This is it, folks. Two more days and I leave Myronivka for a new, permanent site where I will live for the next two years. I won’t know until Monday where that will be, but I am excited to find out.
A few things I will miss about Myronivka.
1. Tanya. My host mom is an awesome person. She is more like a host sister, since we are close in age. I will miss her getting angry at me for whistling in the house. (Yes…a major superstition in Ukraine is that if you whistle in the house, you will run out of money or something) There are a ton of these crazy superstitions but they are taken very seriously here. I will miss her coming in to visit me first light and chattering away a mile a minute in this crazy mix of Russian and Ukrainian (what they call Sorgik) which I can almost never understand, but she doesn’t seem to care if I can understand her or not.
I will miss her quirky way of doing things, for instance; When Tanya brings home chicken wings, she doesn’t like that there are sometimes little hairs on the skin. Understandable, as we have all witnessed a stray feather or two. She removes the burner from the stove and turns up the gas and has this huge flame shooting up like a fountain. She holds the chicken wings over the fire to burn away the fuzzy stuff. Now, this seems like not a big deal but there is a certain 'smell' that permeates the air when she does that. Last night she came home from her little farm and laid something out on the counter and was doing something with it. I leaned over to look and wished I hadn’t. It was whole chicken, which she told me she had just killed herself. I never saw anything like it. She had cut off the head and plucked it and removed some of the other parts like the feet. She laughed at my expression, which you can just imagine what it looked like. Ugh. So, off came the burner and on with the barbeque which smelled even worse than usual.
About Tanya's chicken…it's very tasty. There is nothing like a fresh bird. What we get in the supermarket at home...well, lets just say it tastes nothing like that. Who knows where it comes from, what it's been eating, and how old it is when we finally get in on our dinner table? Here in Ukraine it's killed and eaten within a few days. Fresh as fresh can be.
2. The goat lady.
3. Horse-drawn wagons in the streets competing with cars for lane space.
4. Watching the sunrise over the river from my kitchen window every morning and watching the sunset from my bedroom window every evening. (Something I haven’t taken the time to do since I was a teenager).
A few things I will miss about Myronivka.
1. Tanya. My host mom is an awesome person. She is more like a host sister, since we are close in age. I will miss her getting angry at me for whistling in the house. (Yes…a major superstition in Ukraine is that if you whistle in the house, you will run out of money or something) There are a ton of these crazy superstitions but they are taken very seriously here. I will miss her coming in to visit me first light and chattering away a mile a minute in this crazy mix of Russian and Ukrainian (what they call Sorgik) which I can almost never understand, but she doesn’t seem to care if I can understand her or not.
I will miss her quirky way of doing things, for instance; When Tanya brings home chicken wings, she doesn’t like that there are sometimes little hairs on the skin. Understandable, as we have all witnessed a stray feather or two. She removes the burner from the stove and turns up the gas and has this huge flame shooting up like a fountain. She holds the chicken wings over the fire to burn away the fuzzy stuff. Now, this seems like not a big deal but there is a certain 'smell' that permeates the air when she does that. Last night she came home from her little farm and laid something out on the counter and was doing something with it. I leaned over to look and wished I hadn’t. It was whole chicken, which she told me she had just killed herself. I never saw anything like it. She had cut off the head and plucked it and removed some of the other parts like the feet. She laughed at my expression, which you can just imagine what it looked like. Ugh. So, off came the burner and on with the barbeque which smelled even worse than usual.
About Tanya's chicken…it's very tasty. There is nothing like a fresh bird. What we get in the supermarket at home...well, lets just say it tastes nothing like that. Who knows where it comes from, what it's been eating, and how old it is when we finally get in on our dinner table? Here in Ukraine it's killed and eaten within a few days. Fresh as fresh can be.
2. The goat lady.
3. Horse-drawn wagons in the streets competing with cars for lane space.
4. Watching the sunrise over the river from my kitchen window every morning and watching the sunset from my bedroom window every evening. (Something I haven’t taken the time to do since I was a teenager).
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