoying our frasier fir Christmas tree, drinking plenty of eggnog, listening to festive music, and enjoying the lights and decorations of our neighbors. We’re lucky to have been able to spend [...]
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After spending about 24 hours on buses (minus a 30 minute layover in Bangkok), we made it all the way from southern Thailand to Vientiene, the capital of Laos, two days ago. After a decent night’s sleep in Vientiene, we decided to keep going for four more hours to Vang Vieng, a little river town farther [...]
It’s hard to believe that we’re almost half-way through our trip already! Basically, we’ve had: -3 days in Bangkok -over night train to southern Thailand (Surat Thani) -3 full days on the northeast side of Ko Pha-ngan (ferry to and from the island), relaxing on the beach -two day trip across Thailand to the west [...]
I’m sitting in under a fan in an internet cafe in Khao Lak, Thailand, sipping on an iced coffee from a 7-11 (which are on every street corner). We packed our trusty Macbook Pro between a couple sleeping bags, said a couple Hail Mary’s for it, and shipped it home on our last day in [...]
Our third playground is in a neighborhood called Milirativny. A bit farther out towards the edge of town, it’s the neighborhood where we lived during our first month in Sofievka. We chose a nice spot in a grassy area near some chestnut trees in front of the apartment buildings. The timeline for this playground paralleled [...]
The second of our little parks is located in a neighborhood called Molodyozhny, surrounded by several apartments and a preschool. This part of town is just behind the secondary school, so a lot of teachers and young families live in the apartments. The carpenters didn’t get started on this playground until the end of April [...]
It was really fun to watch the transformation at the first playground, since we can actually see this one from our apartment windows! The first step for this site was to clean up the area, which was no easy task. The neighborhood dumpsters were located about 10 meters from the site, and although the dumpsters [...]
Sorry to have kept you all in the dark for a couple of weeks, but the exciting news is that our first playground (of 3) is amost ready! However, you’re going to have to wait a few more days for pictures, because we want you to be completely surprised by the finished product and site’s [...]
Spring has (fingers crossed) sprung in our little corner of Ukraine, and to Emma and me that means it’s time to get going on our (your) playgrounds! In our last update, we saw that pieces of the playgrounds were starting to take shape in the local workshop. The carpentry crew has been working steadily, and [...]
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
We spent the last week of February at our COS Conference in the Ukrainian mountains. The purpose of the “Close of Service” Conference is to prepare Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) for ending their time in Peace Corps. For two full days, we had sessions in which we reflected on our time here in Ukraine—how we’ve [...]
Emma and I want to let you know that the “Our Sofievka: Parks, Playgrounds, and Peace” project is in progress and moving along nicely. We learned in early January that – thanks to many generous donations – we were fully funded. Peace Corps processed all the paperwork for us, and we were able to withdraw [...]
(Written in the wee hours of January 3rd.) So, here we are – sitting in the airport at 2am after arriving back in Ukraine. Our flight arrived at midnight, our bus leaves until 8am, and we didn’t want to pay for a hostel for just a few hours of sleep. It is entirely possible that [...]
Christmas Eve has sort of snuck up on us here in Eastern Europe. It’s tough to be a foreigner in a foreign land this time of year—are there any Christmas songs not about being home for the holidays? So, our strategy is to go somewhere interesting to keep our minds off the fact that Santa [...]
Check out pictures from our fabulous Griffis Family Vacation! Although things can get a bit tense when 5 people are in close contact for almost 3 weeks straight, getting attacked by millions of mosquitoes and lyme-infected ticks, we had a great time and saw a lot of sites. We got the Western Ukraine experience from [...]
Believe it or not, we finally posted pictures from Mom and Dad McHardy’s summer visit in June. Enjoy!
Please see the new link at the top of our site to find out about our new and exciting project, named “Our Sofievka!”
So, five months after our last post, we figured it was high time to let you know how things are going. We honestly do have good intentions of updating the blog, but we’ve gotten so far behind that it’s too hard to catch back up. Here’s hoping that this post will lead to a [...]
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Emma and I attended our second graduation ceremony here last week, and I gave my second graduation speech. I wrote the thing in English (as simple English as possible), translated it myself, and then got help from my Russian tutor to correct the mistakes. Then I practiced it for a week. My [...]
In more work-related news, I thought I’d share an activity our school did for Earth Day this year. Below is what I wrote when I nominated them for an award that is being given out by volunteers in PC Ukraine’s Environmental Working Group. I don’t know that we did anything award-winning, but it was pretty [...]
