OPS and Photo Walk

It was been an exhausting two days, and it all started two evenings ago when some members of AIESEC Kyiv came over to the intern apartment to hang out with us. The plan was to not drink and have everyone gone by 10:00....not really doing much, just chillin. So, naturally, we were up til 4:00 AM. 2 hours later I was woken up because we had to go head out to AIESEC Kyiv's Outgoing Preparation Seminar, where I got the opportunity to be a faci.

The 2 hours of sleep made me dead tired all day but overall it was a great experience! I got the chance to talk about how my experience was going so far, made some recommendations to the EPs who were about to leave, played some AIESEC games (learned some new ones from Kyiv that I'll be teaching my team when I get back), and also got to meet and talk to some AIESEC members, including a member of VPOGX of AIESEC Ukraine's MC, and the LCP, VP COM, VP OGX...and I've already met Kyiv's VP ICX, VP ER (my EP buddy actually), and VP TM....so I've met most of the Kyiv EB :)

I also got a free AIESEC t-shirt out of the day....success!

Today I had the day free so I decided go for a bit of a stroll. Now, I could have taken the metro to the main attractions but I decided to walk over and see some of the non-touristy areas. I got to see a lot more than I intended to as I ended up getting lost pretty easily. There are no street signs at intersections in Kyiv, which makes it very difficult...only the occassional address on a building to go off of.

I was trying to make it a pitstop at the University between the Train Station and the Center (where most of the attractions are). I saw a bunch of young people with backpacks and laptop bags, so I followed them thinking it would take me to the University. There are lots of small universities in Kyiv though....so an hour later I finally admitted to being lost and asked someone if they could point out on my map where I was. (I always ask young people because education has changed in Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, and that's the barrier for when people are likely to have learned english in school) turns out, I wasn't even on my map anymore. So, I walked some more and got lost but ended up finding the train that I had started at. Based on where I had ended up, I headed out in the direction that was sure to be where the Center was. I got lost again and ended up pretty close to where I had gone to before, but luckily this time there was a single road that I could follow to where I wanted to go.

I got to the area but ended up leaving the main road to attempt to find the Sofia Cathedral, which is one of the most famous sites in Kyiv. I found a cathedral, thinking it was the Sofia, and was quite disappointed and thought it was different than I had seen in pictures. Turns out it was because I was in a completely different area of town, which I didn't know at the time.

I got lost for a 4th time and finally found a man who was walking towards Maidan and just followed him there. He didn't speak much Russian and obviously neither do I. But I didn't speak any Ukrainian and he didn't speak any English. We tried to communicate, and were sort of able to. At this point I picked up one of the other interns, Syaza from Malaysia, and attempted to find the Sofia again. I thought we did too, it looked a lot like it...but I just found I was wrong again, so I need to go back.

We eventually wandered through the extremely beautiful west river side and went home. Very long day, very tired.

The next two days I will be going to a school to teach children about Canada and play some games with them.