2 – 8 June
The first week I was going to work, Carrie, fellow PCV, stayed with me. She's probably the person I’ve gotten to know best and it was fun to have her to ruminate over the events at work and process it all. She is also a development junkie, but unlike me, has been studying it in earnest for some time now and is a delight to talk about all the complexities, contradictions, abuses, trends, meanings, etc., of development work and being an American.

We cooked, hung out, listened to music, read, and generally enjoyed time in a free space, that is my apartment and not home stay.

On Sat. 7 June, Carrie and I went to a festival organized by the other NGO that my organization’s Ukrainian director runs. It was held at an open air museum that consists of houses and villages constructed to replicate traditional housing from different Ukrainian regions. It is a beautiful area away from the city, all green, rolling hills, horses and wooden homes with thatch roofs. I want to go back to picnic sometime soon.

We spent more time wandering around the grounds and eating shashlik (shishkabobs) so I can’t report authoritatively on the festival, but there were tons of people in Ukrainian traditional dress and craftspeople selling their wares. Lots of beautiful but expensive embroidered fabric and clothes.

To get to the festival, I had been told a marshrutka to take, but this info turned out to be wrong. No one on the street knew anything, so we started stopping other marshrutkas and asking them. We weren’t sure how this would be received, but to our utter gratitude, not only were the marshrutka drivers perfectly happy to stop their vans and try to figure out where we should go, the passengers got into the act.

Then we got on the bus they directed us to, asking the driver and his ticket taker how to get from their route to the museum. They not only didn’t ask us to pay, but the ticket taker walked us to the next transport, an electriska (electric trolley bus) to make sure we would get to the right one. I was surprised at this care, for sometimes people seem hard and unmoved, particularly in this big city.