First Visitors!!

We had our first Canadian visitors last week!! My aunt Elaine and her friend Frieda were doing a tour in some other countries and decided to come for a week afterwards. We've been planning this for eight or so months and it's unbelievable that they've come and gone already!!

The weather was absolutely atrocious - it SNOWED the day they got here!!!! and the temperature hovered around +1 the whole time as well which was very disappointing and very unusual for here!

They were lucky enough to experience Ukrainian trains and I was very fortunate to find the oldest taxi driver in the oldest car in the city to take them home from the train station!

We took them to the largest market in the city which I joke is kind of like Walmart because you can buy anything and everything there - shoes, clothes, garden produce, groceries, gardening supplies, curtains, furniture, bikes, motorcycles, plumbing supplies, paint, you name it, it's there!

Hats to the right, windows for sale to the left:

On Saturday they had planned a Mennonite tour here around the city with a Victor Penner. He had room to take me along as well which was great. We mostly stayed in the city where the Mennonite settlement of Chortitza is, as well we toured the cemetery - these are some original Mennonite headstones:

And this sign overlooked this valley filled with very old oak trees on Khortitza Island and basically it says that in this valley are some very very old oak trees and German Mennonites played a large part in their preservation. Victor had told us that Mennonites were quick to chase people off the island who came over for the express purpose of chopping these trees down.

We were in the Mennonite village of Rosenthal where Mennonite buildings still exist - the school is still a school (a rather beautiful, ornate one for Mennonite standards), the hospital is still a hospital etc., it was really cool to see. We actually saw a Mennonite house made out of wood, which is what they did before they started making bricks. That house in particular Victor said was over 150 years old. There was laundry hanging outside - proof that someone is still living there which goes to show just how well-built Mennonite homes were!! We ended up driving out of the city to a village of which the name has left me....but there was a massacre of 76 Mennonites in this village at the hands of Nestor Makhno's army and then just across the highway a short drive away is the village of Nikolaipole (where we worked the first time we came here).  Nikolaipole is a great example of a Mennonite village because it was largely untouched by any wars or civil conflicts and a lot of the current villagers are still living in Mennonite-built houses. The school is still a school and the church still exists although it is in great disrepair (the guys on our Trek team played soccer in the church over four years ago). Victor was great - a ton of stories and great knowledge of history. His personal family story was pretty incredible as well - he showed us where some of his family members had lived in these Mennonite villages and we learned that the only Mennonites that didn't leave after WWII were the ones that were married to Ukrainians - as was true for his family. There are also a few other Mennonites that stayed but assumed other identities so that they wouldn't be killed. I found a bit more info on the Khortitza settlement at this link:
http://www.plettfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/magazines/Preservings20June2002.pdf
It's an entire magazine I think but some of the stuff closer to the beginning explains a bit about how the Chortitza colony came to be etc. but even just looking through the first few pictures is pretty neat.

Oma and Opa were sitting in front of their yard in a village we drove through:

It was ridiculously cold outside and we were looking at all these buildings, just freezing ourselves, it was awful. But !!! we made it through, knowing that we were going to the BANYA afterwards! The banya is a Russian bath - you sit in the sauna and then jump into a pool of cold water, and hit each other with branches to "enhance your circulation". It was amazing! We had so much fun! I usually don't like saunas but this was just perfect after being so cold all day and it was a great Ukrainian experience for all of us - we took my friend Marina (who is from here), our friend Jessica (who is from the states but has lived here for almost five years), she had a friend visiting that came along, and then Elaine, Frieda and I. It was definitely a cultural experience for all of us!

Here are the beds where you lie to get hit with branches:

The branches:

There was a table and chairs so we brought snacks, spent a lot of time in the sauna and not so much time in the very very cold pool!! I would definitely take anyone visiting back to the banya!

It was so great having our first visitors - we felt bad that we couldn't do more because the weather was so awful but it was wonderful to spend lots of time visiting and having coffee!! We welcome anyone else who wants to come hang out for you know, a month or two ;)!

*Thanks to my Tante Elaine for a few of these pictures!*