James Coleman
America Inside Out
The Last Blog Post5/22/2018 Hi there, here I am with my last blog post! To be honest I don’t know what exactly to write as the last blog post is supposed to be special. However, there were so many things going around in the last several weeks, so I can’t choose which one is the most special. So I will just tell you quickly about everything. First of all, I’ve been on trip to St. Louis with other exchange students a week ago. We’ve visited the Arch, the Art Museum, the Courthouse and many other beautiful places. If you ever end up traveling to St. Louis, you just HAVE TO see the City Museum. It is an enormous old building (I believe, it was a factory or something like that before) reconstructed into a gigantic several-storeys maze for kids and adults. All the holes, tunnels, paths are made from recycled materials. You can literally find there a real old plane, a school bus, a real castle tower and a Ferris wheel. When you come inside, you are seemed to be transported to a different reality. It’s impossible to describe it good enough, you just have to see it with your own eyes. Another amazing place in St Louis is the zoo, which is totally free and takes good care of all their animals. There are a lot of activities for the small kids as well as for adults, so it’s a great place for a family weekend. To sum up, St Louis is an amazing city! Another thing I want to share with you - I went to watch the Deadpool 2 last Friday. No spoilers, Don’t worry:) It’s probably the best movie I’ve seen in the last few years and the only Marvel movie I totally loved. It’s quite brutal and has a lot of bad words, but if this doesn’t scare you - you should definitely watch it! The jokes and plot twists were awesome! Thirdly, I received a postcard from China! A Chinese girl sent me a beautiful picture of koala and wrote “Hi!” in Chinese on the back side. Postcrossing is really working, so take a risk and sign up. You may find a good friend from the other side of the world. By the way, if anybody wants to get a postcard from Ukraine - give me your address before I leave! Finally, the last week brought a number of unexpected hardships, and I was surprised by a number of people who tried to help me. I didn’t even expected so many people being so nice to me and cheering me up. I understood, that struggles make us stronger and show real feelings that people have to you. I just want to thank to all of you guys! I really appreciate it:) To sum up... I hope you enjoyed reading my blog and liked the stories I shared with you. Thank you very much for your attention! See you in real life:)
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May 16th, 20185/16/2018 Hi there!
Today I opened my mailbox and found a big plastic package in it. Inside the package there were my certificates and congratulations from my exchange organizations for accomplishment of myyear. Do you know what does it mean? Yes, It means that my year in America is almost over and in one month I will have to take a plane back to Ukraine. I was sitting on the floor of my room and thinking about this year. I remembered all that cool, amazing, unusual situations that happened to me here, all that nice and kind people I met, all that things I crossed out of my American bucket list... and many things I would like to have more time to cross out.... It wasn’t an easy year: imagine, you are taking away from your comfort zone and thrown in an unknown environment. All your friends and relatives stayed at home, you are by yourself. Hard, but it makes you mature quicklier, learn how to deal with struggles, let you find new people to love. It totally worth that! I was sitting and asking myself, “How do you feel about that?” I feel thankful for all the people who were kind to me. I feel bad that I have to leave this place. I feel proud and happy for everything I tried here and sad for those things, which I didn’t. But I am also excited to see what life is preparing for me next. So I am just going to enjoy my last month of the exchange year and take tones of good memories with me back home:) 40 hours of my life...5/16/2018 Hi there guys!
Today I want to tell you about the biggest and the cutest project I’ve ever done. As any exchange student I had to do at least 20 volunteer hours, but I decided to go for 100 to get the special certificate in 3 weeks before deadline. So, in 3 weeks I did about 50 hours. Yes, I know, it’s the craziest decision ever. It would be hard to find quickly a lot of good volunteer opportunities and for my host family to drive me there, so I came up with an idea how to work at home. There is a beautiful tradition in Ukrainian culture to create and keep at the house handmade rag dolls, which are called "lalka-motanka", for luck, health, and protection from problems or diseases. I decided to make some for children at local hospitals. The dolls are created out of colorful fabric, threads, yarn, ribbons, and stuffing inside their heads. Instead of the faces, they have hand-reeled crosses as symbols of protection and Christianity. Every doll is well-detailed and unique, there are no dolls dressed up in the same way. Each of them wears a skirt, an underskirt, a jacket, an apron, and a belt. My host mom loves crafting, so she let me use her material,s and I reimbursed it by buying her some new fabric for my host siblings' dresses. On this or next weekends I am planning to visit children's hospital in the town and deliver the dolls and I am really looking forward doing it. I think this project is a wonderful opportunity for me to share my culture and the most important - inspire children to fight against their illnesses and believe in soon recovering. Prom5/16/2018 Hi guys!
