Tell us about your sport career in Georgia

A bad luck entry may seem like I'm miserable or something, which I'm not, so I figured I'd add a more upbeat journal-style entry for balance.

That titular request began my first birthday party in Ukraine.  It was for Vanya, one of my students in 10th grade.  His aunt, one of the teachers who we've been working with, invited me in class the day of his birthday, 2 weeks ago.  I thought it was kind of odd that they invited me and not the other Americans, but I thought it would be interesting and good to see, since my host mother's birthday was coming up that weekend.  And if Ludmilla (the teacher) was there, there shouldn't be any impropriety issues--after all, another American had told me she went to the discotech with her students (no drinking with them, of course). 
So, at any rate, I met Ludmilla near my apartment at about 6 PM that day, and walked across the street to a small neighborhood with small but well-kept houses.  She took me to a larger one next door to her own house and told me that Vanya's father was her brother.  We went inside and I joined the party in progress, which consisted of 3 girls and 6 or so boys, all about 15-17.  Most of them were my students, but there were a few that I didn't know.  They had a plate of pizza ready for me, and Alina, one of my students, translated the titular request from Vika, a girl I'd never seen before who was apparently too shy to speak English to me.  I laughed, with my mouth full of pizza, because it sounded like they thought I was a professional athlete. 
Following eating, they wanted pictures with me.  First group, then boys, then girls, then individual photos.  During the girls' photo with me, Valentin (another student, male), threw a cat across the room.  Then we played mafia, in 2 different ways--the way I played before in the US, and then a new way where there's only 1 mafia member, no narrator, and everyone in the group holds hands in a circle.  The mafioso then squeezes a person's hand x times, and he squeezes the next person's hand x-1 times, then they squeeze x-2, and so on.  When your hand is squeezed once, you die.  I went home after about 3 hours.  All in all, pretty fun.  But constant questions about you, your life, and your country do tend to get old. 
That was Thursday, 13 days ago.  That weekend was Olga's birthday party, which saw her with Luba and Natasha (Olieg's girlfriend and her daughter) make enough food to feed about 40 people, then invite about 16 people over Sunday afternoon, eat, and make frequent vodka toasts (not everyone drank, but Olga drank every toast).  She spent Monday at home from work, probably nursing her hangover while watching the Russian reality TV shows she loves, as well as what seems to be a Russian version of "The View."
I can't really remember too much about last week, except I got to sleep in one day because I didn't have any lessons and the girls in my group got really pissy about something at the end of it. 
The weekend, however, was excellent.  I did absolutely nothing on Friday but play video games and go to bed early, and then spent most of Saturday in Kiev with 5 friends.  The capital is only about a 30 minute bus ride away that costs the equivalent of $1.  We went to a few cool places, including a McFoxy restaurant (a Ukrainian competitor to McDonald's) and an Irish pub where half the patrons were Britons yelling at an England-Australia rugby game.  On Saturday night, we went to the disco in Vasylkov.  Very, uhm, interesting.  It's so far the only club or bar I've been to where the person at the door is a middle-aged lady, but knowing Ukraine, I doubt it will be the last.  The 2 other guys in our group and I made a "man-pact" to ask Ukrainians to dance, which proved challenging.  First, Ira, one of the Ukrainians (Courtney's host sister) with us, when we asked her how we should go about this, told us to just ask if they spoke English.  We tried this once or twice, then decided it was a bad idea...would you say yes if some foreigner in a small-town club asked you if you spoke his language?  It just seemed weird.  Anyway, we switched to broken Russian; the results of which were much more positive.  We asked, viy khatitye tansuit, which we thought was "Do you want to dance?" but "to dance" is actually "tansivat," an irregular verb.  So I'm not sure what we were really asking, but it was more effective and we achieved our goal after a while.  We made it home around 3 AM.
In less than a month, I'll finally be done with training.  I can't wait.  Pulling 60 hour weeks got old pretty quickly.

Everything Is Bad Luck

A sampling of what is bad luck in Ukrainian culture (many of these are shared with Russian culture or other EE nations)
Shaking hands across the threshold of a house
Bringing an even number of flowers
Giving yellow flowers to a sweetheart
Whistling indoors
Whistling in public (when can you whistle?  I still don't know)
Killing spiders or insects in the house
Drinking cold drinks (you'll get a cold)
Going outside when it's slightly cold while not wearing 40 layers (you'll also get a cold)
Opening windows on a bus, even when its 100 degrees outside and there's no A/C (you'll probably get a cold as well)
What's good luck in Ukraine
Brooms (because they sweep away bad luck)

There's a lot of bad luck superstitions here, and sometimes it's a little irritating, i.e. I whistle all the time, like cold drinks and a nice breeze, and I'm not going to bother to catch a spider to put it outside.  But it makes sense historically that there are so many bad luck customs.  Ukraine (and all of Eastern Europe) has not been the luckiest place on earth.  Unlucky to be so close to invasion-happy Germany and expansion-happy Russia rather than surrender-happy France, nap-happy Spain, and tea-happy Britain.  There's still craters in the nearby forests from Nazi bombs.  Unlucky to have no idea how to handle capitalism when Ukraine first became independent in 1991, and see the living standards decline for most of the population AFTER communism ended.  Yeah, that's something they don't tell you in American schools.  In most of the former Soviet republics, death rates have risen, birth rates and life expectancies have fallen, emigration rates have soared, organized crime (specializing in drugs, sex trade, and more) has gotten more powerful, education has, pardon my French, gone to shit, and corruption has become endemic.

Anyway.  I hope that was illuminative, informative, and maybe a little entertaining.

"Poor Mexico!  So far from God, and so close to the United States!"--Porfirio Díaz