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Miscellaneous...
Jun. 8th, 2003 11:07 amI am the on-call person today.
I spent a little while downstairs in the TV room while the maid tidied up the room. I split my time between French language news and a Russian program aimed at, I suppose, kids. The format of the latter struck me as interesting.
The theme appeared to be maritime, with the host dressed in the manner of the 18th century. There were two teams of contestants, yellow and green, both comprised exclusively of boys. The apparent point of the game consisted in allowing the teams to take turns "shooting" a cannon (electronically) at a grid that would be familiar to anyone who had ever played "Battleship" using a pencil and a piece of graph paper.
Unlike "Battleship," the positions of the "enemy" ships were known, with each enemy team member represented as a ship on the grid. If a ship was hit, the emcee asked the side that was hit a multiple-choice question (of considerable difficulty... I am generally very good at such questions and only got one or two out of about a dozen). I forget exactly what a correct answer does for you, but I believe it seizes the initiative from the other side, and allows your side to take its turn; a wrong answer by the team that was hit allows the hitting team to take another shot.
What particularly struck me was the very adult, businesslike manner in which the host treated the kids. (I mean, there was no mistaking the adult-adolescent interfacing, but it wasn't condescending.) When he told jokes, they did not seem clownish, and when team members were eliminated (after all the squares of the team member's ship have been hit) he treated them respectfully. At the close of the program, he managed to say something positive to both the winners and the losers, although his comment to the losers was... curious ("To your credit, you answered almost all the questions correctly; where you fell short was in marksmanship. Don't feel bad, smart people can always hire people to shoot for them.")
* * * It is only to be expected that food prepared at this elevation (within 100 m of sea level) will be (and seems to stay) hotter than food prepared back home (up at 2200 meters). Today, I found out that Vitaliy, the morning cook, additionally cheats and puts the omlettes he cooks to order into the microwave for a bit to make sure the cheese is well and truly melted. The food he serves is piping hot!
It turns out I had to go to Kazakhstan to try frogs' legs! Some appeared in a serving dish the other night and I had a couple. I must say I didn't care much for the breading on them, but I had no problem at all consuming the meat (what little of it there was). Frogs' legs do, as it is said, taste like chicken.
* * * The weather has been unpleasantly cold and windy for the past few days, with a strong southerly wind blowing almost all of the time, often hard enough to pick up dust and sand. Interestingly enough, the wind died down and conditions cleared during a time slot of several hours duration, creating fairly good conditions for the actual Proton launch.
* * * I feel I have gotten more exercise in the past 10 days than I usually do, or maybe it's just the fact that I've done things I haven't done in years. Last night, I ended up playing a couple of hours of ping-pong in various games, ending up in a doubles match pitting me and one of the French engineers against Olga F. and Veronique C. I forget who won, but it was a close match in any event.
Yesterday's work place at the Polyet hotel is not too far from the Fili, but by the time I finished lunch yesterday, I decided it would be a good idea to bike over to the Polyet. As I approached my destination, my radio announced an incoming call and when I engaged the brake on the bicycle, I almost (but not quite) went head-over-handlebars on the thing. I remember Natalie doing one of those numbers back when we lived in Jackonville, and am thankful I was not going any faster than I was. Coming back to the Fili was murder, as the wind that made going from the Fili so easy was still blowing, but in my face this time.
* * * I could not believe my eyes the other day, but I saw (or thought I saw) a seagull from the window of the bus taking me to work. The thought crossed my mind yesterday, during a lull in the proceedings, to ask one of the local folks about that. I mean, finding a seagull here in Baikonur is akin to finding one in, say, Las Vegas. It's too far away from any major body of water for the poor thing to have simply gotten confused or lost.
Well, I was told that these gulls are the descendants of gulls that used to inhabit the Aral Sea, which today is quite some distance away from here, but was much closer around 80 years ago. In fact, I was told even the Syr Darya river is today but a shadow of what it used to be before a combination of industrialization and collectivist foresight (read: ego) transformed a lush area into a near-desert. Another listener noted that early visitors to the area had observed tigers prowling through the vegetation that lined the river, back in pre-Revolutionary times.
So yes, Virginia, there are seagulls in Baikonur. Moreover, they're the ones that have adapted to a non-marine diet.
