This bitch sleeps around

 

Currently and for the indeterminate future, I am a dog mom. Really I’m only an aunt but it’s full custody until Shelby’s mom can figure out how to get her back to America.

Due to COVID and United Airlines’ current dog policies, she’s stuck being a Minsk mutt for at least a few weeks and more likely a couple of months. My hope is that she’s home in September or so but it’s likely going to be a little while longer. There are a couple of options to get her home, but until United says go, she stays.

It’s been a week, and so far, she doesn’t suspect anything; she has stayed with me this long before. She’s got to know something is up, though, because for the first time, her crate is over here, too.

It’s the dog days of summer and she is living it up. We go on at least four walks a day, two long and two short and we do at least 10k steps a day, usually more. Today, Sunday, we had that many in by breakfast.

In between walks, though, she has nothing to do and just sleeps. The walks tire her out, I think, and for the rest of the day, she just moves from one place to another, closes her eyes, and dozes off. Right now, she’s on the floor next to the kitchen table. In 10 minutes, she’ll probably move to under the table.

She’s sleeping all over my apartment, rotating through about seven spot in the TV area before lumbering off to the bedroom.

It’s hard to look at a domesticated dog like Shelby and think her ancestors used to spent all day hunting and scavenging. In between walks, all she does is sleep.

The most excitable it’s been was after a short rain. For some reason, that electrified her and she started darting around the apartment and kicking up my rugs. (Nonskid rug pads, my hind end.) We found a ball near the dog park and she had a lot of fun chasing it, but only for about 3-4 throws. She lost interest at that point.

Poor thing. Her life is in upheaval. She got baffled when she came over the first time, because we’d all been on the road trip and she got left with me and not her mom. She then went back to stay with her mom, but the house had been packed out and it looked different. Then I took her to work and, since my old office was being renovated, we worked out of a different building.  She didn’t like that much and barked at far more people than she usually barks at.

Now, my office is redone – and missing walls – but, other than tomorrow, she probably won’t be coming in because my new boss has arrived. I’m not sure how he feels like dogs, so between that and the new carpet, she will likely just sit at home all day and sleep. Not much different than now, but this way she’ll be excited when I come home. Now, I am basically furniture that feeds her.

Update: It didn’t take 10 minutes. I leave a window open so she can people-watch and a fly came in. It buzzed by and she leapt up to chase it. Now she’s curled up into her crate. She’s not a bad fly-catcher.

Got out of town

 At this point, everyone has cabin fever of some sort, so for the long Fourth weekend, three of us and Shelby the dog took a short road trip to Brest, which is right close to the border with Poland. (Brest, Belarus, nor Brest, France.)

We mostly wanted to go the forest and see bison, which are one of the animals that are well-known in Belarus. Stork and red foxes are a couple of others, but I really wanted to see the bison. In a perfect world, we could have spent days in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park and seen some in the wild, but it’s hardly a perfect world, so the three of us and Shelby went to the zoo in the park to see some caged bison. It was still very cool and maybe one day I can return and better explore the park, which dates back to the year 953. That’s three digits.

The zoo was over a fairly wide area, but it was still kind of sad to see. We’d heard tales about the bear who would open candy that people tossed at them, and people brought or bought all kinds of foodstuffs to feed them and all the other animals. There weren’t a wide range, really, because it was only animals that were found in the park.  We saw lynx (a “kitty kitty” that threw off Shelby), some boar, deer and some kind of horses that were a bit smaller than American horses. I’ve never seen any kind of horses in a zoo, so that was weird.

There were also two wolves in a rather large area, but not an area nearly large enough for wild wolves. The wolves, like most of the animals, were hovering near the fence for handouts, and our little quartet was away from the others because we had no interest in A) feeding wild animals or B) catching COVID. Shelby caught a glimpse of the wolves and was entranced. She stood on her hind legs with her front paws on the fence, just looking at her cousins. Suddenly, they caught a whiff of her and came bounding over. All the people feeding them became highly interested in Shelby, too, as both wolves rushed over to her and excitedly tried to make friends. My guess is they were saying “Get us out of here, Cuz!” But it was really cute. I’ve never seen a wild animal (such as they were) as interested in a domestic critter.

