Rivne Vechirne journalists visit the U.S.

Rivne Vechirne is a newspaper in Rivne, Ukraine. For the past week or so, the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., has been hosting three journalists and two translators from Ukraine who traveled to the United States to learn about and observe how U.S. newspapers operate. Today was the farewell following a full week of activities, including a live online chat with readers. Feel free to read the transcript of the chat. It's in English!

From left, Svitlana, the finance director at Rivne Vechirne; me; Valentyna, the newspaper's editor; translator Nadia; translator Anzhelike; and political writer, Serhiy. 

I learned a few key phrases from my Ukrainian colleagues, and can now say -- if not spell! -- the following phrases in Ukrainian:
hello
how are you?
Cheers!

There are a few others, but I'm just starting and Ukrainian is much more difficult than some of the other languages I've attempted to learn.

Here the group says farewell after gifts were exchanged all around, including chocolate and coffee from Ukraine.

On the table are some of the individually wrapped sweets from a factory in Rivne. And they presented the newsroom with several packages of coffee that is "much stronger" than the apparently weak coffee Americans are used to. In the background (below wall of photos) is the latest puzzle the DP newsroom is working on, a 2,000-piece challenge. Two of the gifts presented from the DP to the Rivne journalists were puzzles for their newsroom!

One of the coffees.

Fruit-centered sweets in assorted flavors.

I gave each of them a a signed copy of SING TO MY HEART. They gave me a bar of chocolate and it's really cool to read the packaging -- or I should say look at the packaging since I can't read most of it.

This is the second group from Rivne Vechirne to visit the Daily Press. A delegation from the Daily Press is supposed to go there when things calm down in the country.

Here, DP writer Peter Dujardin, right, chats with the Ukrainian journalists.