Goodbye UK

I've set this to hopefully be delayed until I have left for the Ukraine and will as such be my last blog from the UK for some time. For those of you who don't know I have a contract with International House DNK (based in Dnipropetrovsk and Donestk) to teach English as a foreign language for the next 10 months.




As you can imagine I am very excited about this and nervous at the same time, the fact that this is my first teaching post and that I will be developing a language (Russian) which my fluency is pretty poor at still (and let's not even discuss pronunciation!)which means this is less a step out of my comfort zone into the unknown and more a leap from a third story building.

Luckily International House have in place a lot of assistance for teachers coming out to their country to help them with the language and culture changes as well as helping to develop their capabilities as teachers.

My plane departs tomorrow (today when you read this) the 23rd of August at 12:45 and will arrive 17:50 in Kyiv (Ukraine time...which is two hours ahead). After this I'll have about 6 hours in Kyiv before heading off on the sleeper train down to Dnipropetrosk. This short train journey of 6 hours will take me to the city where (baring any last minute changes) I shall be living in for the next 10 months (give or take a few days back at Christmas.

Once in Dnipro (for short) I shall have half a day before Induction week begins and then after that teaching starts straight away. It should be a hectic first few weeks adjusting to full time working and I'm not certain when I will be getting internet access out there so it could be a while before I actually get to write another blog post or anything. However I do want to keep writing and keep you up to date with everything Ukrainian.

To get me into the mood for moving to the Ukraine I have been watching Everything is Illuminate, A film set in the Ukriane and staring Elija Wood and Eugene Hutz the front man from Goglo Bordello. It is a great film about a Jewish man who goes back to the village where his grandfather use to live. What I did find quite encouraging was that I didn't find reading cyrilic as hard as I expected I highly recommend seeing it as it is a really great film.



I will post picture, video's etc as soon as I can about everything that is going on so I hope you will enjoy learning a bit about the Ukraine and everything I get up to. Anyway I must go and finish packing now, thank you for reading.