A break from preparation...

Yesterday, before leaving the полтинник for the day, I printed several French-language articles on Baikonur and the Gagarin flight, with the intention of reviewing them in preparation for today's gig. I didn't get past the first few pages last night, but I sort of expected that.

As for the Bastille Day party, it was held out in front of the hotel and was well-attended. Somehow, after the French kicked things off with a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise, during which, I must confess, the drown-out-the-Germans scene from Casablanca played itself in my head - Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! - the idea somehow got started of having songs sung by the other nationalities represented at last night's do.

I managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and thus was press-ganged into a quartet that belted out New York, New York on behalf of the American contingent, which I suspect made a number of people present question the wisdom of continuing the meme, but the inertia of the idea was unstoppable.

Since the end of the daily coordination meeting, I've been boning up on terms I'm pretty sure I will need during the museum visit. I'll be taking off in half an hour for lunch, so I guess I should get back to work.

Cheers...

Fast forward, fast!

I'm not quite sure why one would want to schedule a visit to a museum and then set things up so that there's only an hour in which to see all of the exhibits and then go visit the engineering mockup of the Buran that had apparently been moved from the field near the Energia facility to the immediate proximity of the museum, but that's what happened.

It now costs 600 rubles, or about $28, to visit the museum and the Buran, with another $8 charged if you want to take pictures. I did the interpretation, into French, in my usual inimitable style that involved the occasional lapse into English. Nobody threw anything at me, which I consider a good sign.

As we boarded the bus to leave, I paused for a photo next to a scale model of the Soyuz launch vehicle, which has pretty much has been the workhorse at Baikonur over the years, with a design that has been upgraded, but which would be instantly recognizable as a Semyorka^[1] by the engineers who first designed it:


Next time, I will remember to turn on the recorder I had intended to use to capture all of the trivia that is released into the wild during such excursions, the better to prepare one's vocabulary with. As it is, I need to sit down and seriously review some of the words that didn't come easily during the visit.

In other news, my internal clock saved me from embarrassment today, because after I carefully set the electric clock in my room to wake me after a 40 minute after-lunch nap, I forgot to actually place the alarm button in the "on" position. Although I've been getting up on my own (perhaps with some aid from the sun) at between 6 am and 7 am since my arrival, I will set the alarm to wake me tomorrow morning, just to see if the thing actually works.

Apropos of sun, one of the escorts told me today that the temperature out in the sun last Saturday had reached 56°C, which is somewhere north of 130°F. I'm not sure I entirely believe this, but I do believe it's been around 32°C lately, which feels like a comparative cold wave.

Cheers...

[1] Transliteration of "семерка" ("seven") which is used informally to refer to the Soyuz launch vehicle, whose official designation was "rocket R7" back when it was designed to be an ICBM.