Машалла! Or, Mashallah!

Селям алейкум! 

I walked through the Park Gagarina to the University this morning. It took almost an hour, but the day anticipated spring and it's more fun to practice Tatar while you're strolling. Can't wait til the willows along the river bloom.

The walk was in some ways a tour of the extremes of Simferopol, and maybe Ukraine - crumbling old churches, expansive mansions, stray dogs in piles of garbage, gargantuan satellite dishes, awkward English expletives etched in graffiti - all come up along the river in the park. And then a jaunt through the mostly

 posh center of town, where my heart bleeds for the elderly baba beggars, the nouveau riche parade by in metal stilettos and ostentatious furs, and the street music seems always to include some kind of accordion.

The afternoon was spent with Milara-odzha declining nouns and trying to figure out that guttural "k" and "h" that I can't seem to reproduce. She likes to take me around the department, introduce me in lightning-speed Tatar to whoever as the New Yorker who came to learn Tatar, and then put me on the spot. Right now I am able to muster about 5 complete sentences when called to do so, to which everyone generously responds Машалла!  ("mashallah") which is like "molodyets" which is a word of congratulations in Russian/Ukrainian that is difficult to define exactly. At the end of our lesson, we sang a beautiful love song, talked about love, and she listened to the recording of herself singing and explaining the same song at our lesson the previous day. It felt like a real deep ethno moment. We're going to get it properly recorded soon.

Hashed over the primaries, drank an unsatisfying beer, and watched a strange game of pool unfold this evening when my host brother/bodyguard accompanied me to meet a Peace Corps volunteer who I found serendipitously on the all-knowing interweb. The pool game, which had elements of calvin-ball, was the first very surreal experience of that nature that I've had here on this trip. The dream ended when the last marshrutka left (close to 9 pm) and I finally relented and admitted that I was Polish to an inebriated guy who had been trying to get me to admit it for quite some time. Yes, ok, I'm Polish! See ya! 

Акъшам шерифинъиз хайырлы олсун! Which is the long way to say "Good night"!