Silly Hats

I have a giant pom pom hat and Mallory has a yeti hat.

Our host mom is so nice, she is always very concerned about us covered our heads when we go outside, so today we finally put on our silly hats : )

Snacks

My host family leaves these out for us and I LOVE them! They are little shortbread cookies with a little berry thing on top.

The most recent time Mallory and I went to the grocery store, we randomly picked some candy to try and this is the one I picked.

Our native coordinator told us that Roshen is one of the best candy brands, so that's why we picked it

It's really good! I think it's butterscotch flavor with a little surprise inside : )

This is the one Mallory picked. It is chocolate and chamomile. Our host brother Ilya, helped us translate it when we got home.

We need to get better at choosing healthy snacks . . .

Dark chocolate with hazelnuts

Arts & Crafts

Hand Print Turkeys

Pipe Cleaner Snakes

Puppy Paperbag Puppet

Cottonball Snowmen

I was in charge of arts and crafts the first week. Here are some of the crafts I did with the kids.

Gryvna

This is Ukrainian money, which is called gryvna. (1 gryvna = 8 USD) All the men on these bills really scare me...

Slippers

These are some very Ukrainian-looking slippers I bought at an outdoor market near a metro station for 90 gryvna, which is $11.25 US. They are very warm and comfortable!

Grocery Store

This is the outside of the store. It looks like this is the entrance, but it's actually to the left.  There's a whole bunch of food in front of these doors. 

Lots of meat

Some weird fish

Crab flavored Lay's

A dried fish snack, there's a lot of these kinds of things in the store

Some kind of scary looking meat

Pig's feet next to a liver or something

Boxed juice, all of it comes like this

These are some pictures from the grocery store that Mallory and I go to sometimes. It's about a seven minute walk from the school.

Singing

As we walked, the girls started singing, so here's a terrible quality video of that. You can also see my host mom, especially towards the end, she is pushing the stroller and wearing a long white fur coat. You can also see the neighborhood where they live a little bit, or as they call it "their small village".

Playing in the Snow

Bernie & Zhenya

The front of our host family's house

Bernie

Deema

After the party, everyone went for a walk in the snow, including our host family's 4-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog, Bernie.

Mallory's Party 2

Mallory & Me

Deema & Zhenya

Mallory's Party

Our host mom, Liliya, was so nice to get a party together for Mallory's birthday. She invited some girls over that are amazing singers because she knows that Mallory (and I) love music, so they came and sang for us and played the piano. It was really fun to meet them and listen to them sing! They are all studying at a music conservatory. I really liked hearing them sing Ukrainian folk songs and some pop songs in Russian.

Mallory's Birthday Song

On Mallory's birthday, January 22nd, our host brothers, Zhenya and Deema sang to her and it was so cute, we had to make them to sing it again and film it!

Mallory & Me

I have hardly any pictures of myself in Ukraine at all, but here's one of Mallory and me at dinner, even though it's not very good...

Ukrainian Dinner

So after exploring the city center a little bit, we all went to dinner at restaurant that serves only Ukrainian food, and it's kind of like Sweet Tomatoes, you go in a line and pick everything you want and then you pay according to how much food you take. I think mine was a little under $6 US. Most of the food was really good! And my dessert was a cute little mouse that was basically a chocolate covered brownie, which was delicious!

City Center 4

Here's more pictures from the city center!

City Center 3

City Center 2

This is another view of the city center. It was so funny, there's these people in big costumes, kind of like school mascot costumes, that come up to you and ask if you want to take a picture with them, but then they charge you a lot of money, so our native coordinator told us never to take a picture with them! (You can kind of see them in the middle of the picture, at the bottom.)

City Center

On Saturday, the 21st, all the volunteers from Kyiv 1 went to the city center- it was so much fun! Before coming to Ukraine, I thought the whole city looked like the center because I had only seen pictures of the city center, but really only a little bit of Kyiv looks like this, but I loved being able to see this area of Kyiv!