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Articles Tagged ‘language’

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Faceplant (the post all-nighter bit)

Monday, May 18th, 2009

As if street urchins looking to lift our electronics weren’t enough next up was a seriously unhinged Syrian who of course was going to be joining us for the ride down to Kazan.  Just what you want at five in the morning is a babbling, red leather motorcycle jacket wearing, dreadlocked, lunatic grin sporting, babbler who within five minutes of moving from trying to attract attention from the other side of the room to plopping down next to doc (how does he attract such attention) had whipped out a bunch of family photos and trying to tell us something about them which was incomprehensible due to not being able to speak English or sentences in general.  My main query about this situation was how on earth did this guy end up in the middle of Russia with no clue or luggage? [read on]

Church overload in the Golden Ring.

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Today we leave Moscow for the Golden Ring towns.  Even though many of the stops along the way are going to be major cities it still feels as though this is the end of the easy part.  The further east we push the less chance that anyone other than my two travel partners will speak English, building language skills with a few words of the day does not really begin to encompass the myriad of situations necessary to function on a daily basis.  There are a number of planned stops that have only been open to outsiders for fifteen years and while sure to be interesting that fact alone is quite intimidating.  Similar to Helsinki the feeling was one of going from the known and manageable into the unknown maybe heightened because the past two weeks had been such a fulfilling time. [read on]