You look like a cucumber today.

I've been informed that next week the season of holiday feasts will conclude with Christianing Day, which I recall quite well from last year as I had a millisecond freakout as the local priest blessed my room, giving my laptop a healthy spray of holy water. It's hard to believe that there isn't another holiday between now and Women's Day given the recent slew of two to three massive banquets per week since I've gotten back to site. I'm amazed by the diligence the Ukrainian women I know put towards preparing insane amounts of food. Of course there was New Years, which I spent in Kyiv partially to avoid being force fed. After this came Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. There were a few saint days thrown into the mix, followed by Old New Years, which is the Orthodox New Year. On the eve of Old New Years, children and other groups go around caroling, receiving sweets and money. Below is a picture of my landlady's granddaughters' class who stopped by. On Old New Years Day, boys go around "seeding" girls, throwing kernels of grain and wishing them a good year. I have to mention that I was surprised to overhear, four times, older people ask if we used to have Old New Years off and how terrible it is that there is still school and what not on this day. Of course the answer is no, Old New Years was not a state holiday because it comes out of the Orthodox faith and I'm quite sure that the Soviet Union was atheist. There's a total disconnect with this generation, who went from the blessing of normal Brezhnev stagnation to the chaos that proceeded it.

Before school started up this week, I went on a walk everyday. Here are two pictures from my typical route. Hopefully I can continue to be outside a little everyday. An unfortunate negative of the temperature rising above freezing in the past few days is the softening of the earth. I can't even leave my house without getting a nice thick coating of mud on my shoes. I mention this because personal presentation is very important and the obstacles of achieving cleanliness never cease to surprise me.

Other things I'd like to share include that I'm still baffled by the kindness of my host family. Without them, I'd probably be a hermit with a lot of potato chip bags hidden somewhere. When I got back from vacation, on my desk there was a beautiful arrangement of gifts from them. I've been trying to sneak in more playtime with the grandson, who turned six, partially because his latest passion is a combination of space, legos, and city engineering. I'm glad I have someone to share my love of city planning with, debating various combinations of bridges and "electric stations" as we build with blocks or snow.

In between classes this week I've been reading The Harvest of Sorrow, it's an older book (1984) about Soviet collectivization, particularly in Ukraine and the famine that it caused. As I've mentioned previously, I've had the privilege of listening to stories of the famine and have taken part in memorials. Reading about it in English, I still fail to comprehend the scale of this tragedy and how people survived in this territory at all during the first half of the twentieth century. Along with that, it's kind of infuriating to see the steady presence of Soviet idolization that occurs today, especially towards Stalin. A new statue of him was built in one of the hardest hit areas of the famine last year and there's talks of adding one in Odessa. The book is also useful to me in that it does a great job in explaining the peasant psych. I think a lot of the characteristics of the peasant are still visible today in the rural community, such as who they interact with and how they see the government. I also found it interesting that the book mentions a system of 3 plot farming, whereby peasants only farmed a third of their land at a time, making it grossly inefficient. During the harvest last year, I often caught myself wondering what century I was in as laborers would go back and forth using scythes. Many fields look uncultivated. When talking to a Ukrainian friend about this, she expressed the fear farmers have about foreigners taking over their land and this is one reason why combining farms and forming coops will never procede (without force). I'm doing a poor job here of explaining this. Basically, the same things that were happening a hundred years ago, seventy years ago, are still happening today.

I read that astrology signs are changing ever so slightly. Most people here that I interact with are really into their signs. Once this news hits Ukrainian press it's going to be interesting.

I'm a frequent reader of Women's Health magazine. I admit that I truly enjoy it. Except for one thing. It's torture as someone who lives in a village, to read about nutrition. It's absolutely absurd for me to comprehend to what level a certain group of Americans are concerned about diet and exercise given my current environment. Turkey pitas? Calcium enriched orange juice? Packaged foods that have additional fiber, cancer fighting properties...

Lastly, I skimmed this interesting article about Russian documentary films. I hope to see some of the films mentioned someday. Like American television, Ukrainian television has gone the prime time reality route. I wonder if anyone has ever written an in depth study of New Years specials here. They are truly otherworldly.