Grandfather Frost, otherwise known as Santa Claus, is from Belarus and has his home in the forest, so we went to that, too. He was there, wearing his summer outfit and greeting guests. Other than that, the park was a nicely shaded area with all kinds of fairy tale things, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (remember, Disney didn’t create the story, he only cartoonized it), the Russian version of Pooh and Piglet, and things like the Chinese New Year animals and the like. We had a nice picnic lunch at one of the rustic tables before heading back to the entry area, which was where the museum and zoo were. The park is huge – it took about 20 minutes by bus to get there, and that was the only time we were in the company of others and wore masks.

The park was the main point of the trip, but we also went to the Brest Fortress, which is now a WWII museum. WWII – known as the Great Patriotic War in former Soviet countries – is really big here and it was nice to see the area. Here’s the Wiki description: “In the late 1960s, the construction of the war memorial complex Brest Hero Fortress was started. The complex was opened on September 25, 1971. The memorial complex is a national place of grief and pride, a popular tourist attraction. It comprises the barracks, gunpowder bunkers, forts and other fortifications, the museum of the defence, located on the site of the old fortress, along with the new monumental structures: the main entrance, the obelisk, the main monument, the sculpture ‘Thirst’.”

It was in an area with lots of bike paths and green space; there was another fortress-type area outside the main fortress. I was able to explore it pretty well because Shelby wasn’t allowed in the main area, so we took turns hanging on to her. I took lots of pictures of the dilapidated brick buildings, which I never tire of, before handing off Shelby and going into the main area.

The “Courage” memorial was the most imposing, of course, just because of its sheer size, but the “Thirst” one was most haunting. It had a soldier, body outstretched, panting for water and reaching for his helmet, which was filled with rainwater. But he’s frozen in time, so he’ll never be able to drink it.

Hopefully, I will get back, and if I do, assuming I am without a dog, I’d rent a bike and bike around. This is very much a biking country.

That day, we didn’t bike at all but walked A LOT and were dead tired. We were staying at someone’s guest house and the host was also a physiotherapist who had a sauna. Well, we were all over that. I got my first Russian massage – where you are beaten by branches and leaves. It  was super hot and kinda painful but man, I enjoyed it. And then I slept like a rock. Shelby, who did not get a massage, also slept like a rock and her poor mom had to sleep around her in a twin bed.

On the way home, we took a different route, stopping in three different communities. At one, we saw the ruins of … something. I didn’t have the guidebook so I don’t remember, but I love ruins. That’s one of the reasons I adored being in Istanbul. I had no idea I’d happen upon some in Belarus, so that was really cool. We also stopped at the hometown of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who was a Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian (borders have shifted through the years; several people lay claim to him) who fought in the Revolutionary War. He signed on with the Continental Army and fortified, among other cites, West Point. We have a bust of him on the compound, and there’s a bridge named after him in New York.  And now I’ve seen his homestead. Not bad.

 

Now, though, it doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. The elections here are mid-August and there are growing protests here and elsewhere in the country. When they’re here, they’re right out my window, so when I say I am not going anywhere, that includes to the grocery store.

Yesterday was the day the Belarusian government “certified” the people who will run against the incumbent (in 26 years) president, and two of the frontrunners were inexplicably left off the list, so that was the reason for the protests. Depending on what happens, it could get very touchy here for the next month.

But if I am locked in, I will have Shelby. Her mom departs post this week but right now United isn’t taking pets in cargo so she’s stuck here. My guess is I’ll have a dog for probably at least a month and more than likely two. I feel like summer is not a good time to put doggies in the belly of planes but I don’t know the rules. Either way, on Friday I’m getting what is undoubtably one of the sweetest, smartest and most diplomatic dogs in the world. Her momma will miss her, but she’ll be in good hands.

Paddle, paddle, clap, clap, splash

On a lovely Saturday, I met a colleague and Shelby her pup for a morning walk by the river. We’d planned to try out the paddleboats, as both Colleague and Pup will (hopefully, for their sake) be leaving Minsk soon. There’s a bucket list of things to do, and paddleboating on the Svislach river is a must.

