Despite what you must admit were a pretty solidly regular set of weekly blog entries, my ambitions were at last overcome by one cavity, two conferences, lots of buses and trains and marshrutkas and taxis, one beauty pageant, a camp staff meeting, a safety training, a Hare Krishna dinner and show, a football match, falafel, Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, and, yet again, the International Writing Olympics.
So, now, here I am, ready to catch you up!
April got off to quite a start on the 1st with a no-time-to-fool-around day in Kyiv. Most notably, I picked up some excellent Writing Olympics prizes from the US Embassy—which turned out to be quite heavy with excellence, in fact, but very, very appreciated. My favorite is a book called America 24/7, every page of which features photos from life in America during one specific week. On the same day, I took part in a conference at Kyiv Aviation University entitled "General and Specialist Translation: Theory, Methodology, Practice." There, I listened to—but didn’t necessarily understand all of—several presentations in Russian, Ukrainian, and English, and presented my own article and ideas—“English to English: American Reflections on Editing Translations in Ukraine.” I guess that title’s pretty self-explanatory. I felt like it wasn’t at all close to the theoretical level of many of the other topics under discussion, but was thanked for the practical suggestions I was able to offer. Next, I had a cavity filled without any anesthesia while my dentist and hygienist watched a football match on TV. If this sounds like some weird metaphor, it’s not. It all worked out fine, actually. I even managed to make a joke with them in Ukrainian, pointing out that without my glasses I could see the матч/ match [match], just not the м’яч/ myach [ball]. Pretty good, right?
Kate and Jay, super-coordinated Volyn superfans.
A few days later, after watching the second half of Catch Me If You Can in English club, a group of us went to a real live football match: Lutsk Volyn vs. Lviv Karpaty [ie, the Carpathians]. Although it was a lovely day without a cloud in the sky, Volyn ended the match without a point on the board. It’s only the beginning of the season, though, and 1- They can only get better, 2- I’ll probably go watch them play again no matter what, and 3- It’s not like I have any great suggestions about how to play soccer. Or football, either.
--- with plans to finish tomorrow... :)
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