Figuring Things Out

Laura and I used public transportation to get downtown for the first time yesterday. Igor, an Old Testament teacher at DCU, was kind enough to show us where to get on and off the bus. He also showed us around town a little bit before taking us to a church meeting in the city. It was informative and fun. Downtown Donetsk is very modern and maintained and should allow us to do all the exploling we can handle. It is about a 15 minute walk to the bus stop and about a 30 minute ride (for only $0.07).
We will travel there again this afternoon to meet our Russian teacher and maybe even have a short lesson. We are excited to learn the language so we can begin to understand what is going on. Many people at the university speak English well and can translate, but they are not always around and we need to learn the language to be effective (or at least feel like we are being effective).
We are getting settled into our apartment and it is starting to feel like home. It is somewhat small and empty, but it serves our purposes. It is located in a building where many other faculty members live and that is very nice. We eat breakfast and supper there but we eat lunch in the cafeteria. The food is good even though there are some meals we are not accustomed to eating. The main course yesterday was liver over rice and it was pretty good. I never thought I would hear myself say that liver was good.
After one week in the country, I can finally say that Laura and I have fully recovered from jetlag. It was crazy to wake up in the middle of the night and totally feel like it was time to wake up. I had never experienced that before. The sun begins to set at 3:30 (or 15:30 as we now refer to it) and that makes for a long evening.
We were invited to spend (American) Thanksgiving afternoon with some other teachers from the States and are looking forward to that. Hopefully Laura will have a class or two under her belt and will be feeling well and I will be able to ask "Where is the bathroom?" in Russian.

Dave