Museum redux...

While the prop load team (described by Dwight M., our safety officer, as "the best prop team in the world") did its thing with copious quantities of monomethyl hydrazine, a number of French team members got on the bus that would drop a portion of them off at the Yuri Gagarin museum here at the cosmodrome, and then deliver the rest of the group to the market area in town.

I got off the bus with the museum attendees, as it would fall to me to interpret our guide's detailed explanations of the museum's exhibits. Into French, naturellement.

Anyone who has been reading my journal recently has probably noticed I have something of a confidence problem with regard to my oral French skills. Still, I tried to approach yesterday's assignment in a positive way. As we approached the museum, two thoughts crossed my mind: First, whatever the result, in 90 minutes this activity would be history; second, whatever the result, nobody could send me back to boot camp.

In the end, although there were some bumps along the way, I was gratified to see a steady stream of nodding heads as folks signaled their understanding of my French interpretation of the Russian museum spiel. Afterward, several of the group came up to me and said I had done a very good job, and thanked me for my work.

This caused a third idea to flash through my head: All things being equal, it won't be as bad as you imagine!

And it's not as if these concepts are anything new to me; it just took this assignment to make things come into focus like this.

After the museum visit, our group went into town, motivated to find some finely machined metal models of the Proton rocket. When we stopped by one recommended store, they did the have models in stock, for 2800 and 3600 rubles, respectively, for a medium and large sized model. (The ruble is trading at about 26 to the dollar, which makes these rather pricy souvenirs.)

Eventually, our group made its way to the market, where I picked up a hank of this marvelously smoky, salty string cheese that goes well with beer. The waitresses at the Palermo called this cheese "chechel" (чечел), but this word meant nothing to the lady behind a counter filled with an intriguing variety of foods at the market. What I finally bought from her was something called a "kosichka" (косичка, which translates as pigtail or braid, which fairly accurately describes the appearance of the product when you buy it), priced at about 420 rubles per kilo, though I bought only 200 grams worth. It's the ideal thing to share when people are sitting around a table drinking beer.

Afterward, I stopped by the Vostok open-air restaurant and had a cold draft beer. Despite the shade, it was still very hot (someone later told me that the official temperature had reached 43°C, or nearly 108°F). An old woman sat at the next table, mopping her brow in the dense heat, and subjected me to intense scrutiny. I smiled politely in her direction as I sipped my beer, but she betrayed no reaction.

My beer disappeared quickly, and I quit the Vostok to return to the bus a few minutes shy of our agreen 5:00 pm rendezvous, hoping the vehicle was available for boarding with the air conditioned running. It wasn't, but I spent a few pleasant minutes speaking with one of the Russian security people until the driver came back from doing his own shopping to unlock the bus.

We all got back to the hotel area around 6:30 pm, and I was truly tuckered out.

I'm covering the morning meeting in just a few minutes, so I will cut this short. More later, maybe.

Cheers...

A good start...

Besides being the punch line to a so-so lawyer joke, it's what I've got going on the pages I selected to translate in my free time. I started by digging into what I figured was the toughest part of the text, a section that details all of the endangered species in the area of operations that is the subject of the document.

A couple of years ago, I mentioned having to deal with an ancient assignment that involved a lot of animal names, but without their respective binomial Latin nomenclature (not that such nomenclature would've helped, as I had nothing suitable on my shelves and there were few resources on the Internet at the time, and I was still getting familiar with "gopher"). Today's Google session took some time, but resulted in my coming into possession of acceptable names for various animals, names that would never have occurred to me if I had to rely on the original Russian (there is a bird called a "старик" - literally, an "old man" or "graybeard" - which is actually an "ancient murrelet" if you look up its Latin monicker, Synthliboramphus antiquus).

It's a half hour until "dinner" (the prop party) and around 90 minutes until I interpret at the safety and security briefing. I bet this briefing will be short and to the point, no kidding. Still, I should probably go review the handout.

Cheers...