Funfare for the Common Man

This is post 8 (of 10) for my August 2020 Challenge. We’re going back to the Reader Mailbag to answer one of my reader’s questions. It’s actually one of those questions I get asked a lot by students and is very tricky to truthfully answer in 30 seconds or less. This happens a lot in the classroom – questions requiring intricate answers, for seemingly simple questions. ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What do you do in your free time?’ are much easier. But ‘do you speak Ukrainian or Russian?’ can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes and tangents. When I answer that my language skills are pretty poor and that I can merely ‘get by’, I often get puzzled looks that appear to say ‘What? Seriously? After 6, 7, 8, 9 and now 10 (!) years living in Ukraine, you can only ‘get by’?’ Actually, it’s worse: I’ve lived here nearly 11 years. With the 10-year anniversary of me deciding to come to Kyiv upon us (I arrived here at the end of August 2010), what a great time to revisit my horrid language skills and...

Though I don’t think it was intentional. I hope. It’s amazing, the number of words that exist in other languages that are untranslatable into English. German is especially rife with epic words that don’t seem to have a direct equivalent into English. Take Vergangenheitsbewältigung , for example: ‘coming to terms with one’s past.’ Less dramatic in size, but perhaps heftier and more foreboding in scope is Waldsterben : ‘forest-death’ (though I think it actually means the death of forests themselves, not people in forests). Either way, I very nearly succumbed to some form of Waldsterben on my recent trip into the Carpathian wilderness. 1. This is my final post about this trip. 2. This is post 7 (out of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. 3. In my last, post-modernish post, there were no bears or boars threatening to eat us. 4. I really don’t think my wife wanted to kill me, truly, honestly, I promise. This was our 4th trip out west. All four trips have featured some sort of adventure/misadv...

A study in contrasts: urban v rural Or, city v nature, Part 1 And Part 6 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. August 2020, the Carpathians:  It was the ‘wild’ I was looking for, and it was the ‘wild’ we got as we ventured west to the Carpathians, that magical land where ‘time stands still’ to quote myself from a post from May 2013 and though the place we stayed is fairly touristy by Ukrainian standards – Yaremche – it still had a few areas off the beaten path or track that offered thrills and adventures and it actually was a bit unintended this adventure because really what we wanted was a standard trail and my map seemed a bit dated and unreliable but we thought the trails on there could be found but we weren’t able to so we just traipsed our way up through and over a massive hill not quite a mountain but a steep oh-so-steep hill and by the end of this trip – as you shall see but I won’t actually share a photo – my legs were scraped, bleeding, scratched, bitten bitten bitten – the...

Part 1: Embracing the wilderness  (And part 4 (of 10) of my August 2020 challenge) Out in the wild, cut off from the world: a treat. When you read Trip Advisor or Booking.com reviews, you probably notice lots of people complaining about bad wi-fi in their hotels.  The place we stayed in the Carpathians, in Western Ukraine, didn’t even have wi-fi. I didn’t know that before I booked it. I didn’t even check, nor did I care. When we got there and I found out, I shrugged and said ‘good!’ Less temptation. I can say goodbye to the world for 8 days of peace and solitude. No social media. No keeping in touch with people. No news. No sport. Just fresh air, hiking, relaxing, reading, eating, drinking… [Here’s the part where more socially-connected, millennial readers will say, ‘who needs wi-fi when you have a smart phone with 3, 4 or 5G?’ And I will respond ‘but I don’t have a smartphone!’ And then they will come back at me with ‘yeah, but doesn’t your wife have one?’ and I will retort w...

This is a direct nod to Barry Ritholz, one of my everyday go-tos for his Daily/Weekend Reads ( The Big Picture ). Though they are mainly and ostensibly about business and finance, there are very often some fascinating links to a wide range of articles about much else besides. I’m still ‘in between’ ideas for posts – I’ve got 3-4 bubbling away on the backburner – so for now, I thought I would share a few of my own random observations. Except that I have to be really pedantic and pernickety to start off with – these are anything but ‘random’. Arbitrary, perhaps, but more like inchoate. Or half-baked. But I’ve put at least some thought into them, and they are things that have been floating about in my head for the past week or two (or three or…) Here’s his full list: Ritholz’s Random Lockdown Observations I’ll quote just two of my favourites, one to get the ball rolling. ‘There are two kinds of people during this lockdown: Those who are having a bit of fun with it, and those with kids. No...