Gramma? Who needs it...

Apparently I am only 91/116 competent in Russian.

Мой результат "Теста от ульяновского губернатора" 91 из 116 Пройти тест на грамотность

06:11

on a Saturday morning... I think I'm gonna go get some sleep...

The result....

Remember the little poll that I asked people to take a few weeks back? Well here are the results for it:



I guess it proves my point that mainly people think that we (ourselves) are better than others and pass judgements about other people's intellect. Am I surprised? Not really, but I suppose there is an idealist in me who likes to see things perhaps as they should be and not as they are.

Thomas Carlyle said - "Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!" But how can one tell whether another human being is wise or not? Need to ponder over this one I think...

Sweet Dreams

Did I mention that we (Jack and I) are going through some sort of Sween Dreams frenzy... I think it got triggered by our Riga trip where we watched 100 best songs of the 80s, and the only reason we actually didn't get through all 100 of them, is 'cos the TV died at about 3am. This is Marilyn Manson's version - very cool.



and of course it wouldn't be a fair post without the original...

The Witches Gathering - Berlin, Germany

Yep - Julia was here. Last weekend in fact. It was great to have her over, relax, chat and enjoy the nice weather... and of course a couple of drinks that came along for the fun of it.

Here's the breakdown of the household chores:

Friday:
Julia - get bottle of champagne; get on plane; get off plane; drink champagne;
Jack & Polina - get to airport; pick up guest; drink champagne;

Saturday:
Jack - cook breakfast; surf the internet; surf the internet; surf the internet; eat dinner; drink cocktails; dance at the Russo Disco; drag drunken women home;
Polina - eat breakfast; shop; eat ice-cream; relax at home; eat dinner; drink cocktails; dance at the Russo Disco; behave like a drunk silly maniac that she is; be dragged home by husband;
Julia - eat breakfast; shop; eat ice-cream; shop; eat dinner; drink cocktails; dance at the Russo Disco; behave like a drunk friend of a drunk silly maniac; be dragged home by the drunk silly maniac's husband;

Sunday:
All three - sleep; sleep; sleep; sleep; ... sleep; drag themselves to Gorki Park for brunch at 3pm; walk through Tiergarten; watch fireworks from balcony; smoke Shisha; sleep...

here are some snaps:




PS: On that last photo notice how the sun looks like it has six ends? Well - that's actually a shot taken over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe... think about it.

Russo Turisto?

Итак вдохновленная Юлиным примером я решила написать этот 'пост' на русском - посмотрим какая русо-писательница из меня получится...

Мдааа... как-то это странно, может потом переведу на английский... ну да ладно - эксперимент, значит эксперимент. И по крайней мере мне не надо волноваться о том, что скажет Бабушка о моих ошибках - она наш 'блог' не читает.

Опять же спасибо Юле, за эту ссылку - Наталья Радулова, вот уж кто, так она писать умеет! Как видите (если посмотрите на время появления этого 'поста') я не могу спать, и в этот неурочный субботний час я просмотрела весь её 'блог'... а почему я не могу спать спросите вы? Дело в том что я получила постоянную работу и вчера мы с начальником "завершили деловые переговоры" о моём контракте. Он начинается 1-ого Мая, что в принципе значит 2-ого... и до той поры я буду валять дурака и наслаждаться свободой. Работать я буду четыре дня в неделю - ураааа! Ну так вот - а к чему это я собственно? Ах да, после работы мы с Джеком пошли 'аут' и очень мило пообедав в тайском ресторанчике соблазнились на дешёвые коктейли какого-то барчика... после чего придя домой сразу уснули... проснувшись посреди ночи я с трудом разлепила глаза и сообразив что надо-бы вообще-то смыть тушь я пошла умываться. Но по видимому вода смыла не только тушь, но и моё всякое желание уснуть. Вот.

Что-то как-то скучно по русски получается - надо это дело раскрасить... вот - оказывается я не алкоголик, как возможно думали некоторые.