This week everybody was excited only about one thing - about the prom. So, this post will be mine short opinion about it. In my school back in Ukraine we have prom after the 9th grade (when you finish the middle school) and after 11th grade (when you graduate), so this prom was second in my life. Although I am not a big fan of dances or noisy places, I enjoyed the evening. I think, it’s a good possibility for seniors and juniors get together for the last time before everybody moves and enter colleges, dress up and feel fancy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the after prom party which is the most exciting part, but I still had a lot of fun just dancing and chatting with my friends. I don’t really think that prom deserves spending hundreds of dollars on it, but it’s a good occasion to please yourself with a nice dress, hair and makeup. In my school graduation ceremony and prom are at the same day at the end of the school year, so I expected American prom to be long like that. But to be honest, I was quite happy that it was only about 5 hours as I got tired of my heels really quickly:) Family trip to Ohio4/22/2018 Hi everybody!
This week our host mom decided to spend several days at her parents’ house in Ohio so that we could visit some museums and landmarks nearby. We arrived there on Thursday evening and planned to see the tunnel under Ohio river, where slaves were hiding during the Civil war, on Friday. However, we find out that the tunnels were closed till May, so we followed the plan B. On Friday morning we arrived at the Ohio Air Force museum, where you could learn about the history of aviation, Wright brothers who created the first airplane, see space satellites and rockets, and even walk inside the real Presidents Truman's, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s airplanes. Since I had been always interested in aviation and engineering, it was an extremely exciting day for me. However, the thing that made me laugh and be angry at the same time is that in one of the rooms, where they provided an installation about Igor Sikorsky, Ukrainian (he was born in Kiev) scientist who was the pioneer in helicopter aircraft, they hanged the Ukrainian flag upside down. I am not offended by regular people making mistakes when they talk about my country, but I think that the State museum had no excuse for that. If such thing happened to the American flag, people would get mad! So I went to the Info desk and politely asked the administration to fix this problem and I really hope, they listened to me. So, the next time when you visit this museum, text me whether the Ukrainian flag was eventually hanged right or no:) After that, we visited some other beautiful places like the parachute museum, the beautiful cemetery where the Wright family was buried, the Wrights’ bicycle shop where they worked before they started creating the airplanes, and the next day we attended the Native American History museum. All those places are extremely lovely and I highly recommend you to go there one day. Unfortunately, to go on this trip I had to skip the choir contest I’d been preparing for, but I think this amazing family trip totally worth that. Bridal Shower4/15/2018 This Saturday I went to the bridal shower for the first time in my life. We don’t have such tradition in Ukraine, so it was an unusual and lovely experience.
To be honest, at first, I thought that it was going to be pretty boring as people come to the bridal shower to chat with friends and I didn’t know anybody there. But it turned out to be a great evening with funny games, tasty food, and nice people. My host mom and I even won a prize for creating the most beautiful wedding dress from the toilet paper:) The bride was the cutest girl you could ever meet, she created some of the decorations for the party. My host mom made homemade coffee face scrub, mint foot scrub and lavender bath salt for her present, and I gave her a cute teacup and saucer. Somebody took a polaroid picture of me and the bride, and I think I was supposed to put it in her photo album but I impudently stole it for my scrapbook. The party was extremely lovely and I am really looking forward to meeting the groom at the wedding. They’ve already sent us the “save the date” card with their pictures and they seem to be such a cute couple! Ukrainian Easter4/15/2018 Hi guys! Today I want to tell you about celebrating Ukrainian Easter with my host family last week. In Orthodox Christianity, all holidays are celebrated in a week or two later than in Catholic or Protestant. That’s why unlike American Easter, Ukrainian was not on 1st of April but on 8th. In Ukraine, we have a lot of different Easter traditions, so I tried to share some of them. In the morning we decorated eggs with special sleeve-stickers I brought from home: you put an egg in a plastic colorful sleeve, then dip the egg into the hot water, the sticker shrinks and sticks on the egg. My host mom baked some zucchini raisin bread which looked like Ukrainian Easter cake. Then we set everything in the Easter baskets called the Pascha baskets, covered it with embroidered towels and went to the Orthodox Church in Loveland. In the church, the priest blessed our baskets with the holy water, and we stayed there for half an hour to listen to the special Easter service. Orthodox churches usually have few benches, but you are not supposed to sit during the service, so it was a little bit exhausting. However, it definitely worth that, as the singing of the priest and church choir, all the beautiful paintings on the walls and golden decorations, the smell of the church candles made with incense were amazing! To sum up, it was a wonderful family day and a great experience. If you ever have a possibility to visit Ukraine, you should definitely do it on Easter time as it’s a beautiful holiday with unusual traditions. Postcrossing4/1/2018 Hi there!