We met before the paddleboats opened, so I took the opportunity to film this Facebook post marking U.N. Public Service day. (That’s the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit’s bells ringing in the background.) I’d tried to film it the day before at home but had to rig up a backdrop and arrange the phone and wound up with what someone kindly described as a “hostage video,” so that got deleted.

That's her guilty face.

The Svislach River itself is wonderful and I am keeping up with the walks up and down various segments of it, but until Saturday I hadn’t gotten on it. We decided to get the four-seater “catamaran” so Shelby could have a place to sit ($6 for an hour), but she wound up mostly standing on the divider between the seats, which held the rudder control thing.

The part of the river we were on is the view on the way to work; there are a bunch of boring buildings on one side, slightly less boring buildings on another plus a domed concert venue of some sort, a place to go go-karting and the Isle of Tears.  You can also see a bit farther down to the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, too.

The Isle of Tears is a peaceful little island that commemorates Soviet soldiers from Belarus who died in the war with Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, and there are lot of ducks that call home.  We circled it about three times, and on the second, we were just relaxing and watching the ducks. There are lots of mama and baby ducks all over and they would swim up to us because people tend to feed them.

Shelby is a really good diplo-dog, and she is a good rider in the car. She was also really good in the boat, right up until she took a flying leap off after the ducks. She sunk, then rose to the top, quite bewildered, and her mom hauled her back in, laughing hysterically. Shelby kept shaking off and both humans just laughed and laughed. She was really wet and all three of us smelled like wet dog.  No duck feathers were ruffled whatsoever. She didn’t even get close to them.

In other news, the Belarusian elections are scheduled for August 9, and there’s all kinds of stuff leading up to them. The president has been in power for 26 years and there’s a growing sentiment that it’s time for a change. Meanwhile, the president’s opponents are winding up being detained by law enforcement officials for what many deem false charges.

One of the prime opponents, along with his son, was detained by the KGB (it’s still called that here) on Thursday. That night, as I was watching “The Hunger Games,” I thought I heard people clapping and horns honking, but not constantly.

  

   

Euronews photo: https://www.euronews.com/2020/06/19/top-challenger-in-belarusian-presidential-race-detained

That evening, I’d gone out for a walk and got caught by a massive rainstorm when I was three blocks from home. I got home, shed all my clothes and took a shower, then grabbed dinner, so it was maybe around 7:30 p.m. when I put the movie in.

By the time Kato was being attacked my mutts, there was something going on. Keeping in mind this is two days short of the longest day of the year, it was still light out after 9 p.m. I looked out of my front window and saw/heard cars blaring their horns as they drove down the road in front of my apartment building. It’s Independence Avenue, and it’s a long, straight road, and there were people lined up on either side. Now and then, they would start clapping.

To me, horns blaring and people clapping signals a Florida State win, but that’s not what was happening here. These are straight-up protests. That’s right, clapping is form of protest in Belarus. In 2011, the president decreed that you can only clap in public for war veterans, so people lining the streets and applauding is a peaceful but unlawful protest.

As we get close to the elections, law enforcement officials have busted out the riot gear and paddywagons and have started detaining people. This is not just happening in Minsk; there are reports coming out of other cities, too.

Thursday remains the biggest protest I’ve seen. It was livestreamed somewhere and apparently people who were watching it on TV came out to join the line, which stretched over two miles. I watched out the window until about 10 p.m. before going to bed, but I heard it went until 1 a.m.

The following evening, like on many Friday nights, I met my colleague for dinner, and we went to a place right downstairs from my apartment. (I have fantastic restaurant choices!) Even just from the outside seating at the restaurant, we could see people walking up and down the street and applauding. There weren’t as many cars honking, but there definitely were more than a few.

There are uniformed officers as well as plainclothes cops around, but I haven’t witnessed anything that seems too heavy-handed, though I’ve seen videos and heard about some.

It is likely that protests will continue leading up to the elections, and who knows what might happen after they are over. I’m not sure how elections are done here, like if there are more races than just the presidential race or what.

It is definitely an interesting time to be in Belarus.

