Our base celebrated Christmas together on December 26th. In Ukraine, Christmas is on January 7th so we celebrate early so that everyone can be with their families on the holiday.

Since Lance and I love games and just having fun in general, we have tried to incorporate games in our family nights at the base. Of course there is always a feast and we always feast first.

Working together to decorate a tree… with toilet paper!

After the feasting has finished, we games can commence. Lance led the different games of writing captions for Christmas comics, contest for decorating a mini Christmas tree and a Christmas ornament relay. Everyone participated, kids and adults alike.

After our game extravaganza, the kids had a little Christmas pagent to put on for us. Everyone enjoyed seeing the kids perform, who doesn’t like seeing kids dressed up as sheep?

The evening ended with our own Christmas exchange, we drew names the week before and everyone was prepared to give a gift to their special someone. Of course in order to open the gift you had to guess who gave it to you. We were thankful for the time together and the past year, we are all looking forward to the upcoming year!

Every year we have a Christmas party for English club, every year we have lots of food, every year we have the Christmas gift exchange. Everyone loves to come and have fun. We usually sing some carols, share what we will be doing for the holidays and then have our gift exchange.

It is always fun to see how people react to the gift exchange. We do the classic “steal” the gift game. This is really hard for people to understand and to accept. Some people just can’t bring themselves to take a gift from someone. (One year, for our staff party we did the gift exchange and the only people who stole a gift were the two Americans…) Somehow our English club has managed to get over the usual hesitation of stealing and they really get into the game.

Group shot

Since it has been such a busy year, Lance and I have hardly had a vacation. We managed to squeeze in a few days in mid November to make a trip to Lviv. Lviv is a beautiful city full of sites to see.

Here are a few pictures from on our way to Lviv.

And a few from in Lviv.

We were there right as fall was ending and winter was starting.

At Lychakiv Cemetery

The Lychakiv Cemetery is stunning in the fall

We had a great time away resting, and seeing some sights that we had never seen before. Lviv is a city that we often go to since it has the nearest airport. We have seen many of the normal tourist sights but there were a few we have never managed to go to. We also wanted to see a few castles on the way to Lviv but they were closed when we came.

Lance and I just celebrated our first anniversary together as a happy married couple!! We did not have a ton of time to get away, only the weekend but we managed to have an adventure nonetheless. We travelled to the city of Kaminets-Podilsky which has a lovely castle we’ve been wanting to see.

The only thing we regretted on our trip, was that we did not plan ahead and make reseverations. We made the terrible assumption that it was October and the tourist season would be over so we shouldn’t have to worry. Wouldn’t ya know, they apparently were celebrating Oktoberfest that same weekend we were there… After trying four hotels, we managed to find one that had two rooms left. It was a narrow escape that we hope to never repeat.

VIew of the city from the castle

What a handsome guard!

We kissed in a castle!

Our first stop was actually the view outside of the castle. As we walked up to the castle, there were hot air balloons just rising up over the castle. It was a spectacular site to watch 10 balloons float off into the distance. The castle itself is probably one of our favorites. We were free to explore most of the hallways and stairways through out the castle. There was a museum to look through, an archery contest was happening while we were there and there was a fabulous view of the city.

The old city gate

Watchtower

After the castle we made the trek into the city to find dinner which was an exhausting chore. We ended up simply buying from food vendors on the street. The city was alive with action and everyone was out and about. The weather was fair and perfect for festivities. We ended up back at our hotel completely spent but we did look through photos of our first year together. It was fun to remember what our highlights were and what our hopes were for the next year.

Orthodox church

Breakfast also proved to be a difficult task but we did eat and then set off to explore more of the city in the daylight. We found some amazing sites and we were happy to walk all around the city before heading back home.

Castle on the way home

Conqueror of the castle

The way home

We made time to find two castles on our way back. We didn’t really know what to expect we just had a general idea of where they were. Our GPS always proves to know the way, we found our way down dirt roads that I had no idea were considered roads. Despite the crazy routes we went, we did find the castles. Both were in ruins and no one was caring for them, we just simply hiked up to them and explored. Our last castle provided a beautiful view with the sunset and a lazy river below. It was a perfect way to end our anniversary weekend.

Hike up to castle #3

Sunset together at a castle

Just a quick note to those who have followed this blog for more than a year. Normally this time of year, Megan wrote a State of Megan Address. Since being married and moving back to Ukraine, we will postpone the official State of the Roberts Address until January (which is more appropriate in many ways!)

Just know we are super happy here, loving life and will have lots to share in our official report. We celebrate one year of marriage on Sunday!! Yeah!