Some History
Many years ago, Ukraine was a part of Soviet Union as well as Russia which fell apart a few years ago and formed many independent countries. Now, those countries all together are called the Commonwealth of Independent States or CIS. So, they are like the USA but independent from each other. Of all those countries of former Soviet Union people know Russia best. Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea was at first Russia, but now its Ukraine.
All thing are the same in all "states", and now, to change it, they begin to change languages from Russian to Ukranian or others. It is kind of funny when you speak Russian all your life and suddenly you can't speak it any more and have to learn another language and speak it all the time.
The first thing I want to say abot school is that Ukranian schools are the hardest schools I have ever been to! We go to school 10 years. We don't have the 4th grade(we go from the 3rd grade to the 5th), and we don't have the 12 th grade. The hardest thing is that beginning from the 5ht grade we have 9 or 10 subjects and then each year they add 1 or 2 more. Well, that doesn't mean that we have all subjects every day, we have 6 or 7 classes each day and each day of the week we have different schedule.Oh, almost forgot, we go to school on saturdays too as if it is a normal school day.Here is another funny thing. Our schools don't have names like high school or middle school, our schools have numbers. For example this is the school # 43 (my school) and in that school you can find students of each grade level, in other words, all years that we spend in school we spend in one building.When we reach the 9th grade, which is the beginning of high school in American schools where you can choose what you want to study, nothing changes in Ukranian school for except you go to the next floor of the school and all you classes are there. By the way, we don't have lockers.Yeah, thats not too much of good stuff about Ukranian schools, but the good thing is that you can leave campus wherever you want and you can wear whatever you want to.We don't have any detentions or any kind of punishments. You can chew gum or talk and a teacher can tell you thousands of times to shut up but he can't do anything else.In other words if you want to learn something at school, you learn, if you don't do whatever you want to. Well, there is a lot of cool stuff about Ukranian schools and I can tell it forever. By the way, there we have English as a school subject from the first grade and french or german from the 5th grade in many schools. When you turn 15 you have to take a special test and if your results are the best ones you can visit USA as a foreign exchange student.
Yeah, thats very different. The first thing is that we don't use cars as much as Americans do. We have a lot of public transport and you can see a lot of people on the streets especially in the weekends. The things that we wear are different because of the climate and all other stuff. We have cold winter and warm summer.We don't wear blue jeans, girls wear skirts most of the time. In Ukraine we don't have houses like in the USA, we all live in apartments. Only in villiages we have houses but they all are old and nobody likes living only villiages. Always old people live there. I like living in appartments because in my house there were 60 appartments and I knew all my neighbors. That way you have more friends. I think that appartments make the biggest difference in our lifestyle.School Lifestyle
