Before anything, Happy Thanksgiving to my family, my friends, and everyone else in the United States. You are with me everyday in spirit and Thanksgiving Day is no exception. This is the first Thanksgiving I've spent away from my family, much less the entire country. I've been sure to spread the love of my favorite US holiday to my students and coworkers. It kills me to miss everything, but I will celebrate wholeheartedly here with my Dnipropetrovs'k family. Stay tuned for documentation of the festivities.
Fun fact, if you have a friend who speaks Russian, ask him/her to translate the word for "Native American woman". Then watch the smile creep up on his/her face. There are two possibilities: (1) there exists no Russian word for "Native American woman" and (2) the word is the same word for "turkey". No one here knows (envision me shrugging my shoulders).
This will be a photo post, arguably the best kind. Please enjoy the pictures and the occasional witty caption.
Some notes before beginning,
(1) I promise to get to the aforementioned topics in last post's "next time" section.
(2) I've noticed that I have used a consistently clumsy spelling of my city's name. To begin an explanation with a simpler example, Kyiv is the English transcription of the Ukrainian and Kiev is the English transcription of the Russian. Naturally I try to show my Ukrainian pride by sticking with the Ukrainian variant. I encourage you to do the same. My spelling of Dnipropetrovsk is actually a careless hybrid of of the Ukrainian and Russian transcriptions. Ukrainian: Dnipropetrovs'k / Russian: Dnepropetrovsk. Therefore I will henceforth use Dnipropetrovs'k. In my defense, my neglectfulness could very well be from my environment. As I have stated before, my academic background is in Russian language and I have minor verbal knowledge of Ukrainian from my mother's side of the family. In Ukraine, all official documents, street signs, grocery store signs, and largely anything written, are in Ukrainian since it is the sole national language. Ukrainian is the main language of verbal communication in western Ukraine. Central Ukraine flip flops between Russian and Ukrainian. Eastern Ukraine (like where I am, although I believe I'm technically central Ukraine), is dominantly verbally Russian. Naturally this makes it complex for me to practice reading Russian. Ukrainian is almost identical to Russian at times, but is equally almost identical to Polish at other times (in pronunciation only since Polish uses the Latin alphabet while Ukrainian and Russian use the Cyrillic alphabet). Ukrainian can also be entirely independent from Russian and Polish. So in the most complicated way possible, I justify my spelling mistake. Futurama and Sir Patrick Stewart adequately convey my daily linguistic struggles. (Transcriptions do not adhere to standard rules, and are for ease of pronunciation to the American reading eye only)
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"Potato"
Russian: Kartoshka (Картошка)
Ukrainian: Kartoplya (Картопля) |
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"Pumpkin"
Russian: Teekva (Тыква)
Ukrainian: Harbooz (Гарбуз) |
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| The Dnipro on a fall morning |
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| Le Petit Prince in Dnipropetrovsk (note the rose) |
Few joys can compare to those of running through a park in the late fall with the full intention of getting lost and not caring whatsoever.
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Geology Alert (deplorable use of my bag for scale):
It was a gneiss rock, don't take it for granite. |
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| The conclusion of the getting-lost-run; I trusted that the tracks would take me back to the general vicinity of the city |
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Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk vs.
The Black Sea (Loose translation; club team from Odessa) |
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Former site of yet another Lenin statue that came tumbling down months ago
Note the fresh blacktop by where the people are walking |
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Slavic Winnie the Pooh
Shout out to my Russian Linguistics class |
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Canadian Pride Classroom
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International Exhibition of Cats
I regret not standing next to it for scale; the banner was no less than 15 feet in height |
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| Exotic Lay's Flavors: (L-R) White Mushrooms with Sour Cream, Bacon, Crab |
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| The mid-fall Dnipro |
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| Abandoned hotel plus trident national emblem, at dusk from the embankment |
The pictures are lovely. In regards to Russian and ukrainisn, I took one semester in college and it was easy at the tome. However, I found it became more challenging.
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