Visitors and birthdays

Esther, who has been teaching at SEI in Dnepro every July since 2009, has been staying with us for a few days. She came in a week early on Friday. Of course we weren't here since we were in Kiev, partying and waiting for the van. However Victor picked her up at the airport and drove her out to the village. She got to choose between our empty house or staying with our new translator (Nellya) at the girls house. She picked the company and even was not in the village when we arrived Saturday night, having gone on the outing to Zaporosia with Nellya and the students!

(for more on where they went check out the new post on the trade school blog- click on the bird photo at right)

Sunday morning Garry picked up Esther and her stuff before church, and that afternoon Garry found out it would be Nellie's (English version of her name) birthday on Monday so we went out to dinner with her and Esther at the restaurant in the nearest village to us on the highway. It has a lovely outdoor patio.

We really enjoyed sitting outside, chatting and eating salads and entrees (half of us had pork and half chicken with mushrooms, and then we topped it off with dessert. Esther and I split an order of cherry verenicki, while the others had sundaes.
It was novel to have a translator to figure out what to order, we have gotten better at reading a Ukrainian menu than when we first came in 2009, when we could only read Koka-kola, got our drinks and after a while had to order two of what the waitress was carrying past us! Pork cutlet and french fries. It was tasty, back then, too.

My favorite Ukrainian food

Happy birthday Nellya (Nelly)

On the way home we stopped in to see how  (grad) Kolya Mazhara (#16 in photo) was doing- he plays on the village soccer team, Unfortunately they lost this time, 2-1. They are in second place in the local team league. You can see one of the donated nets that the Steinbach team brought from Canada in the background. This year they have home games.







Oh well, it's after midnight, you can thank jet lag for all the blog posts lately, next week I'll be busy teaching English with Esther and all the gang in Dnepro. Not sure about driving that big van to the city myself, we'll see how it goes.

It rained today, not a lot but enough to cool it off and make the crops happy for a day or two. Garry is looking into getting some round bales of pea straw done, he can get it for free (only paying for the baling) on the fields that were combined recently in the area. We may need extra feed next winter, the heifers may be very happy with it in their food mix.