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,