October 2005
30^th October	New rules at work. The library is closed to the public on Fridays and has been since school started. Office employees still work but the counter people do not. Because half of my classes are comprised of counter people I have no classes so Friday is a weird day for me anyway. Well last Friday (21 Oct.) the boss came by at about 10:30 shivering in her long coat and told us all to go home and work at home because it is too cold in the library. It was chilly but I did not find it too cold but who am I to argue. On Tuesday I was informed that until the heat gets turned on for the winter we would continue to work at home on Fridays so this week end was a three day weekend and we just lazed around and read, relaxed and I did get some computer work down for my classes. Currently I am working on screenshots of Russian drop down menus and English Drop down menus from Microsoft Word, I set them up so that they can be compared to each other. My computer class right now consists of 10 students and two laptops. The laptops are mine with the menus in English and Virginia’s old laptop with The Russian version loaded on the machine. So classes are uneven as one group gets to work entirely in Russian and the second group has to look at paper menus and translate the words. I do enjoy that class because most of the students are new to computers and I have two assistants who know the program to work with it so they are great help to me. The class consists mainly of short explanations and lots of play. Going across the menus first after four classes we have done the file menu and started on the format menu. I thought they would move faster but because of the play method used we have spent three days on the format menu and we have only covered the first four sub menus. They know a lot about it before we move on to the next sub menu and I find that I go much deeper then I normally would with beginners. Word 2003 is a better program but it repeats menus so much. I have to say more often the I want that we will get back to that because the order of the menus does not follow the teaching I want to do. That’s life. We went to the other Kerch PCV’s apartment for dinner Friday night. Her boyfriend came over from another town and our tutor and her long term boyfriend joined us. The tutor (Ira) of course speaks excellent English but her Boyfriend (Sasha) does not speak any and yes I used their names because they are the most common names in Ukraine and you will never identify them from this. I felt that we were excluding Sasha too much but he did not seem to mind. Last week we went out to play Billiards and I felt it was better because he could speak to one of us at a time and we did not concentrate so much on English. It was very enjoyable to jin with others for a pot luck dinner. I do not think it is a common form of entertainment here as Ira said it with a question in her voice when she mentioned the Pot Luck part. I will ask her on Tuesday when I go to session. Last week on Saturday we joined together with our counterpart PCV, Ira, Sasha and another Ukrainian couple to play Billiards. The club had one american pool table one russian billiard table of professional size and four smaller home sized russian billiards tables. Playing Russian billiards is a trip. The balls are larger (MUCH) and the pockets are smaller (Much) so that the balls have to go straight in and there is no room for bouncing around at the pocket entrance. The other part that was hard for me is that any ball can be used as the cue ball and scratching is not only acceptable but required. What I mean is that you can hit any ball on any turn. When you aim you can aim to sink the ball you are hitting or any other ball on the table as long as there is contact with another ball sometime before it goes in. You can not just aim the ball at the hole and shoot you do have to work out the angles and use a lot of skill. It was harder for me to aim to sink my cue ball then anything else. Sloppy shots are called Durok and if you fault on the stroke you give up a ball. The billiards parlor is the basement of Pushkin Theater so you have an elegant setting for this event. It was fun and we had a good time. They said that we are going dancing next time. I think this is all to help with our Russian skills as I mentioned in session that it was harder for us old fogies because we did not go to the bars, or dance club to interact with the locals like our younger counterparts. Also we do not go out and play basketball which is an excellent place to work on those pesky verbs of motion. Ira is more then my tutor she is also my friend and has decided that I need to get out more and do more in this country. It is kind of fun and very helpful to have your tutor like you enough to take an interest in the rest of your life here and not just the part where they earn their money. I have met through her and her boyfriend several policemen and other helpful people that are good to have on your side. I am having fun here and learning a lot about the country. I just hope that someone feels the same as I do and I am giving back as much as I am getting out of this experience. I am spending a lot of my free time getting ready to teach a class at PC University. This is a new feature in training. There is so much to learn that during the coordinators conference they have decided to host a period of time where you can sign up for specialized classes that are taught by other PCV’s. I am teaching Web Page design for dummies, I mean beginners, and I have a section on Microsoft word and the Russian menus. Chris is teaching the Ukrainian section of the same class. That will be mid November then Virginia and I will head out to a meeting of all Married PCV’s in Kiev before returning to Kerch for the long winter. They speak of winter here as wet and muddy and cold. We checked out the latitude and decided that we are on the level of the United States that would be about Milwaukee. But surrounded by water as we are it will be windy and lighter on the snow. I am sure that we will bore you with winter stories as we progress but right now I am impressed with the building I live in. We are quite warm here as the wind blows because the walls are almost three feet thick. Including the inside walls. Well I must do a little work before I go in tomorrow morning and face my class.
