February 28th Update

Hey all, I have some pictures and a video to share with you.

First up, the tale of “The Curl Marxists”

One of the guys we work with is from Canada. He is the traveling black sheep of his family. He has worked everywhere. It turns out that his brother stayed home in Canada and helped his parents with their farm and was a genuine nice guy. Already my friend, Ryan, looks like a tool, right? Well, then his brother pulls a trump card: he becomes a national hero as an Olympic athlete. Granted, the “sport” he participates in is curling, but still the guy is an Olympic athlete.

Right after Christmas break I received an email from Ryan about a curling tournament here in Kyiv. He is all geeked about doing it, just to show his parents that he is a good son too. So Cassie and I agreed to be part of his team (having never curled an end in our lives). A week later Ryan finds out that his brother has thwarted his chances at ever being the good son, and has arranged it so Ryan can come back and watch him curl at the Olympics; this made Ryan unavailable for the local tournament. Cassie and I were still excited about curling so we put our own team together. The pool of potential players was drastically reduced by the fact that the tournament was to occur on the first Saturday of our February Break. Thus we ended up with five players, none of which had ever curled before.

So we went to the tournament and actually did very well. We won the first game 1-0. And we lost the next game on the tie breaker. The third, and final, game came down to a judging mistake and we lost. This put us in 5th place, not too bad for a bunch of Americans who had never played before. We also got an invite to the next tournament…

Here are some pictures:

Oh, and our friend Ryan was further cast aside by his family when his brother won Gold at the Olympics…

After our curling match, Cassie and I used the rest of our time off to travel to Bukovel in Western Ukraine to go skiing. We had planned this trip with another family who works with us. Going in I was unsure if I could even ski. It had been 12 years since I had last tried and in the time between I had too many knee surgeries to count…

Needless to say I was nervous…

We booked this trip through an English speaking travel agent that happens to be located in the front entry of our building. We simply told them what we wanted, they booked it and we were able to pay them cash. The total for airfare, a transfer, and 4 nights in a lodge at the ski resort was under 700 dollars, not bad.

When we arrived, Cassie and I rented equipment and bought our passes. 4 days of lift tickets for 25 bucks per person was a huge deal. The very first night I discovered that I could ski. It all came back to me, like riding a bike. We did very well for ourselves. Cassie got comfortable towards the end and was able to take some of the intermediate runs. I did a few black runs, but did not fall once during the whole ski trip. I was very pleased…

We are already thinking that we might go back next February.

Here are some pictures from the resort…

And a few videos of Cassie and our friend Carl skiing. Carl is a 38 year old Texan, who had never skiied or snowboarded. His kids wanted to learn to snowboard so he rented the equipment and took lessons with them. The kids (teenagers) gave up quickly, Carl worked his butt off and was actually pretty good.

February Update 1

February-Madness...

Hello all. We are back. I have some pictures to share from the Holiday season here in Ukraine and some other updates. The pictures will be at the bottom of this post, so if you want to skip my random musings, please scroll down…
If you are friends with me on Facebook, you have probably already read about my new career as an acolyte for Bobby Knight. I am the head coach of the middle school boys basketball team at Kyiv International School. My kids are very talented but we have lost 3 games due to horrible officiating. Seriously, my Korean center gets called for personal fouls when he is on the bench (it happened once while he was waiting to get subbed in, crouching below the scorer’s table…). I spend most games running up and down the sidelines yelling at the refs and getting technical fouls… The local league here is very competitive and helps us warm up for the CEESA tournament in Riga, Latvia in the first week of March. Because the local league is so hotly contested it makes each game a bit of a grudge match (the High School teams regularly break out into bench clearing brawls --- this is very normal for Kyiv and Ukraine… free speech is allowed, but one must realize that if you say something someone else does not like, you get your ass kicked. The local government and the parliament often break out in fist fights. And the heavyweight champion of the world Vladimir Klitschko has twice knocked out the Mayor of Kyiv because he does not approve of the Mayor’s policies. As I write this post, it is the runoff election day, we have been told not to go downtown today or tomorrow due to the fact that they are projecting riots no matter who wins the presidency here.) I am having a great time…

Vacations…
We only have two weeks before we get our first spring break. Yes, I did say first spring break. We have the last week in February off and then the first week in April too. This is a definite perk of this job. Most of our co-workers are headed to the beaches in Egypt over this first break (it is dirt cheap and beautiful). Cassie and I are headed to the Carpathian Mountains to go skiing. We are getting 5 days of an all inclusive resort stay, 5 days of lift tickets, rentals, and a flight from Kyiv to the resort for $300 a person. We are very excited, the only question mark is my knee as I have not been since my first knee surgery (11 years ago), but I have been able to play basketball and hockey here with my brace, so skiing should not be that bad…
Over the April break we will be heading to Scotland to visit our friends Tom and Alister. We love Glasgow and cannot wait to have a few of the comforts of the West.
After April we have two months of four day work weeks due to Ukrainian holidays. Over one of those long weekends we will be traveling to Berlin to see “the National,” one of our favorite bands from NYC play.

Everything is really good for us here and we are excited for what comes next. By the way we will be back in the States for most of the month of July. We hope to see as many people that we can while we are home, so keep an eye out for us…

Pictures…

These are both from Christmas night in Kyiv (Ukrainian Orthodox Christman falls on January 7th).



Talk to you all later,