Here I am with a short blog post about an amazing hobby I found for myself few days ago. On Thursday I was just searching something on Internet and suddenly came across an article about postcrossing. It’s an international exchange of postcards between people from all over the world, who have even never meet in real life. It means that one day you may open your mailbox and find there a picture with some wishes on the backside from a stranger. Isn’t it fascinating? The only thing you have to do to participate in it is to sign up on the website, put there your address, and wait for a postcard:) To send a postcard you request an address, and the website gives you a random one of any other user. You also get an ID of a card to write down on it. When the addressee gets your card, he or she types the ID on the site, and the site marks it as delivered. This time I am sending a postcard to a 46-years-old man who lives is German countryside with his wife and a tiny dog. I wrote a short message for him in German, and have already sent it. I am so excited to find out when he will get it! I hope this post's made you at least a little bit interested in this activity and you will try to do it. It doesn't require a lot of time or money - one card, one stamp and you'll make somebody on the other side of the world a little bit more happy! Trip to Jungle Jim4/1/2018 Hi guys!
Today I want to tell you about our family trip to Jungle Jim on Tuesday. Actually, we planned to go there on Saturday. But then the weather of Indiana State said “I feel like you need some snow storm on the weekends, guys”, so we had to stay at home. Jungle Jim is an amazing place where you can food and drinks from all over the world like. Of course, shopping there is more expensive than at a regular grocery store, but it’s a good opportunity to get acquainted with foreign cultures. And they have that beautiful decorations for each section of the store styled for the country the food is from. If you have an opportunity to go there, you should definitely buy something at their bakery: their bread is extremely tasty! I bought some sweets from my country, but I was really surprised by prices: because of all the shipping taxes, some food was almost 7 times more expensive than I used to pay for it at home. One thing that made me laugh a lot was an enormous, giantic barrel with a symbol of the Soviet Union Army and sign in English "Chernobyl Nuclear Power" spelled with Russian letters (Chernobyl was a Ukrainian nuclear reactor that explode in 80s, and caused huge environmental problems). I think it's a really good black humor joke. However, there was one thing that made me really disappointed. Although, the store had a number of racks with German, Italian, Japanese or Mexican food, they didn’t have at least one shelf for Ukraine: they just settled all Ukrainian food in the Russian section. I am quite used to people whose job isn't connected with Geography and who often mix up these two countries, and I am totally fine with that. But if you are opening an international store that's focused on selling goods from abroad, such mistakes are unacceptable. So now I am planning to write a complaint to the store and ask to create an individual shelf or at least a sign. All things considerate, it was a cool experience, and I highly recommend you to visit this store if you haven't yet! A little bit about everything...3/18/2018 Hi guys!
I really don’t have any special ideas for this blog post, so I’ll just tell you few things I did this week. Firstly, I started doing tennis. I am not a sporty person at all, but as America is all about sports, I decided to try. And I am happy I did! I have never played before, so now I can’t even hit the ball with the racket, but I think it will be better by the end of the season. A little bit of irony: every day when I am dying by the end of the practice, the turkey vultures come and start circling above the courts, which makes me feel like I am literally something dead… Secondly, I became a member of the National Honor Society. That was an amazing ceremony with cookies and punch afterward. I am really grateful to my friend Alayna for the beautiful speech she wrote about me. The only thing that makes me confused is that we have to do some volunteer hours every year to stay a member. But I won’t be here next semester to do it. Does it mean that they are going to kick me out? If not, does it mean that I am a cheater who doesn’t do her work but stays a member? Also, I was “lucky” enough on St. Patrick’s Day to wait 20 minutes in the line at Skyline for the green spaghetti and realize that the customer in front of me get the last portion:( However, the Universe re-counted my karma and gave me a little bit of luck to find a perfect prom dress. I bumped into it by accident and now I am really looking forward to wearing it. To sum up, that was a good week! 7 more days before the spring break! We can do it! Daria GoptsiiAn exchange student from Ukraine. Archives
April 2018
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