Мой результат "Теста Анонимных Алкоголиков" Polina! Вы алкоголик на 10% Вы отнюдь не трезвенник и можете опрокинуть рюмашку-другую в праздники. Пару раз могли попасть в нелепые ситуации из-за алкоголя (скажем, загремели в вытрезвитель), но не наверняка. В целом вы добропорядочный гражданин, таких как вы - большинство. Про вас можно сказать, что вы любите алкоголь - без всяких задних мыслей. Запросто можете разбираться в марках, выдержках и т. п. Продолжайте в том же духе. Только "не повышайте градус". Пройти тест Анонимных Алкоголиков

И вообще я хочу завести котёнка... вот каких мусек предлагают. Еээех! А жаль. Я скучаю по Муньке и Марвину... где вы там наши лапочки?

Копаясь бесцельно на интернете нашла вот такую страничку. И мой вопрос - ну что это такое??? Я бы хотела посмотреть на того, кто это читает. "Заколебал. Как навсегда отбить у партнера желание изменить?" или "Как найти мужа за 20 минут". Грустно всё это товарищи!

Вот напоследок - пища для размышления...
«Мы не знаем, как поступить с нашей коротенькой жизнью, но все-таки желаем жить вечно» ~А. Франс~

"The little things" of language

Even though the people at work speak very good English, the minor mistakes that they make amuse me. Thus one of the guys I work insists on saying 'magazine' (the same 'i' as in the word 'blind'), instead of 'magazine'. Or for example when talking about his driving and how he speeds along the Autobahn at 200km an hour and needs to change lanes... it's not lanes, it's trails. For example, "Germans are crazy when they change trails, and they are very eager to defend their own trail' :)

To be fair, I had a bit of a slip up the other day when a coworker asked me for a lighter. Naturally translating directly from English where we say "I don't smoke", I said "Ich rauche nicht"... which kind of means "I don't smoke" (in the context of "This car gave off a lot of smoke")... which is perfectly true, because I don't give off a lot of smoke, but the smirk on the guy's face suggested that there was something humorous in what I said. Ahhh language!

Huh???

This is what I said to myself this morning after getting out of bed and peeking out of the window. What disgusting, miserable weather! So in the end of March this bloody winter wakes up and decides to snow - late bloomer! But apparently it's meant to be sunny and 10-14 degrees by the time Julia gets here tomorrow night *fingers crossed*






In other news, a couple of weekends ago I managed to destroy our vacuum cleaner. The story goes like this - it is fairly old from what we know of it, and the cord which is meant to retract upon the pressing of the 'retract' button should retract. But the problem was that the cord grew a mind of its own and said that it's going to retract whenever and wherever it wants, meaning that you could only really vacuum around the power point. In my previous battles I managed to win by giving it a good tug and keeping it out... but on this one it refused to cooperate. So after giving it a couple of tugs and the cord not staying out, I naturally gave it a couple of harder tugs and then giving up decided that I might just use some masking tape to keep the cord out... but by the time I tried to turn the thing on - it died. This has also happened before but I managed to fix it by ... take a guess .... yep, tugging on the cord, except that this time it really did die, so no tugs or kicks (yes, I tried the good old Russian method too) brought it back to life. Thus I had to resort to taking a deserted floor brush into my hands and brushing the whole place. Jack took a look at it and after bringing a multimeter from work figured out that the cord was broken right in the end, so the next night he brought a soldering iron from work and soldered the whole thing back together. And now the cord stays out all the time and doesn't retract - YEY, and I don't have to brush any more!!!!

Aaaand... we also have a little new living thing in our place... and it's not a fetus. It's a cactus - that's actually blooming, so it's very pretty. Thanks to Neela and Nick who brought it for us the other night. Hopefully my death instinct will be weak and the plant will have a good long prospering life (unlike all of our other Berlin plants which have vanished into oblivion of death much too early in their existence)

Riga

So from Fri 2nd - Sun 4th of March we were in Riga, flying out early in the morning is definitely not one of my favourite things!


We got to Riga and found some of the winter we missed in Germany this year, the town being covered in a good remainder of snow and ice. After catching the bus in true ex-soviet style (yelling pushing, standing on each other) into town we wandered around to find something to eat. Mmmmm blin (pancakes).



All up we found Riga to be quite small (well we were only in the old town part) but very interesting. It was also quite günstig. We did a bit of sight seeing:


And managed to relax and have a few drinks.

What do YOU think?

