Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I continue adding to my nomenclature files, and I still discover new groups which I have overlooked during my first and second 'campaigns'. Like for instance yesterday a group called Lepticida, which apparently should be placed as something like a sistergroup to the Afrotheria, which according to modern taxonomists comprises not only elephants and seacows and hyraces, but also aardwarks and tenrecs (Madagascar's parallel to hedgehogs) which in my youth were included in a group called Edentata (literally "toothless"), together with anteaters, sloths and armadillos. But when the extant animals were analysed genetically the learned guys discovered that they had made a monumental blunder, and the group was cut into two - and one of these was apparently closer related to mammoths rather than to armadillos.

Today I intend to run through the hoofed animals, which nowadays include the whales (!) (apparently the nearest relatives of the hippos), but I hope also to find time to study some bilingual texts. As I have written some time ago, I have found out that old used bilingual printouts are an excellent source of goodnight reading stuff because I don't need dictionaries to use them, and yesterday evening I grabbed some of the sheets I keep near my bed and discovered that these were new and unused and in Czech - so I decided to study them intensively first before I use them as extensive relaxation tools. I read some Assimil Indonesian stuff instead.

Yesterday I would have studied too, but ended up watching Youtube videos - but at least either with speech or subtitles in something not-English. It's not because I have anything against English as such, but if you fall for the temptation to watch anything in English on Youtube the system will gobble you up and dump you into a vortex of silly Anglophone videos, and noone will ever see you again.

Platt: Düsse Vöörmiddag höff ik tofällig een program "De Noorden op Platt" op NDR funnen. Die Feernseehlüü höffen wies, wie een traditionele Koekenbacker Bruunkoeken bakt, und een Kinnerkoor hett Wiehnachtlieder sungen, un een ambuleerende Theaterensemble hett wat över de grote Wiehnachtfloot vun 1717 daehn in een Kerk. De Lüü höffen aver ook eene modige Dame portraitteert, die Nedderdüütsch als Vollerwassene hett versöökt met de Hölp vun een App to lehren. Aver sien Interview op de straat heet sie sik apenbor nich traut op Platt to maken (siehe nerrn). Daarom de Unnertitels!

DeNoordenOpPlatt.jpg

[tiia]

With all those museum visits, I thought it may be interesting to know, that about 370 museums in Finland can be visited using a museokortti (price next year 79€, valid for one year after the first visit). So if you make it to Finland, this could be something for you.
Does Denmark have something similar?

[tarvos]

Knowing Iversen he probably has that already, the Danish version that is.

In Netherlands we have the museumjaarkaart. My wife has the museokortti.

[Iversen]

Let me first say that Finland and the three Baltic states are high on my list over places I would like to visit in 2025 - even though I probably won't have learnt their languages before I arrive. In 2024 I have focussed on Denmark, and in my html based travel system I can see that I have spent something like two months on trips that included one or more hotel nights plus more than a month on one day excursions - so now it's about time that I venture outside this small country again. By the way, I have just seen that the gathering in March 2025 will take place in Brno, not Praha. OK, they have got a number of good museums there, but last time I visited the town was in 2019, where the gathering censorship committee refused my proposal for a lecture in Portuguese about the asymmetry in translation exercises - and then I visited zoos and museums in Bratislava and Eastern Czechia instead.

Museum cards - well, I have not seen anything like a museum card that covers the whole of Denmark for a whole year (but I bought the Dutch one during my last visit there before corona). There is something called Copenhagen card (which includes transportation), but it's too expensive, Instead I have bought annual passes to particular museums and zoos, and since many museums are organized as conglomerates with one central administration and several branches that means that I have at least covered something like thirty locations. And thanks to mutual agreements I can get in for maybe half price to maybe thirty more. And those that aren't included probably need the money.

As for the drawings: I always send a copy by e-mail to each museum (or group), and sometimes I don't get any answer, but most of them at least have the decency to say thanks. And some circulate my works among the staff, a couple of times I have even been told that they have put them on a notice wall in their staff areas, a fair number have put them on their Facebook pages, a few have given me free access and I have at least one art museum that is seriously contemplating using their drawing to entertain their young visitors: they will print the drawing with some marks on it that refer to a section with a list of initials, and then the idea is that the kids should find the artworks I have depicted and write the full name of the artists. I'll not write the name of the museum yet, but if they do make this you'll be informed.

