December update

Not too much time for writing - hectic translation orders are dropping one by one, had to prepare and deliver a lecture on cinema (went pear shaped and flew over the heads of the listeners with all that semiotix and art theories), still have to prepare and deliver a lecture on interpreting (having wised up I guess I gotta make it simple and anecdotal) - and last week we had a sort of a competition at our university where I was one of the judges. It was a sort of a language 'KBH' (excuse my Russian) or some language juggling where teams had to dub movies and play with words and some such. One task impressed me because they had to (as per the description) in turn produce sentences made of words 'whose initial letter follows the order of the alphabet'. Pretty nifty, thought my colleague Ken and I, and right before the beginning of the show concocted a sentence where all the words started with the letters of the alphabet in order. Happened to be not so easy but fun.

A boy caught dogs eating fried (germs) goat however in joking killed lots more new or prosperous quintessential rodents sitting together under very warm xenophobic yawning zebras.

At the end it turned out that the teams had to make sentences with the FIRST word of the consecutive sentence starting with the next letter of the alphabet. But it was fun having a go at it. I guess some pastime.
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What surprised me with its seemingly shallow purpose was the task of watching a part of a movie and then dubbing it with EXACTLY the same words. No kinky perversions or changes of meaning. But later it dawned upon me that it is actually a very cool way to practice and learn a language, repeating all those intonation patterns and all. Kinda boring on the audience but pretty exciting for the teams. And what is the university life if not loads of unreigned fuuun?!))
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Another nice thing here is that by Christmas time waitresses in restaurants and shop assistants wear those (fake) fur-padded red vests and red a-la S.Claus hats with these little white pompons at the top. Looks cheerful. With all the palms and sunshine.
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But I am freezing my @$$ off in the unheated apartment. Doh! Subtropics my ... that thing. The cracks in the doors and balcony are so huge the draft is coming over to visit all the time with the howling sound that used to scare me at the beginning but now is just a background noise (to make an acoustic comparison, pretty much like the toilet flushing upstairs or downstairs here - a fact of life, not a reason for bitching, eh?)) A comfort is that my flushing is as loud for them as theirs for me. Or for that reason, if you will, the cheerful chirping of birds is better audible too. Going back to the little eddy breezes that dance around my apartment - on a positive note they are bringing some fresh air into my otherwise stuffy world. Constantly. Some healthy circulation.