Pumpkin Day

Here we are... 31st of October 2009. I don't know what it is about Halloween but this is one 0f the few holidays that truly inspire me.

Actually, it was the first American holiday I experienced on the other side of Atlantic. It was 11 years ago when on one particularly cold and windy day I was crossing Chippewa river to get to the other side of the University of Wisconsin lower campus and was totally mesmerised but an array of pumpkin faces looking at me from the colorful porches of typical Middle America houses.

That same day I was invited by one of my friends for a family dinner followed by a traditional trick or treat. Everything was about pumpkins that evening. For dinner we had some kind of soup baked in the whole pumpkin, followed by a homemade pumpkin pie and pumpkin candies for desert! After we were no longer able to consume anything that remotely reminded mentioned above vegetable we decided to go for a walk and watch kids in costumes and street decorations. And it was remarkable! Imagine everyone dressed in bright spooky costumes, thousands of candles burning all over the neighborhood, hundreds of deliberately carved pumpkins around the houses and overwhelmingly irresistible feeling of joy everywhere you looked... Speaking about a holiday spirit!

Joy of Halloween stayed with me over the years. When I came back to the United States to live in Washington I was very much looking forward to October 31st to see how different it was on the East Coast. It was all I expected and more.

My cosmopolitan Dupont Circle neighborhood celebrated in its own way. Festivities usually started with the High Heel Race on the Tuesday before Halloween. It is a pretty funny event with dozens of drag queens racing down 17th street and fighting to win. If you combine competition and drag queens together you get the picture how it actually is.:)

Costume parade on M street is certainly a culmination point of Halloween celebration in Washington. Hundreds and hundreds of people in exquisite costumes march around Georgetown. If you like to be in the center of attention and you don't have a lack of imagination then that is the place to be.

Description of Halloween in Washington would be incomplete without mentioning an International Student House (ISH) party. ISH is a special place for me that deserves a separate post on this blog. Let me just say that there was nothing better than spending an enchanting night with your best friends making fools of ourselves and having a time of our lives!

Regardless of where you are and whether they grow pumpkins there or not I wish you a very colorful and happy Halloween to remember!

Joy of Packing

In this title there is only one word which is true and that is packing...I don't know if it is possible to use joy and packing in the same sentence...I can tell you for sure - not for me...Always the same routine. No matter how much I am trying to procrastinate unavoidable, there is always a moment when you just have to start folding and wrapping and ordering and measuring and stocking and more folding and piling and more ordering...I am not trying to sound negative, not at all. I am just stating a fact here:).

Well, that said, the expectation of a new adventure always serves as a remedy for the painful process of relocation. So far I did it about 5 times. I am talking about major move here. The first time I was going to the U.S. to study at the University of Wisconsin. I was about 19 years old back then...Most of my suitcases were not even done by me so, I guess, that first time does not really count. Other times were when I moved to Washington and back to Donetsk and, finally, when I moved to Kyiv almost six years ago.

One thing I have learned from all this process is that the older you become the more boxes you need to move. You just somehow absolutely cannot imagine your life in a new place without that special frying pan, that one and only sweater, so precious to you regardless of the fact that you did not wear it for about... well... 3 years...And let me tell you, all those things add up...
So in order to save some of my "or so fragile neurons'' I decided to go with professional movers. I thought all I needed to do was to go on my facebook while all those professionals loaded my belongings on one of those magic trucks or whatever they used to transport your things across the borders...Ha...I should have known better...

The movers arrived to estimate the quantity of things to be shipped. I left it up to them to go around my apartment and do whatever they needed to do. I was just about to indulge myself in life feed updates of the world wide addiction - THE one and only facebook, when I was totally thrown of the track by a question posed by one of the movers: "How many cubic meters of T-shirts do you have?"Ha? Here came my tranquility. I thought she was joking...I asked what she meant by cubic meters and she went into a long explanation: "well imagine one meter in height, one meter in length and one meter in width''...For one moment I thought poor lady needed a professional help herself... Honestly I was so startled that I did not know what to respond. I was just staring at her and evaluating in my mind whether she had any heavy or sharp objects in her hands and whether i could make it to the door...I guess my facial expression was somewhat alarming because she looked like she started to evaluate whether I had any sharp objects in my own hands and whether she should run for the exit herself...

Then it occurred to me that this poor girl was probably joking and I simply lost my sense of humour...Shame on me! So in order to reinstate that I was still capable of joking myself, I stated that I measured my T-shirts in square miles only... Oh boy... that did not help... I think it could have been the end of my contract with the movers... That was when my friend came to my rescue and calmly asked why they measured everything in cubic meters. Guess what the answer was? Because everything is transported in boxes and shipment is calculated depending on the size of the box (i.e. depending on your cubic meters)...Now I know how many cubic meters of T-shirts I have:).

I feel better because I've learned something new today:).

*photo twomenboxes.com

First Entry Ever

I feel such a responsibility now since I've decided to start this blog. I thought it could be interesting to share all the travel adventures and discovery of this tiny world as well as some daily blurbs of my mind. Actually I should have done it a long time ago... but you know how it goes. I needed to live with this idea for some time before going on the world wide web and creating something like that.... Anyways...

I also thought it could be a right time with all the changes in my life this year.
Today is exactly one month before a major move. Yes I am leaving Kyiv and soon will be calling London my new home. The countdown has started as well as all the bureaucracy associated with it. I have a feeling that my next post will be about apartment rental and job search in the United Kingdom... we'll see...

Now few words about the name of this blog- discovery. I think there is no better word that describes my constant curiosity in people, countries, languages and world in general. Last five years were filled with travel, meeting people and opening my mind about a lot of things. The bottom line is I don't want this blog to be all about me or my life I want it to be about sharing various experiences with my friends. Let's hope I will stick to my plan:).

With these few words that actually turned into a rather long post I'd like to welcome you to my discovery and thank you for sharing what you think about anything I post here.