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Journey to the Borderland

May 20

Posted by Lindsey Whissel on 05/20 at 11:18 AM

It’s always hard saying goodbye.

There was a last-minute change of plans and our visit to Sumy was canceled, so we ended up having an extra day in Slavyanask. We were given the morning to do as we please and Ashley and I ended up making a trip back to the ceramics market, then met up with Mark and his hosts at the beach on one of the salt water lakes (oddly enough, there is a fresh water lake right next to it).

In the afternoon, we had a barbecue to celebrate the birthday of Yula, one of our Slavyansk friends. My host’s wife left this morning for Israel (she lives there part time with one of their daughters), and Antole (my host) told me I was officially the woman of the house now—he even dared to leave me in charge of cooking potatoes for the BBQ (anyone familiar with my lack of culinary skills will understand what a risky move this was). I’m happy to report, the potatoes were more edible and no known fatalities occurred. 

We all had a good time preparing food together for the party and I got to teach Oksana (our translator) a new term in English—“sweet tooth”:). As usual, many wonderful toasts were made, but the best was Carrie’s—she got quite choked up when explaining how the hardest part of this trip has been saying goodbye to our new friends every time we move to another town.

On a lighter note, Anatole would not give me a moment’s peace until I tried his Salo. I tried explaining that I’ve already tasted this traditional food (basically an all-fat bacon), but he said I hadn’t tried it until I tried his…. he won this argument.

We are packing up to catch a night train to our next destination, Miragord; it’s about two hours from Kiev and we will spend one day and one night there before traveling to the capital.

Word of the day: день рождения (den roj-den-ee-ya) – birthday.