I've gotten up early this Sunday morning (ie. 9:30am) to give Gleb a call on his birthday (my brother just turned 16 - gosh), and got dragged into reading an article on Expatica about whether the editor should publish offensive letters from readers, especially ones concerning the Holocaust. I even got all fired up and wrote her a reply, however I am very intersted in what all of my friends think about this... so made up a little poll - if you have some time, I would really appreciate it if you could answer :)

Snafu

...that's my newly discovered word! Look it up...

Jack is at work migrating CVS, and I am listening to Morcheeba and catching up on a pile of emails and blogs. I wanted to go and discover the joy of wireless Internet at a cafe nearby. . . So after getting a cup of hot chocolate at Einstein Cafe and organising myself at a bar stool facing Gendarmenmarkt I was all ready for some relaxing time... except that the Internet was not free, and I didn't want to fork out 10 Euros for it... and since I didn't want to give up and go home, I fired up Eclipse to work on my portfolio website, but the coffee world was against me as a guy pulled up next to me and started chain smoking cigars. I had to get some fresh air, and after going for a bit of a walk ended up at home all comfy on the couch.

Last weekend we were in Riga, but I'll let Jack write about that. I'll only post something that we found in one of the local publications for English-speakers. A happiness indicator - apparently in Russia only 2% of people are happy, as opposed to Iceland with a staggering 94% happies. And Moldova is sitting at -12%, which I suppose means that they're 12% unhappy, right?

We've been pretty slack at going to the gym for the last couple of weeks, considering that I had some weird cold that lasted for about 3 weeks, gurr. But this week we've been twice, and one morning after the gym I was reading The Age and discovered this article. In Holland they've opened a 'naked' gym, where on Sundays people can come and work out naked. Now, the nudist beaches of Wansee are disturbing, but seeing an old naked guy/gal running on a treadmill is definitely not my thing...

This Thursday there was a "do" after work for our unit, which was advertised to everyone as a 'cozy relaxing evening to spend together'. And thus after a 20 minute ride on the U-Bahn after work about 25 of us squeezed ourselves into a space equivalent of our lounge room, at a French restaurant called 'La Raclette'. I think the amount of space must have has something to do with the managerial requirement for having a "cozy" evening. Food and drinks was paid for, and it was indeed a very nice relaxing night. The menu consisted of onion soup, green salad, and of course raclette. I've tried to find a picture of the oven that they had during the night, and this is a bad picture of something similar. It basically involved a huge triangular hack of cheese suspended between two heating rods with the melted cheese dripping into two plates below. Actually while looking for a good image I came across a Raclette Australia, which I didn't know existed... so I think we'll have to organise one from these guys once we're back in the country.

The rest of the night involved desert and too much free grog. The music entertainment for the night involved a chap by the name of Las Vegas. He sang a few covers followed by quite a number of his own songs, which from the limited amount I could understand, were very good. He has a local blues band by the name of The Soul of Elvis... yesss. Conversation topics with various co-workers for the night included, but not limited to: how long have people been at Aperto, marriage and why people do it, movies about WWII and why there isn't much more new stuff film makers can say because it's all been said before, Holocaust and why young Germans still feel guilty, university IT degree and it's (ir)relevance to working in IT, the Marilyn Manson cover of 'Sweet Dreams' by Eurythmics, why we think Berlin is cool, why doesn't the DJ have anything by The Doors or Cake, why do all guys at work are so skinny and have no arse, why age does(n't) matter, why we should now drink vodka shots to world peace... I ended up getting home closer to 4am in the morning, and after having 3.5 hrs of sleep had to get up at 7:30am. After taking two panadols and donning on my sunnies I crawled to work. I think I must have been yawning and fidgeting on the chair too much during a weekly technical meeting that one of our managers came up to me afterwards and said that us - frontenders, don't really have to attend this meeting, as it is very boring for us. I didn't disagree and spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake and not throw up. Conclusion: it was the best work 'do' I've ever had.

To finish off this post here are two pictures of the cheesecake that Jack and I made this week. Which, unlike every other baked good that our oven produced, has turned out great and almost nothing of it is left. And still on the kitchen topic, here are the two espresso cups I bought yesterday... even though I normally stop myself from buying things for the house, as it would be hard to get them back to the land Down Under, for these ones I just couldn't resist (they're ceramic). I believe this is called having nesting instincts :)