Hawaii- Day One

As of late last night, we have officially arrived in Hawaii for our winter break vacation!! We is my immediate family (Mom, Dad, sister and brother), my dad's brother and his family (uncle, aunt, and three cousins), and my grandparents (Grandma and Grandpa Dad). I crashed as soon as we got in, since Chicago is four hours ahead of Kauai. I woke up at about 7:30 this morning, went to breakfast, and checked out the Business Center in order to print out some documents for- drumroll please- an online class on Ukrainian culture!!

I am super excited for this class. I think that after learning about Ukrainian history and culture, I will have a much better idea of what I want to see on our trip to Ukraine.

My family is going down to breakfast, and I'm going with them even though I already had. More updates soon!!

Sunday!!

Yesterday I was feeling much better. Well, maybe not initially, but eventually I had a really good day. And I managed to have my Ukrainian lesson with a hangover.

So this was the story: on Saturday night, I hung out with my best friend, her fiance, and my ex. I know that sounds weird, but it's not. My ex and I are really good friends now. We went to this bar that has karaoke. I love karaoke!! I actually have a good voice, and I really love singing. I was also excited because I hadn't drunk anything since mid-October (I had a drink the night before I got strep throat, and after I got really sick the next day I had this weird association with alcohol and I couldn't drink for a while).

Three 'Sex on the Beach's and a shot of Tequila later, I find myself on the stage giving everyone I see a high-five and screaming a screechy rendition of "Bad Romance" into the microphone (did I mention I'm obsessed with Lady Gaga? Because I am).

We got back to my best friend's house at 3 AM. I set my alarm for 7, and crashed in her trundle bed. 4 hours later, I let myself out and drive home, stopping to get coffee and a scone from the drive-through Starbucks five minutes from my house.  I thought it would help me wake up- too bad it made me throw up. Whoops. At least I made it through the whole hour and a half of Ukrainian before I had to run to the bathroom!!

The moral of the story: don't drink coffee with a hangover. You will regret it.

Sleepy Saturday

Today has been a simple day. I had Ukrainian at 8 AM, pretty early for a Saturday morning. I'm also having it at 8 AM tomorrow morning, to make up for Thursday (which was really nice of her). Today's lesson was good. We learned imperfect verbs vs. perfect verbs. It's kind of a weird concept. It's like, if the action you're talking about is something you've finished or done many times, then you use imperfect. If the action is something you haven't finished or only done once, then it's perfect. This rule only applies in past tense.

But what about a verb that doesn't have a clear beginning or ending? For example, "I went to the store." Should 'went' be imperfect if you got to the store but didn't come back? Is the action of going to the store complete when you get there, or when you get back? Or... well actually it's probably dependent on whether you went once or many times. If you're trying to imply many times, you use imperfect. If you mean you only went one specific time, you use perfect. At least that is what I think it is. I might be mixed up. In any case, it is confusing and I don't totally get it. Also there's no rule for how you change each verb from imperfect to perfect. You have to individually memorize each one. That's my homework for tomorrow. Let's see if that actually happens.

Today's Lesson

Today at 12:30 I had my Ukrainian lesson. I was feeling very nervous, because I was supposed to have a lesson yesterday, but I had to cancel it. Except I didn't cancel until fifteen minutes before, and that was rude of me, so I was worried she might be mad at me. But she wasn't, so it was all good.

I had a really good lesson today, much better than usual. I mean the lessons are always fun, I really enjoy them, but I have really bad study habits (thanks to years and years of undiagnosed ADHD) and so I never study and then I forget everything by the next lesson. She never says anything, but I'm always afraid she thinks that I am a lazy person. She doesn't know that I have ADHD or Executive Functioning Disorder, so when I don't study it looks like I'm just not studying because I don't feel like it. Plus I don't think that Ukraine is really big on mental health and learning disabilities. Not that I know, but I just get that kind of sense so far.

My cat is sitting on my wrists now so it's kind of hard to type.

The rest of my day was uneventful. I finished this book, "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt. I don't want to spoil the ending, but one of the characters dies in the end and I've been feeling very sad about it. I obviously didn't even know him, but I feel like I did. I was having a good time with my mom and grandma tonight over dinner and then I remembered that this character died and my stomach just dropped like a pit. I had to stop eating. It was weird. I need to start another book, get that one off my mind I think. Or maybe talk about it with people, so that it's not like someone I knew personally. I don't know, this has nothing to do with Ukrainian but I've been thinking about it a lot so I decided to write about it anyway, to get it off my chest.

