adjustment

There are three subway lines currently, though I’ve seen plans for another two lines, as well as extending the current lines…the plan I saw said 2015, but I don’t know if that’s the year when they plan to start, or if that’s the year by which the building is supposed to be finished…hmmm…subway rides currently cost the equivalent of 25cents, no matter how long you’re on the train…there are three transfer stations, all within the city center…most of the stations are underground, with the trains coming on the outsides of the central platform areas…the trains seem old school to me, but maybe that’s just cause I’m used to the system in Korea…

Some of the metro stations are REALLY DEEP…as in, riding an escalator for more than two minutes deep…the city itself is built on hills, and the original subway system was built as a combo metro system and bomb shelter network…some of the stations are more ornate than others, and each has it’s own decoration scheme…there is almost no signage in English, which was a bit alarming the first few times I rode the trains…some of the trains have tv screens that show the station names in English and Ukrainian, but not all the trains have this system…the announcements are only in Ukrainian…given that this is Ukraine, I can’t complain…though if Ukraine really wants to join the EU, they’re going to have to do a lot to make the country easily accessible to people who speak other languages…

The train rides are never silent, though not because of people talking…you hear the train as it goes through  all the tunnels…sometimes it’s almost a roar, and you can’t hear the station announcement at all…you have to learn what each station looks like, or count stops…

There are three stations in the city centre where the subway lines intersect with each other…it seems a bit strange to me, but at these intersection stations, each line has a different station name…as opposed to say, choosing from the green line or blue line in one station, you choose from different station names…the very first time I rode the trains, I started in what I thought was one station, but in fact it was the other station there…whoops…I figured out my mistake almost immediately, and was able to come back, wander through the station and find the other line, making it to my destination only a few minutes late…now that I’ve figured out how to read a little, I can usually figure out where I need to go if I’m in a station that has two lines…

Subway isn’t the only way to get around in Kyiv…there are also buses, trolleys, and something called matrushkas…matrushkas are basically large minivans, and often go long distances…there is a web site to figure out where all the buses, trolleys and such go, but it’s entirely in Ukrainian, and I don’t know the city well enough to figure it out anywho…soon, I hope…you can buy monthly transport cards, which is handy…I get one that is good for unlimited metro rides each month, it’s less than $15USD/month…awesome!!

I’ve slowly been learning to read the alphabet here…Russian and Ukrainian use Cyrillic letters, and most of the letters in the languages are the same, though there are a few differences…in Kyiv, Russian is the majority spoken language, as it is in the eastern half of the country…Ukrainian is also spoken in the city, though not as much, and in the eastern half of the country…I hope to start Russian language lessons soon, because there is very little English here…it’s a good thing, as it forces me to learn a new language instead of relying so much on English…but it makes it challenging when I don’t understand anything…right now, my only Russian vocabulary is VERY basic…yes, no, thank you, 1,2 and please/you’re welcome…let’s just say that won’t get me very far…foreigners do get charged slightly higher prices here, but it isn’t so bad…I know that speaking Russian will help a lot in that regard…if I ever get to a point where I feel comfortable with Russian, I’d also like to learn Ukrainian…

My school is a quadrilingual preschool…English, French, Russian and Ukrainian…the parents choose between Russian and Ukrainian, and they can also have English and French…we don’t currently have any students who come all day every day of the week…we have one 4 year old who attends 5 mornings a week, and two students who come three full days a week…other students attend just a few half days a week, which isn’t great…its hard to teach a class when the students in that class don’t attend every class…figuring out how to make sure each child gets all the information, and gets to participate in enough activities is a challenge, to say the least…

My school is a brand new branch of a school that already exists in three cities in Russia…the methodology is well thought out, which I love…since this branch is brand new, it means we have to prepare EVERYTHING… classroom decorations, ordering basic supplies, creating heaps of visual materials for our lessons, etc…it’s a lot of work, but at the same time I love that I can immediately see the results of my work…since we’re new, we don’t have too many students, which means we don’t have many teachers…so we’re all teaching many different levels of kids, and doing all the paperwork for each class…at the other branches, teachers have two levels at most, to teach…since we’re new, we are also still working out the kinks of scheduling and various routines…as new students come to class, random things change, and we have had plenty of discussions about how we want to do various things…

Right now there is only one guy working at the school, our office manager…everyone else is a woman…our director, head teacher, three teachers, and two assistants…for the most part, we all get along…there are more heated discussions when communication is lacking, or when there are too many questions as to who is in charge of certain things…it’s frustrating to me when I feel like I’m doing work three times over because different people are being put in charge of something, and I have to redo something I’ve already done…argh…but, as routines/schedules/chain of command gets worked out, this should get better…

The weather has been amazing…blue skies nearly every day…chilly-ish in the mornings and at night, absolutely lovely during the day…photos are great when there is a blue sky…love love love!! Winter here is long, cold, and snowy, so I’m enjoying the wonderful weather while it’s here…I’ve been told that October and November are likely to be rainy and cloudy, so we’ll see…I hate hate hate rain, so I hope it isn’t as bad as I’ve heard…I love snow, so I’ll be thrilled when that comes around…I’ve also been told that snow sometimes comes as early as October, woo hoo!!

My sister has been sending me the stuff I shipped home from Korea, it’s been great to have a bit of variety in my wardrobe again…my room doesn’t look like MY bedroom, it’s just a bedroom…I hope people send me postcards so I have something to put on my walls!