Typing in Ukrainian

So I am here learning how to type in Ukrainian. Meaning that I now type slower than I can ever remember and it is the most serious hunt-and-peck typing. I am going to translate the sentence I want to eat and I will time it for you and here it goes:
Я хочу їсти.

And that just took me a full minute. Not because I had to mentally translate (My language is surprisingly getting pretty decent!) but because I don’t know where any of my keys are, bar the question mark which is located by hitting shift 7. Yup, you heard me the simple question mark is now up on top of the keyboard. And let’s see, well, all of the punctuation marks are essentially now located up on the number line. And I will just have to take a picture of the keyboard to give you an example of the new chaos that is my computer.

But let me actually get into the story that I have planned to share with you. This one is concerning one of my favorite topics- food. This time, unfortunately, I don’t have any new fun meals to share with you, but I did actually share a new meal with my host family. I decided that it was about time I cooked for them too, especially since my host mom is under the impression that my grandmother is a cook- long story short, she was asking me if I knew how to cook and when I said I did I tried to explain that I learned it from my Mom and she learned it from her mom, so Oma, officially in Ukraine you are a cook. Since that is a super high compliment here, I hope you don’t mind!

Anyways, the point is that I wanted to cook for my host family, and knowing that one of their previous volunteers had made them Mexican food and it hadn’t ended super well (spicy is not in the Ukrainian palate) I decided to make them one of my own personal recipes. The bell pepper/squash/veggie and chicken sauce with pasta recipe. I know, not super original, but I always got high reviews of it in the States and figured it would be good here. So I ask my mom if I can cook for her and she asks me, very hesitantly mind you, what I would be making for them. I tell them that it is one of my own recipes and has no name, and so I just start listing ingredients. She nods ok, but I can still see in her face that she is worried about entrusting me to the precious job of feeding her and her family. She’s a professional cook so there is no pressure there at all anyhow ;)

Then my host sister asks what I am making, and I proceed to tell her the same bit that I told my mom. And this is where my delighted surprise starts kicking in. The more I start listing which veggies are going in, the more excited she gets. Seriously, a 12 year old that is psyched to eat veggies!? That is awesome, and I am excited. I love veggies, and thankfully my States-side family is the same veggie eating fanatics, but I still get a kick out of kids loving veggies. And even more so, when I start cooking, she and her friend (also 12) help me out in the kitchen (not that I really needed much help, one of my clustermates came over to help out and enjoy the spoils) they both starting chopping veggies and herbs (all fresh) like nobody’s business. The surprise isn’t that they were helping (without being asked) it was that every time I looked over at the two of them; they are giggling like crazy and shoving all the veggies into their mouths. Mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, you name it. Then they start picking the veggies out of the sauce to eat. So I realized that maybe their veggie eating craze compensates for the fact that they eat mayonnaise like I eat peanut butter? (Of which, I am desperately craving right now)

So I got a great kick out of watching kids eat and love some veggies. My family loved the food I cooked- and yes, the leftovers were served over buckwheat for breakfast. And what else, oh yeah, I think that somehow in the last week, despite the stress kicking in for having our project this weekend (courtesy of having our TCF translate, yours truly will be presenting a speech on HIV/AIDS to a bunch of middle schoolers) my language and community integration is finally coming to a nice comfortable level for me. Now, if I could just catch up on some sleep…. Sometime…. Maybe…. Sleep is so good. Я гочу спати будь ласка. Можливо зараз?