As is usually the case when I haven’t written for a long time, I don’t really know where to begin when I think about trying to sum up the experiences I’ve had for the last two months. While May and June sometimes veered in the direction of slow and almost boring, July and August were the fastest two months of my life. It was a great summer and I can’t believe it’s over. On Monday I head back to school to meet with my colleagues and discuss the upcoming semester. Apparently there have been some huge changes in the curriculum, so I have absolutely no clue what to expect from this year, but I look forward to getting back into the swing of things. On Tuesday we have the “First Bell” ceremony and on Wednesday we’ll have classes (I think?). So my summer is more or less over and before I know it, I’m sure the leaves will be falling from the trees and soon enough snowflakes will be falling from the sky.
But it’s not quite autumn yet, so I guess I should reflect a little on the summer before it’s officially over. When things in life get overwhelming, I usually find myself drawn to bulleted lists…they make things seem manageable and oh-so-organized, and so in an effort to describe this summer without going on for ten years, I’m going to make a nice little list of what I did this summer.
- Spent five days at the Ukrainian Language Refresher…a camp for grown -ups.
- Hiked in the Carpathians with Karen and her sister
- Travelled to the east –visited friends in Dnipropetrovs’k and Donetsk. Spent 21 unbearably hot hours on a train with windows that wouldn’t open.
- Spent a week camping with students and fellow Peace Corps volunteers at the environmentally themed “Camp IKnow.”
- Spent one week at home. One week.
- Picked up my dear friend Yente at the airport in Kyiv and, in total, spent over two solid days on trains, ferries, taxis, and busses while travelling over the span of two weeks to the following places:
- Sevastopol (former base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, home to the ruins of an ancient Greek colony)
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Bakhchisaray (cave cities, cliffs, palace of the Crimean Khans)
- Balaklava (formerly secret cave submarine factory, beautiful, isolated cliff beaches accessible only by a 40-minute ferry ride)
- Odessa (Pretty architecture, spent time with friends, saw the famous Potemkin Stairs)
- Chortkiv (home!)
- Kamyanets-Podilsky and Khotyn (old cities with ancient fortresses)
- L’viv (always beautiful)
- Kyiv (went to the cave monasteries, Independence Square, walked an awful lot, rode the impossibly long escalators, walked more)
After two amazing weeks of travelling around, Yente left and a few dramatic days later (another blog post entirely), I went back home. Now I’m happily back at site, trying to figure out how to deal with a mold problem that’s progressively gotten worse and worse throughout the course of summer and getting ready for school to start in a day or two. I have no idea what my schedule for the fall semester will be and I have absolutely no clue what I’ll be teaching, and yet it’s good to be back. Travelling was nice and I had an amazing summer, but as my Ukrainian friends say, “east or west, home is best.”