I don't know, I've just been feeling very lonely.

Ukrainian Lessons

So here's the deal: I am obsessed with languages. And I don't use the word obsessed like normal people, I mean for real OBSESSED. As in OCD-style obsessed. As in I actually have OCD, and sometimes I become obsessed with random projects or hobbies- like languages, for example.


So what languages do I know? Well there's American English, obviously. Then there's Hebrew, which at this point I can understand fluently but can no longer speak fluently (I used to be able to speak, but I'm out of practice). After that, there's smatterings of other languages. There are random Yiddish words, as well as a tiny bit of Japanese, French, and Russian. And of course, there's Ukrainian.

I only started learning Ukrainian about a month ago when I decided that I wanted to travel to Ukraine with my grandparents. At first my family laughed, thinking this was just another fleeting obsession that would pass as quickly as it had come. But it became clear after a short while that I was serious, and my grandparents were backing me up. So the trip planning started. The thing about me is that I hate traveling to other countries and not being able to speak the language or understand a little bit. I like it when the local people know that I have made some effort to try and learn about them and their culture. So I did my research online, and eventually found the ECHO Eastern European Center for the Study of Slavic Languages, located in Kiev. What better way to learn Ukrainian than from actual Ukrainians?

So now I have skype sessions with a teacher twice a week (I don't want to say her name to protect her privacy). And you know what? Ukrainian is a fantastic language. I am loving learning it. My only regret is that I don't have so much time to study- I am a full time student in college, and that obviously has priority. But over winter break, which starts Friday (yay!!!) I'm taking an online class called "Intro to Ukraine" through SUNY Canton. I'm super excited to learn about Ukrainian culture.

Introduction

I'm Beth. Chances are that if you've stumbled onto this blog, you've done so completely by accident. I didn't exactly tell anyone that I'm writing this. I'm not sure how this is going to go, because I've never written a long-term blog before. In fact, according to my track record, this should be the only post that this blog ever sees. Hopefully that won't be true, but... we shall see. I don't exactly have great credit right now, as they say (I'm not sure who says this, but I bet that someone does).

In any case.

Hi!! I'm Beth. I'm 21 years old at the time of this blog post. I'm a college student living in Chicago. I'm not sure how relevant any of this is, but I guess someone might want to know.

Anyways. I get off topic pretty fast, in case you haven't noticed.

I'm starting this blog because of a conversation I had recently with my grandfather. I won't tell you his name, to protect his privacy, but it's a really archaic name. It suits him well.

Off topic again. Focus!!

This was the conversation (with a lot of paraphrasing):

Grandpa: Blah blah blah blah something about my parents in Ukraine.

Me: Wait, your parents were from Ukraine?

Grandpa: They were from a part of Ukraine that was considered Russia at the time that they lived there.

Me: I thought you always said they were from Russia.

Grandpa: Well they were, it was part of Russia then. Now that area is part of Ukraine.

Me: Interesting...

That's all I remember of the conversation.

Grandpa Dad (that's what I will call him, since he is my Dad's dad) is eighty-one years old. That's a lot of life to have lived, and that's a lot of memories. He is a very nostalgic person. Grandpa Dad likes to talk about his memories, regardless of whether they bore other people. In all honesty, they bore most people. But I take after my grandfather, and I enjoy hearing his stories. This is why I was surprised that at the ripe old age of twenty-one, I had not yet heard about my family's origins in Ukraine. I mean, I knew that we were from Eastern Europe, presumably Russia/Poland (different sides of the family) and that either my great-great-grandparents or my great-grandparents (depending which family member's ancestry we are discussing) came to America in the late 1800's/early 1900's to escape the anti-Semitic violence that occurred in the shtetls that they called home. Three of my grandparents were born and raised in Chicago. One (Grandma Dad) is from New York, but moved to Chicago after marrying Grandpa Dad in the early 1960's. But Ukraine!! This was new information.

And thus began my obsession with Ukraine.

I typically cycle through 'obsessions'; I start projects, put a lot of time and effort into them, and rarely finish them.

This one, however, is different. This is a journey!! Journey is a word that connotes greatness, adventure, and important discoveries!!

Hopefully all of these things will be present when I travel to Ukraine in the summer with Grandma and Grandpa Dad.

To be continued............