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Published: October 19th 2005
It sounds kind of cheesy, but my long lost family is exactly what brought me to this tiny village. My grandmother and her family left the village when she was ten, but her brother, seven years old, stayed behind, and raised his family.
It was absolutely amazing, everyone was so happy to meet me. If there's one word in Ukrainian I won't forget, it's yeesht, eat. Constantly my family was telling me yeesht, yeesht, and stuffing me full of all kinds of great Ukrainian food as well as countless vodka toasts. It felt like something out of a movie when my aunt Anna came to meet me at the train station, I was holding a newspaper so they could recognize me, she saw me and started waving and ran up and hugged and kissed me. When we got back to the house, around 3 in the morning, I met my cousin Volodye and of course Anna had to cook some food (yeesht, yeesht) before we hit the sack. When I woke up in the morning, the house was full of people, with tons of kids running around. At first I thought maybe Anna ran a day-care service or something. It
took me a while to realise that everyone was my family. Apparently two of my uncles drove all the way from Moscow to meet me.
Communication was interesting because there was only one person in the village who spoke English. My English-Ukrainian dictionary got much use, and I managed to learn a bit of Ukrainian. I suppose with family you dont really need to talk so much. I hope to visit sometime next year and bring some more of the Colorado fam along. And study Russian or Ukrainian before I go. Theres more to tell, but I won't write any more here because these stories deserve to be told in person.
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Mark
non-member comment
Eating
The word for eat is transliterated as "yeech" not yeesht, which sounds more like some disease.