21st	It has been a long time since I wrote here so it has become hard to get started. It is easier to just find a reason not to write. I have all of the things that I wrote over the summer in e-mail form and I fully intend to clean it up and get it installed here so I waited until I could get that done before I wrote again. That is where I went wrong. The time required to clean up the emails just kept eluding me and I did not write. That has to stop and I will now write every day and you can see just how uneventful my days here really are. Today is a cold drizzly day. The darkness made it hard to get out of bed and face the day. I experimented with some stuff that looks vaguely like cream of wheat but had no label and no instructions so I dredged up from my memory what I thought the proportions were and gave it a try. It worked and tasted just like cream of wheat. The chances for experimentation here are great and sometime you get the desired results. So far I have not had a bad meal but it does not always taste like I wanted it to. The apartment is starting to feel like home to me. I am sure that the process was accelerated due to Virginia’s arrival here but her ideas on separating the one big room into a sleeping area and a living area has made the apartment very comfortable to me. We did purchase two bookcases for the apartment and Sergay finally did finish the wardrobe so things are starting to get off the floor and away out of sight. I still want something with drawers for the desk so I can hide my small junk, pens, pencils, and computer disks from casual view and make the desktop look better. I want to get back to food for a minute. Right now the markets and bazaar are full of fresh vegetables and cooking is fun, some of the volunteers are canning and storing food but as we have no storage space I am planning on living off what I can find in the market throughout the year. This could prove to be very interesting in the depth of winter but I really do not think so because the two new large supermarkets in town are constantly adding new stuff to the shelves every day. It has become a game to find the new items on the shelf every time I enter the store. Yesterday they added the little coffee creamer things that you get for free at the local gas and go when you buy coffee. They have increased the cheese selection over the past two weeks to include gouda and blue cheese. The last month saw chunks of Romano and Parmesan appear and Feta is on the shelf. When I got here all I could find was many different types of soft white cheese that was vaguely like mozzarella. Last week I found a fairly decent cheddar cheese hiding behind the gouda but just for informational purposes do not buy the cheese labeled Cheddar because that is a very good Mozzarella suitable for Pizza. I am in heaven here right now because Eggplant is everywhere and I do love to eat eggplant. I have learned several new ways to eat it and in the bazaar the ladies make a very good spicy eggplant salad that I really want to know the recipe for. It is available stuffed, baked, boiled, fried and made into pasta sauce. I talk with the younger volunteers who are learning to cook and they, like most American youth, do not know what to do with it or what it is suppose to taste like. Peppers are very popular but I think that the color coding system I am use to does not always work here. The first time I bought a kilo of sweet red peppers I ate one and it was just what I expected but the second was hot and spicy. I bought a mixed bag of colors and about half was spicy. I like spicy peppers but it was very surprising when they did not taste like I thought they would . As you can imagine I will spend a large amount of time here writing about food and the work I do in my kitchen because I like the time I spend there and the feeling of comfort I get out of cooking. Work is progressing but still undefined. I teach English on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10-11 and Computer basics on Monday and Wednesday. These classes are open only to the library staff and I feel inadequate most of the time because my Russian is still quite poor. The computer class is very interesting because I am working without computers with students who have never touched a computer before. The two girls in the acquisitions room are my steadfast assistants in the computer class and they get rewarded by a special class just for them in advanced graphic design on Fridays. Wednesday I had a smaller class so I decided to set up my laptop and Virginia’s old laptop and let them play with word. They made me promise that I would acquire two keyboards with Russian characters on the keyboard that I could attach to the laptops. They did spend an awfully long time trying to type their name with the keyboard layout I provided but the class did progress much better then it had when I was only using paper screenshots to teach the class. I will be glad when they decide about the grant and we can get some computers here. Computers are getting cheaper here by the month. When I got here I found computers to be hard to find and very expensive. When you went into the store you were awed by the array of computers available and the prices where very low, until you go to look at them and find out that it was just the case for sale. You had to build your computer from an array of listed parts and the guy would present you with a finished computer in about a week. The cost went out of sight as you added in the processor, the motherboard etc. It would be like building a car from the parts store. Lately you can find imported computers and HP has started to build a plant here so computers are on the shelf finished and reasonable. The laptop I bought Virginia is available here with Russian version of windows and a russian keyboard for only about 100 dollars more then it cost in the US. I feel that as soon as I get the computers I can be of real use teaching the computer classes to these new users. Virginia and I decided that it is currently just like America in the early 90’s. The machines are just getting into the common house and internet service is just starting to become available but the price is high. As more and more people complain about the cost of internet and get on line more companies will get involved and costs will get down. Somebody like AOL or Netzero needs to get here and teach them how to do it. Problem is that the phone lines are so old and of poor quality that new systems must be invented and used. Well I guess I just wanted to talk this morning. I will add to this journal every day and we will try to remember to upload new material at least every Friday unless the library is closed then I will do it on Monday. I promise to keep it updated better now and as I get old emails cleaned up I will post them in the proper month and tell you in the current information that I have done so. Sitting in a cold library watching the cleaning ladies sweep the courtyard with stick brooms.