More From Russia...August 26th

Hello everyone! (here's another long one for ya...) Hope you are all doing well! I'm so out of the loop when it comes to the things happening in the US, I won't even begin to ask questions about what we are missing. I can say this...we are beginning to miss the US as a whole. Things here are altogether different...smells; language; food; sights; cold shoulders...you name it! Speaking of language, we have traveled quite a bit and I have done a pretty good job of butchering many a language in that time. However, I've never experienced the complete lack of understanding as I have here in Russia. In most languages (and their respective countries they're spoken), if one happens to pronounce a word incorrectly, the "native" will look at you a little strangely, but then the light bulb will go off and the "oh! I know what you're trying to say!" will happen. Not so true in Russia. If you pronounce a word incorrectly here, you'll get nothin' but a blank stare! And I'm not talking like a big mispronunciation...I'm talking maybe the accent on the wrong syllable! Seriously - have you seen the cyrillic alphabet?! Crazy characters (I use that term loosely...), some having similar sounds, some completely out of my realm of even being able to say! I'm lucky to have learned "hello" and "good bye", which, still struggling with those! Not to mention, since I have butchered many a language, I will be in a situation where I need to say something simple like "thank you" and instead of it coming out in Russian, it might slip out in Turkish, etc! So weird - I try to be a good traveler and learn a few basic phrases in each country's native tongue, and now I'm telling Russians "all is good" in German! Oy! Oh well...whatcha gonna do? :)