Tomorrow, May 9th, is a big holiday in Ukraine – Victory Day. NPR’s Weekend Edition had an interesting piece on Ukraine’s history and the meaning of this day to Ukrainians. I hope you’ll take a listen:
NPR – World War II Holiday Brings Ukrainian Nightmares
As with most PCV blogs, we tend to talk here about fun, interesting things that happen. Holidays, travels, food, weather, etc. But, what about work? Sometimes it feels like we do very little work, sometimes it feels like we do way too much, but either way, we rarely report about it to you. So now’s [...]
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Everyone here says this winter has been exceptionally snowy. For that, I’m actually glad. Without snow, winter here seems to be very brown, gray, and somewhat gloomy. A good snowfall, however, gives our town an austere charm and turns my daily walk to school into an arctic trek.
This February especially, snowfalls came one after the [...]
Don’t worry – we still have some more “Winter Wrap-Ups” to post, but I wanted to let you know that SPRING IS HERE!! After a long weekend in the eastern part of the country, we arrived back home Sunday to find the rest of the snow GONE! The temperatures have been in the 50s for [...]
One fun thing we did at the end of January was attend a Peace Corps “language refresher.” It was a 4-day long Russian language training with other PCVs from our group and the previous group in the northeastern city of Chernihiv. We managed to make a 9 day trip out of it, including a weekend [...]
Spring finally appears to be on its way (although we still have inches of snow and ice on the ground in places), the sun shines brighter and longer each day (the vernal equinox is tomorrow!), and everyone’s spirits are slowly lifting in anticipation of warmer weather (anything above 40 is considered warm these days). So, [...]
It turns out that birthdays are a Big Deal here in Ukraine. Ask a Ukrainian what their favorite holiday is, and a lot of them will say “my birthday”. It’s been almost a year, but, if I recall, back home we don’t even consider birthdays to be “holidays” per se. Well, I [...]
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
One of the best things we got to do during our Christmas vacation in Budapest and Vienna was eat. And drink. Now, don’t get me wrong: Ukrainian food is delicious. But, there’s a definite lack of ethnic variety around here. We have pizza places, although the pizza usually consists of a thin crust topped with [...]
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We had a great time tonight celebrating the New Year with my counterpart Olha, Emma’s director (Olha’s father), and their family. New Year in Ukraine is roughly equivalent to our Christmas – it’s a big family holiday with lots of traditions. So we were honored to be invited to prazdnovat (праздновать) with some of our [...]
We’re definitely having a nice time here in Vienna. We’ve walked around lots of Christmas markets, drunk hot mulled wine, eaten roasted chestnuts, thrown snowballs at statues of random Hofburgs, and gorged ourselves on good food and beer. Tonight and tomorrow we plan on going to all the Christmas masses we can take, including Christmas [...]
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In case you missed this storyline, I’ll give you some background. Emma and I met the local weight training coach this summer when we were living in the Lyceum dorms with his star trainee, Sasha. An invitation to come to his training hall and get back in shape somehow evolved into me agreeing to [...]
Well, we’ve now made it through two American Holidays in Ukraine! After teaching our students all about Halloween, we took 3 weeks off due to a national H1N1 quarantine, only to come back to school just in time for Thanksgiving! Last week’s English classes and clubs included vocabulary words such as: turkey, pilgrim, Native American, [...]
Some time ago we got this old Russian cartoon from our language teacher called Жил-был пёс (zhil-buil pyos) – There Once Was a Dog. I found it lying around on the hard-drive again today and thought I’d share it.
It’s a great little story based on a Ukrainian folk tale. Beyond being a fun little [...]
Emma and I are in week 2 of our 3 week national “quarantine”. An outbreak of Swine Flu in the western part of Ukraine led the government to cancel classes in every educational institution in the country.
So we have 3 weeks off!
Well, not exactly. My school had already scheduled a “fall break” for [...]
On my way to school this morning, I walked under a tree (maybe a Chestnut) that was dropping it’s big leaves like they were going out of style. Every tree around it was already bare, but this one had kept most of its leaves until today. We had our first serious frost last [...]
The Halloween party for my English Clubs was a success! Although most Ukrainian students know what Halloween is thanks to American movies, they haven’t actually celebrated it before. The mostly 15-16 year old kids enjoyed dressing up in costumes, or at least painting their faces. We carved a couple of pumpkins, provided by my English [...]
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I’m feeling rather good about myself today, and I just poured myself a superfluous afternoon cup of coffee (as opposed to the absolutely “fluous” cup I have in the mornings), so I thought I’d drop some lines about life.
Life is good right now. The reason is that the “Director’s Seminar” finally happened yesterday and so [...]
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