Whew, it's raining today, first time in a while. Just like England: hot and humid for ages, then rain. Anyway, where was I?

30th August: To be honest, I don't remember if I did much of interest on that Saturday. I remember that I went around Khreshatyk (the main shopping street area) and Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Sightseeing, window-shopping, that's it. Then I came home and watched some footy on the TV (I've got pretty good cable TV, which most people don't so I'm kinda lucky, even though nearly all of it is in Ukrainian or Russian). Oh yeah, then around midnight-ish, I locked myself in the kitchen. What?

Basically, the door is designed really badly in that it's a push-button lock door, so you push the button, and the side with the button can turn the handle and unlock it, but the side with the lock needs the key. So they decided to put the side with the lock on the inside of the kitchen. Good move! I can totally understand why you'd want to lock yourself in, so that other people can come in but you have to have the key. Nice. After some panicked phone calls to people at the school, [the school director] just suggested I give it a running jump. Amazingly, it worked perfectly: I flew through the door, the wooden frame splitting in two. I just stared at the frame and laughed out loud (I'd been in that room for a while, so I was a little hysterical). Another bad thing to happen to me. They keep on coming.

31st August: Sunday was a little quieter than that, obviously. I went to the Golden Gate Irish pub - overpriced beer and loathsome ex-pats aplenty - to watch Villa v Liverpool. 0-0, dull as ditchwater, but nevermind. I also had to explain the story about the door, so that was fun...

1st September: Now the real work starts. My first lesson - with teenagers - was a catastrophe, as even though I came in really early to do plenty of prep, I rushed through my entire lesson plan with half an hour to spare. Plus the kids can be a little tough to handle sometimes. Mercifully, my second group of teenagers were much more sedate and much easier to get to grips with. Finally, my adult group went relatively smoothly, but I relished the post-work beer more than most, I think. Interesting note about this, actually: it's perfectly normal in Ukraine to stand around on a street corner drinking beer. Such behaviour in England is simply not done, but the price is an obvious reason for it: 4-5 UAH (50-60p) for a 500ml bottle/can of beer from a street kiosk, or 10-20 UAH (£1.20-£2.40) from one in a pub. I'm amazed such a practice hasn't caught on in the UK too.

More tomorrow - though being my first week it's pretty predictable...