Landlocked but waterlogged

It’s the time of year I’ve been waiting for since I arrived in Minsk in late October. The weather, when it’s not crappy, is brilliant and the sun rises before well 5 a.m. and sets well after 9:30 p.m. (Thank God for blackout curtains.) Long spring days are lovely in Europe. It’s green and beautiful.

There’s a river meandering through Minsk, and I walk up and down it most days. Today’s walk was about 10 kilometers; since it’s Sunday, I had nowhere to be and just listened to podcast after podcast as I walked down one segment, turned around, and then walked back the other direction.

An aside on podcasts: Wow, these are great. I’ve just finished two series from the Washington Post’s Lillian Cunningham, Constitution and the Presidents. I haven’t found anything else intelligent to listen to so I am killing time with a Margaritaville podcast and listened to an hour-long interview with Mr. Utley of the Coral Reefers today.

Through that podcast, I learned that Jimmy Buffett does a European tour and I looked up tour dates on the off-chance he was planning a show in Minsk. (Don’t laugh; Sting is coming in October, or at least is scheduled to come in October.) JB doesn’t have Minsk on the docket, but apparently does shows in Dublin, London and Paris. The ones for 2020 have been pushed back to 2021.

My thought on that was, “Hey, I’ll be in Minsk in September 2021. Why not go see JB?” And, because sometimes I money outweighs sense, I researched it and discovered that London’s original venue still had tickets available. (Since the shows were originally scheduled for 2020, they’ve already sold out and under no circumstances would I pay $400 to any third-party vendor for a single show.) I now have three tickets, plans for September 2021 and a hefty credit card bill.

Meanwhile, back in Minsk, I’m still walking daily, which is keeping me sane. I love water and Belarus is a landlocked country, so there’s no heading to the beach or anything like that for me. However, in my walks both along the river and through town, I have come to realize that, despite its landlocked status, there is a vast amount of water around.

Looking out my window one day, I realized that the little park that runs down my street has fountains. I didn’t know this before because during winter, they shut off the water. (Plus, I am not all that observant.) Now that it’s spring, all of a sudden, there are fountains everywhere. Things I thought were just art have water spraying out of them.

None of the water turns on until 10 a.m., though, which saves me to some degree. At one point in my walk, just past Gorky Park, there is a fountain that doubles as a splashpad. Right now, during the pandemic (52k cases and counting) there are throngs of kids playing every day around 6 p.m. The parents usually lie out on beach towels nearby, so when I hit that point in the walk on weekdays I circle as wide as I can, since my weekday walk happens after work. On weekends, I set out early and there’s no one around. Well, barely anyone. This morning I noticed two middle-aged men there, one watching the other play in the water. It was a bit odd because it wasn’t hot, but I’m tempted sometimes so I won’t throw stones.

Shingled out

One of the weird bonuses of working where I work is that I have access to vaccines that aren’t always automatically given to the rest of the world. No, this isn’t about COVID; when there is a vaccination for that I’ll be standing in line same as anyone, I would guess.  But not every American has had the rabies vaccination and most probably don’t take a typhoid preventative every five years and haven’t had the yellow fever vaccination.

And now that I’ve hit the age for the shingles vaccine, the doctor at work encouraged me to get it. As I’ve heard how bad shingles can be, it seemed like a good idea. It’s a nasty, nasty thing to get and no one in their right might would want any part of it.

The vaccine consists of two shots; I’ve no idea if they’re identical or what, but before the first one, which I got in March, I listened to a lecture of side effects, read about more and signed a piece of paper saying I understood like could get ugly after it. The embassy doctor advised me to do it on a Friday in case I had any ill effects.

Dose one, no issues. Yeah, I had a little soreness in my shoulder but none of the flu-like symptoms I’d been warned about, so last week I really wasn’t worried about getting the second one. I’d planned to do it on Friday, when I was in the office, but I wound up having to go in on Wednesday to do a particular work thing, so I went ahead and lined it up for then because I wasn’t sure if I’d have to go in Friday, too. (We have a health unit at the embassy; I didn’t go into a local medical facility to get it.)

A meeting ran a bit late and I rushed in to the health unit, which thrilled the doctor because he’s pretty much starved for human contact. There is virtually no one in the office all week, and he’s in a location where the few people who are on site don’t run into him, so I was probably the first human being he saw on the job. We chatted, I got the shot, he reminded me that I should take an ibuprofen or two just in case.

