Very Superstitious

It’s been a pretty slow day today, at least for me. I got to feeling pretty terrible last night around 9 and tried to go to sleep early, but that didn’t happen. Luckily, despite the lack of sleep, I woke up this morning feeling a little better than I did last night. I’m starting to think that I actually picked this up from our hotel room in New York. Danny and Stephen are both sick and we all stayed in the same room. We started working on wallpaper right away and finished the first room. It’s looking pretty good, and the team is already starting to paint.

Despite feeling bad, the last couple days have been really good. The kids here have really started warming up to us and the language barrier isn’t nearly as extreme as I thought it was originally. I still want to learn the language, but we’re having a great time even without it. Even some of the girls have been warming up. I was afraid I was just a big scary American to them but we’ve been joking and teasing each other today so I’m not so afraid of that anymore.

We had an interesting lesson on Ukraine the other night. Ukrainians are a very superstitious people. First of all, I found out that whistling is a bad thing. The superstition says that if you whistle you will lose all your money. Besides that I found out that when a baby is born, it is believed the child will be jinxed if their parents talk nice to it. So for the first few weeks of its life, they say things like “Stupid baby,” “ugly baby.” They use a nice baby tone to say it in though. There are also some pretty crazy superstitions for women as well. If women sit at the corner of the table, they will never get married and if they sit on the ground, their ovaries will freeze and they’ll never have children. Black cats and ladders apply the same as they do in the U.S. but mirrors have a bigger role here. Here you can’t put a mirror facing the door. If you do, when you bring money into the house, the mirror will push it back out. And when someone dies, they put covers over all the mirrors and reflective surfaces because if they don’t, their spirit will get caught in the mirror.

I love learning about different cultures. I wonder what the roots of these superstitions are. I may have to do some research when I get home.

Ron, losing the battle to sleep... so much for that Facebook Status.


Lori showing Micha some pictures behind the Mac army. The kids                       are surprisingly technologically savvy. I guess it's a generational thing.