Rachel's in Kyiv!: Potatoes

So a while ago our host grandpa Sasha invited us to go to his village to plant potatoes and go to his bee farm. I think he said that May would be a good time to go, so then we brought it up again a couple Sundays ago (April 30) and were using google translate to try to communicate. We were asking about the potatoes and Sasha was saying "tomorrow" something, but we couldn't figure out what he meant. Later we asked Katya (our host grandma) about it and after a long time figured out that the potatoes have already been planted. Then the next morning Katya came and knocked on our door to get us for breakfast and so we went down and right after we ate, we were about to go upstairs but Sasha motioned for us to come outside and there was Katya sitting in the backyard with about 10,000 potatoes, getting all the growth/root stuff off that grows on them. So not only were the potatoes planted, but they had been grown and harvested and put in to bags and taken from the village to our host family's house. It was kind of funny! With all the language barrier issues we just did not understand! So then Sasha had us sit down and we took all that stuff off the potatoes - and I have never seen so many in my entire life!! There were probably 10 20-pound bags of them or more! So Sasha would dump out a bag onto the ground, and Mallory, Katya, and I would take the stuff off and put it into a bucket and separate the big potatoes and the small potatoes and then after a while Sasha would dump out the bucket of extra stuff when it got full and we would empty the crates of potatoes into bags. When I first saw the pile I almost laughed because it was just sooo many potatoes and I think it really caught us off guard because we were not expecting that! It took maybe like an hour and half to two hours, I'm not really sure though. I thought it could take like six hours when I saw how many there were, but it ended up going a lot faster than that. It was so much fun!! I loved it! That was probably another one of my favorite things I've been able to do in Ukraine! It was so fun to be able to work with the grandparents! They are so nice and it seems like they really care about us. Even though we can't speak the same language, they really try to talk to us and get to know us. We use the little bit of Russian/Ukrainian that we know and Sasha will use the few words in English that he knows (Katya doesn't speak any English) and then a whole lot of charades! It's probably quite a sight sometimes! But anyway, they are just so nice! And luckily, Sasha suggested taking pictures, so I was able to take some! And I forgot to mention earlier that this week it has just been the grandparents, Mallory and I, and our oldest host brother, Ilya (but he is not around very much) because the rest of the family was on vacation.