That went in one ear and out the other and I pretty much forgot I got the shot, which had been around 4:30 and, when my shoulder started hurting on the walk home an hour later, I didn’t connect that to the shot. My mind went to the fact my shoulder hurt like it did before I’d had shoulder surgery and I had wild thoughts about having three shoulder surgeries in four overseas tours.

At home, I tried to chillax but the pain increased. At some point – maybe when I saw the Garfield BandAid – I remembered the shot and the suggestion to take ibuprofen, so I gulped down two around maybe 6:30 p.m. By around 8 p.m., I was in agony. The left shoulder hurt just as it had post-op.

A couple hours later, I downed two of the knockout PM pills, assuming I would fall asleep and wake up fine, like what normally happens. Nope. The pain was excruciating and just as bad as Day One after surgery. No matter how I arranged the pillows, I could not get comfortable and woke up screaming “Oh God” so many times my neighbors must have thought I found a new man. I took two more painkillers at 4 a.m. but didn’t get any sleep at all. The pain was so bad I was nauseous.

The next day plan had been to meet someone for breakfast and then have the three of us (the person and her pup) come work at my apartment but I felt so miserable I called it off. Feeling hot, I took my temperature and it was over 100, but again, this is not a COVID story.

 Come to find out, I was the poster child for side effects. Here’s what the CDC said about the shingles drug:

Most people got a sore arm with mild or moderate pain after getting Shingrix, and some also had redness and swelling where they got the shot. Some people felt tired, had muscle pain, a headache, shivering, fever, stomach pain, or nausea. About 1 out of 6 people who got Shingrix experienced side effects that prevented them from doing regular activities.  Symptoms went away on their own in about 2 to 3 days. Side effects were more common in younger people.

It's one of the occasions when I would have loved to have been “most people,” but I’m rarely most people. I guess I got lucky because not only was I one of the six who experienced side effects, but I experienced the whole lot of them, all day long. Fortunately, I’m teleworking now, which, that day, meant crashing on the sofa between emails. It was awful.

Our doctor came and checked on me and offered me Benadryl and some other painkiller. Those, combined with a single melatonin, helped me get sleep that night buy boy howdy, that was not a lot of fun.

I went down to the river to pray

Belarus is still open for business, and everything else.  We’re at about 28k cases as I write this but jumping up by about 1k daily. Plus, we had a parade last weekend.

Not another soul in sight

Yep, you read that right. Victory Day parade, not that I was anywhere near it. And although it was sparsely attended compared to years past, there were still thousands of people watching as well as many elderly people in it. Just not smart.

As far as work goes, my office isn’t going to open back up for probably months. It’s rather dejecting. I am getting into the office here and there but mostly working from home, like anyone else. And right now, I have plenty to do; I’ve got a recurring project I’m doing for the third time and then there is Russian – I need every minute.

Already I feel Russian is hopeless. I am OK reading and understanding; it’s very slow but I know what the printed words mean once I figure them out. But I just cannot speak or understand. I had my first lesson with the teacher and it went about like I expected. He probably thinks I am nincompoop but I haven’t landed on how to learn. There’s got to be a way.  I don’t know how people do this. I just don’t have an aptitude for it, but there’s got to be something I can to that will help.

Copyright infringement?

Meanwhile, since there is absolutely no commute involved in working from home, I have what seems like a couple more hours a day and no purpose to go anywhere. And as bad as getting dark so early was, it being light out from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. makes you want to go outside.

Well, when the weather is decent. Oddly, it snowed last week. Not much, but enough to remind me why I don’t like winter. We keep having brilliantly sunny days at or near 60 and then it goes back to cloudy in the low 50s.

But I am trying to get outside anyway, even if it’s chilly. We’re not locked down, and Minsk is blessed with green spaces. The Svislac rives twists through the city, and along both sides in many places people can find paths, parks and trails. Minsk’s version of Gorky Park is a couple kilometers from me and encompasses a pretty big area. There’s an amusement park, ice rink, planetarium and probably lots of other things over a series of long blocks on one side of the river.