* * * There is a bus leaving for town in just a few minutes. Afterward, I am told the bus will take a swing past the Progress launch, which is scheduled for about 4 pm this afternoon. As the on-call person, I'm pretty much confined to the area of the Fili and local buildings, otherwise I would have loved to go. Maybe I'll get to go next time, if an opportunity affords itself.
More later, maybe. According to the interpreter work schedule, I'm on the hook (along with Olga F.) to do the farewell banquet tonight (a celebration for everyone except the interpreters who arrived 10 days ago). In theory, everyone will pretty much be out of here by the 10th (some people, including Olga and Galina, will be leaving via an Antonov transport plane whose final destination is Nice, after a stop in Ulianovsk; the rest - myself included - will fly back to Moscow aboard a commercial Kazakh flight), so I better take advantage of the lack of people around the Fili and get some laundry done.
Cheers...
I spent a little while downstairs in the TV room while the maid tidied up the room. I split my time between French language news and a Russian program aimed at, I suppose, kids. The format of the latter struck me as interesting.
The theme appeared to be maritime, with the host dressed in the manner of the 18th century. There were two teams of contestants, yellow and green, both comprised exclusively of boys. The apparent point of the game consisted in allowing the teams to take turns "shooting" a cannon (electronically) at a grid that would be familiar to anyone who had ever played "Battleship" using a pencil and a piece of graph paper.
Unlike "Battleship," the positions of the "enemy" ships were known, with each enemy team member represented as a ship on the grid. If a ship was hit, the emcee asked the side that was hit a multiple-choice question (of considerable difficulty... I am generally very good at such questions and only got one or two out of about a dozen). I forget exactly what a correct answer does for you, but I believe it seizes the initiative from the other side, and allows your side to take its turn; a wrong answer by the team that was hit allows the hitting team to take another shot.
What particularly struck me was the very adult, businesslike manner in which the host treated the kids. (I mean, there was no mistaking the adult-adolescent interfacing, but it wasn't condescending.) When he told jokes, they did not seem clownish, and when team members were eliminated (after all the squares of the team member's ship have been hit) he treated them respectfully. At the close of the program, he managed to say something positive to both the winners and the losers, although his comment to the losers was... curious ("To your credit, you answered almost all the questions correctly; where you fell short was in marksmanship. Don't feel bad, smart people can always hire people to shoot for them.")
It turns out I had to go to Kazakhstan to try frogs' legs! Some appeared in a serving dish the other night and I had a couple. I must say I didn't care much for the breading on them, but I had no problem at all consuming the meat (what little of it there was). Frogs' legs do, as it is said, taste like chicken.
Yesterday's work place at the Polyet hotel is not too far from the Fili, but by the time I finished lunch yesterday, I decided it would be a good idea to bike over to the Polyet. As I approached my destination, my radio announced an incoming call and when I engaged the brake on the bicycle, I almost (but not quite) went head-over-handlebars on the thing. I remember Natalie doing one of those numbers back when we lived in Jackonville, and am thankful I was not going any faster than I was. Coming back to the Fili was murder, as the wind that made going from the Fili so easy was still blowing, but in my face this time.
Well, I was told that these gulls are the descendants of gulls that used to inhabit the Aral Sea, which today is quite some distance away from here, but was much closer around 80 years ago. In fact, I was told even the Syr Darya river is today but a shadow of what it used to be before a combination of industrialization and collectivist foresight (read: ego) transformed a lush area into a near-desert. Another listener noted that early visitors to the area had observed tigers prowling through the vegetation that lined the river, back in pre-Revolutionary times.
So yes, Virginia, there are seagulls in Baikonur. Moreover, they're the ones that have adapted to a non-marine diet.
More later, maybe. According to the interpreter work schedule, I'm on the hook (along with Olga F.) to do the farewell banquet tonight (a celebration for everyone except the interpreters who arrived 10 days ago). In theory, everyone will pretty much be out of here by the 10th (some people, including Olga and Galina, will be leaving via an Antonov transport plane whose final destination is Nice, after a stop in Ulianovsk; the rest - myself included - will fly back to Moscow aboard a commercial Kazakh flight), so I better take advantage of the lack of people around the Fili and get some laundry done.
Cheers...
