Easter Update (A week late)

Agh! So by the time you read this I will be a super proud second cousin! My mom just texted me today that they are inducing my cousin’s g/f and I am so excited! It’s definitely one of those times that will make me really wish I were still in the States. But, I am having a fantastic week, and Easter was a blast so I am just going to have to tell you all about that and just keep that bit of homesickness tucked away for now. (And as I come back to add the second half of this post, I can even more proudly announce Izaac is here at 6 lbs 10 oz) Yay 

So Easter seems like the best place to start. Let’s see what did I do? Oh, well here, we shall start the Friday before hand and go from there, and I will try super hard to make in chronological this time. I came home from class Friday and found that my host family’s first volunteer was there and was able to meet her. Which was awesome in and of itself, but that she is practically fluent in the language helped me to understand the home situation better, that made it even more awesome. Saturday morning we helped our host mom start Easter cooking which meant chopping potatoes, dill, eggs, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, mushrooms, ham and well pretty much everything delicious. Most of it went into a cold soup- which was a lot of veggies, boiled eggs, ham, cheese, and of course potatoes, and then the broth part was a kefir/sour cream with dill mix. So think sour cream and dill dressing (Oma style) and add additional ingredients and water. Extremely delicious! Anyhow, back to Saturday. After chopping and cutting and such for about an hour, I went to attempt the hand washing situation again. This time more successful, a beautiful sunny breezy day has now left clothes smelling pretty awesome. The bad part is that the whole time I took to try and hang them all up that darn turkey was chasing me around. I swatted at him with wet jeans to try and shoo him away but it only made him stick around longer. Grrr. One of my cluster mates just learned how to butcher chickens for his SDL, maybe I can do the same but on a bigger scale, aka, Thanksgiving Turkey. Part of PC is supposed to be sharing American culture right??
Now, Easter officially begins before the crack of dawn here. That’s right, super early! We woke up at 3 (AM) to get to the church. We had our Easter Pasca (a type of bread that looks like a giant cupcake), eggs, and salt blessed. To do so meant that every family circles around the church with their baskets of goodies and lit candles. It was so pretty I wanted to take a pic to share but was informed that I wasn’t allowed. So I will just let you imagine a few hundred families circling around the church with baskets laid out and candles lit (the only light, bar the stars of course) and all the ladies (including yours truly) wearing scarves to cover their heads. Then the Priest came out and walked around the circles the blessing all the food and splashing Holy Water on the people. Then, I think it was around 5 am we head home, though not to sleep. We have to stay up and now eat. So I had some blessed eggs, meat, Pasca, and probably a few salads and such (it’s a little vague, being that it was an early morning). Then after that, we went back to sleep (yay). When we caught up on enough sleep to function we woke up to start packing for our Easter picnic- though of course we ate first, including a whole chicken, salads, more Pasca and eggs, and who knows what else. All delicious though! Then we take a 30 minute walk to the outskirts of the village to the most beautiful picnic site I have ever seen. (I will try super hard to post pics) And our Easter picnic mean started- so that means more food. The cold soup, fried fish, cutlets, radish salads, egg salads, Deviled Eggs (with ketchup on top), fruit, bread, Pasca, eggs, melintsi (filled with the ground up respiratory system of a “wild” goat, which yes, I did try, and like… the texture was slightly unnerving though), liver cake (also tried) and some random salads. But we aren’t done yet! We also have to grill up some catfish and the shashlik- super marinated shishkabobs. If you sat down to a large traditional Thanksgiving meal and ate your fill you would have to eat three times that to understand the amount of food I consumed this particular Sunday. And it was glorious. Basking in the sun and eating all day. Yup. Awesome. And throughout we had homemade wine and homemade cherry compote (juice). So even more awesome.

And what we didn’t eat during our 8 hour picnic we had for left overs for the rest of the week. I am probably 20lbs heavier than you last saw me, but it was worth it! And the week after Easter was amazing, the weather is sunny and gorgeous and I have just been in a wonderful mood. Фанташні… or however it’s spelled. (I don’t want to fight my dictionary today. It’s on hiatus right now. I was trying to say canon last night to my mom for a scavenger hunt thing, and my dictionary only gave me the translation for like a Church Canon ((law type thing)) so there was quite a confusion situation)
And now I am going to wrap up a bit by telling you about my week this week in a paragraph, or at least attempt it. We met our new LCF this week, she’s good, but she likes to make us sing and clap like kindergarteners so there is a bit of resistance on that front. Wednesday we met our Adopt a Cluster PCV’s who are awesome and gave us a big insight into what happens when we move to site, what to expect and that type stuff. Today (Saturday) we went into the city for our Cross Cultural session and for the city scavenger hunt. Which my team won, for which I got an awesome Chernigiv mug! But the best part was that we had to ask all the questions to the locals and that meant a lot of Ukrainian practice so super cool, but the best part was that I knew about the quest so the night before I talked to my Host Mom (in Ukrainian) and she drew me a map with landmarks and such. Which would be like cheating except that she told me everything in Ukrainian and the map is not only written in Ukrainian but in script! Yay. Happy Day 