In the mornings, I’ve started walking through it now that the weather is OK, or mostly OK. This morning it was 46 and overcast with a little wind; not ideal but if I wait until the afternoon more people come out. One day last week, I went in the morning and in the afternoon and the afternoon had far more joggers, walkers, fishermen, pets on excursion and people on roller blades, bikes and scooters going by. There’s still enough space to feel safe, though, but I prefer the solitude in the morning.

Ferris wheel at Gorky Park

My path this week has taken me on the main road, just past the circus and over the bridge to the park, where I pop off the road and wander through to the end of the park, then I switch sides of the river and go by the opera house and continue to the area with the stadium, which is close to my house. It’s really a nice walk; water just sucks me in. I found a place with a really big rock under a willowy tree and it’s just lovely to sit and pray. Despite the wanna-be fishermen sitting around with poles, the river doesn’t seem to have fish, or at least I haven’t seen evidence of any. But there are ducks, pigeons and occasional geese to watch, so there’s a nice calming effect.

The loop I’ve done this week is about 5-6k, so it’s something in light of our gym being shut down. I need to motivate myself to run outside but it’s just not my thing. I love walking outside; running is a treadmill thing to me. But maybe when it gets warmer in the mornings.

If I make it into the office this week, I plan on walking back by way of the river, which would lengthen the commute from about 2k to probably 8k. I went in two days last week and intended to do that, but bad luck struck and one was the snow day and the other was also gloomy, plus our mail came and my bag was a bit heavy to lug that far.

Our mail comes to Lithuania instead of directly here and someone normally goes to get it. However, we can’t be doing that right now, so last week was our first load in over a month; we had to have a contractor bring it to us. It was so nice to be reunited with stuff we’d all ordered back in February or so. My voting information came for the primary. That’s how far behind we are.

And there’s no end in sight. We’re so far behind everyone has pretty much lapped us.

I *could* spell cat

Like everyone else, I’m working from home. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot I can do from home. The official case number in Belarus is rising steeply. Today, it’s about 16k and going up by about 1k daily. Those cases fall under “being treated” or something like that; there is also a figure of “recovered and discharged” and there’s no a lot of clarity of the honest total of diagnosed cases.

Anyway, point being, whatever number we have is now shooting up, so whereas a couple weeks ago it was fine to go into the office, now it’s riskier. As a result, I am stranded in my lovely apartment doing my best to not waste taxpayer money by doing absolutely nothing.

My days thus far have been filled with taking random online classes offered by our department learning institute. These are fun, interesting and sometimes enlightening, but not directly related to my job. I’ve been working here for over six years and have, this whole time, been taking classes that are related to my day-to-day duties, so I ran out of those long ago. I moved next to things that were interesting that, in a perfect world, I would do or at least benefited from learning about, like how to take more interesting pictures, how the consular section works and about some of the online programs I use.  

Those had value for me, but now I am sort of regulated to taking the most least interesting. Really, we’re taking about 2-10 hours classes with such titillating titles as “fundamentals of contractor-held property” and “centrally billed accounts training.” Some were no-brainers but relevant, like how to use an emergency radio (which I’ve been using for years now), but in all, I’ve been really scraping for the past week or two.

Fortunately, as part of the regular, non-COVID calendar, the summer class schedule included a “mentored” Russian class that’s 14 weeks long. I signed up for this while I has been going into the office daily, but now I am so glad I got accepted.  (I have no idea if they turn anyone down, but I had to fill in a justification of why I should be able to take it.) Technically, it starts on May 11 (Daddy’s birthday), but we got access to the course materials early.

The class is designed for people who have no knowledge or ability in Russian. I have very little ability, but after six months, I do have some knowledge, so the idea of going through the alphabet again is a bit disheartening. After checking out the materials, it appeared that I needed to go through every little screen to “get credit” for it, so I spent two hours on the first half of the alphabet (again). There are three screens with activities for every letter, and I made no shortcuts and did all of it.

