Final snapshots

Last weekend we went to a corn maze. It was just down the road from last year's farm, but this one even better because... there was no map! You just walked and walked and walked until you eventually found the exit.

Resources to find a job in Ukraine

Kyiv

 

Privet! :)

Maybe you sent me an email about moving to Ukraine or maybe you just stumbled across this post. Either way, you want to move to Ukraine, right? Awesome! 

Alaskan summer

The summer that I drove an Alaskan tour bus seemed to stretch on forever. Trip after trip after bus after bus of people, people, people.

Some of the guests were really fun, like the group of Chinese businessmen who didn't speak any English and brought along their interpreter. We got a flat tire that trip, and when I lugged out everything to start changing the tire, they formed a blockade and insisted on doing it themselves. They don't have a chance to do this stuff in China, the interpreter said with a shrug.

Oregon to-do list

I'm cleaning out some bookmarks today. Last winter, I cleaned out my bookmarks about Ukraine here. Now it's Oregon's turn!

We spend most of our time hanging around the state's largest city, Portland. It is quite pretty (and filled with bridges), but...

No more blog, plenty more Ukraine

This blog is six years old... officially old enough to retire, haha. (But for real.)

Thank you very, very much for reading these past six years. Thank you to every person who ever sent an email or left a comment on a post! I hope that we'll keep in touch. :) There are still a few more posts in the works for this month, but I didn't want to make you read to the end to get the main idea of this post.

I swear I saw that same guy on the same bench 4 years ago, ha. (Sarzhin Yar, Kharkiv.)

My friend sent this picture from Kharkiv last week.

So much has changed in her life in the past few years. When we met, she was teaching for 40 uah/hour ($5 USD/hour, at that time) at a local English school. She lived near the sickle-and-hammer-covered Пролетарская (Proletariat) metro stop. She and her husband owned the kind of apartment I'd only seen in movies: a long hallway, a single room for each family, and a lone kitchen shared by the entire floor.

Now she has a beautiful roly-poly baby with chubby cheeks instead of the teaching job. The Пролетарская metro has been rechristened Индустриальная (Industrial). Not long after that, my friend and her husband were finally able to sell their one-room, shared-kitchen home and move into a place with more privacy and space for the baby. 

A day of smoke and ash

View of the city today:

It's hot here.

City beach, today.

This is very strange for Portland.