The next day, I went back and discovered a different way to enter the course, which was through the mentor’s “homeroom” link. This time, I went in that way and it too me ALL THE WAY back to the beginning of the alphabet. Heavy sigh. I had to start over. I did, shortcutting (but still completing) the screens I’d gone through and then being thorough when I got to the last half. I ran out of daylight, shut it down and came back the next day.

Well, now, I cannot figure out how to maneuver to that “homeroom” link again. I went back in the browser history to try and then went through all the “practices” for the block letters but they didn’t register as completed in the “objectives” part of the course, so it looks like I haven’t even started. I’ve asked the mentor but it’s a very narrow question and I don’t guess I described it correctly because he sent me a different link (the one for the conference calls once we get going).

Dejected, I pushed forward anyway. The practices were incredibly hard for me; my language problem is not reading but speaking and spoken – I can’t pronounce and I can’t understand people talking. I can know someone is telling me, “I want two cups of black coffee with sugar please,” and understand the “I want” and “please” and possibly, maybe, the “coffee,” but the rest is just noise. Even playing the phrase in slow speed (thank you, Mango Languages) and staring at the words on the screen, I cannot tell what it is. Not good at all. One of the practices was to spell a word that was dictated. I had absolutely no idea what the first one was. The best I could guess was it had two syllables. I was right on that, but utter fail on the rest.

Speaking is not as bad but still brutal. I can sound out words very slowly, one syllable at a time, but I have trouble talking as fast as, say, the Mango Languages voice. I cannot tell you how many times I repeated “I like brown bread” last night and I still couldn’t match the speed.

Some letters complicate it for me, too. Especially vowels. There is a vowel that looks like an English “e” but it has two dots over it. That vowel hates me, as does one that looks like a backwards capital “N” with a squiggle over it. It’s a multi-talented vowel because every word it seems to represent a different sound.

And I need to know how to understand, more so than reading, I think. When I go into the doner place nearby and ask for “one schwarma” – which I can say – they come back with a follow-up question and I am lost. As I have yet to not walk away with a schwarma, it’s not like it’s life or death, but it’s really frustrating. This is so, so hard for me.

But I am plugging along, using several forms of learning. In the department’s class, I finished the block letters (though I still don’t think I’ve been credited for it – I have to find that darn link) and moved on to italics. And at this, I pretty much lost all hope.

As it turns out, Russian – a language that, one colleague told me, the more you study, the less you know --  in some cases,  has letters that look totally, totally different in italics than they do in block print. How do people learn this?

Up until now, I knew how to spell cat. It was C-A-T, and as the kindergarten song relayed, was basically the first word I could spell. (Hippopotamus was a lot harder.) And even now, I can understand that in Russian, there is no hard “c” and it’s represented with a “k.” I can grasp the concept that in other languages, words aren’t always direct cognates to English but are close. I’m OK with knowing that the English word “cat” is spelled “kot” in Russian. Not a problem there.

But oh my, these italics. The “v” sound, which is represented by “B” in Russian (I can grasp that mentally, too), somehow, in lower-case italics, looks sort of like an “e,” if the bottom stretch of the “e” made a loop like the top. I had trouble writing it in a pencil because I kept filling in the loops. That’s just weird. Why should something look vastly different in lower-case italics? The lower-case “g” looks like a very small, very awkward, backwards “2” or maybe “z.” The “d” sound in Russia is represented by a letter that looks kind of like pi, if pi had an additional line near the bottom, but the lower-cased italics letter looks a lot more like an English “d,” but it’s a bit lopsided. I can get used to those, even if it is confusing.

But man, the lower-case “OO” sound, which looks like a “Y” in regular block, turns to “u” in lower-case italics. Now that’s crazy. How did this come about, really? But the worst ones are “M”  and “T.” The lower-case italics “M” looks like a small upper-case “M”—points and all. And it’s important to remember that, even lower-case, it’s pointy because, for a reason I will never, ever understand, the lower-case italics “T” *also* looks like an “M” in lower case – with the rounded humps. It is totally crazy. No wonder Russians drink a lot of vodka.

It boggles my mind, and I have no idea how to grasp this. I could spell cat. It was really simple, a long time ago and for a very long time. Now, though, it’s spelled “k-o-t” as well as “k-a-m.”

I might never recover. Where is the vodka?