In the meantime .... OK, I should have written about language activities, but this message is already becoming too long, so you'll get an update later. In the meantime I'll show you my two drawings from the Neue Pinakothek i München, where I made one drawing in their creativity room in 2023 - and then I discovered about a month ago that they have a 'Mediathek' of sorts on their homepage with more than enough motives for one drawing more. OK, I made also drawings in half a dozen museums in Praha here i 2024, but since I couldn't sent them mails in Czech they haven't been informed. And next time it will apparently be Brno, not Praha. I did write to the Pinakothek to say thanks for having that collection on their homepage, and also for giving me the opportunity to make the first drawing in situ, and I got a nice answer back.

And here goes:

Y_F7010a04.jpg

Y_F6433b05_og_kilder.jpg

[Iversen]

It would be hard to overlook the fact that it's Christmas eve once again, and most families run around their Christmas trees wailing christmas charols, and afterwards the kids get their presents. In some countries they postpones that till the day after, but here in Denmark people just eat and sleep and argue on that day. In my family we dropped the present years ago when our mother became too ill to go buy the things on the wishing lists in town, and my sister and I found it was ridiculous to have to buy our own presents. We also dropped the Christmas tree and replaced it with a contraption of metal and plastic - which I have let stand with all the paraphernalia on since last christmas, like the 200+ christmas hearts all the way around the living room. I invited my sister to eat thin Danish pancakes (not the thick American ones- - and no syrup!), and I watched the last minutes of "The Julekalender" without sound. I have mention that program - it's the one where the pixies speak a mixture of Danish and English, and the humans speak Danish with a Jutish accent. The subtitles to the right say "Yeah, it's good to be a nissemand. Very merry Jul". And the drag lady to the left has just received the foodprocessor she has been waffling about since the 1. of December.

The_Julekalender.jpg

But that's all the christmas there will be in my humble abode.

In my latest message I refrained from listing the videos I have been watching, and I am not going to mention them all here. But it might be worth mentioning the two videos from Alghero on Sardinia - the only town on the island where the old folks still speak a dialect of Catalan. On the rest of the island the old people speak Sardic, and everyone speaks Italian.

CA: Primer vaig veure un documental amb una durada de més de 24 minuts, i després un vídeo més curt sobre la mateixa ubicació. És difícil ser optimista sobre el futur d'aquest enclavament lingüístic: es gairebé segur que l'italià estàndard sufoca tant l'alguères català com també els cinc dialectes del sard. No va ser difícil d'entendre el dialecte, i em vaig adonar que hi havia articles amb l- -i això és sorprenent, ja que el català balear té articles amb s- (i també el sard, per cert, però el català continental, ni el valencià). No he visitat mai la ciutat Alguer, però he visitat la ciutat d'Olbia prop de l'extrem nord una vegada, i allà només parlava italià, però vaig llegir un llibre sobre la gramàtica d'un dels dialectes sards en la biblioteca local.

IT: E ora che ho già menzionato la lingua italiana:

GR: Έχω παρακολουθήσει και μερικά βίντεο για τα Αρχαία Ελληνικά. Το πρώτο ήταν αρκετά ασήμαντο, ενώ το δεύτερο βίντεο ήταν καλό και ενημερωτικό. Φτιάχτηκε από Massimo Bortoletti και ονομαζότα "Greco antico dialetti". Άλλωστε, πρώτα συναντάμε ένα είδος παλαιάς ελληνικής σε επιγραφές στη Γραμμική Β (Linear B) από την Κρήτη (Κνωσόυ)), αλλά κυρίως από την Πύλο, όπου ο Όμηρος λέει ότι βασίλευε ο γέρος Νέστορας. Αργότερα επανεμφανίζεται στα ομηρικά έπη, γραμμένοι γύρω στο 800 π.Χ. σε μια κυρίως ιωνική διάλεκτο. Και ακόμη και αργότερα κυριαρχεί η αττική διάλεκτος γιατί κάποιοι διάσημοι Αθηναίοι μιλούσαν αυτή τη διάλεκτο. Υπήρχε όμως μια παλαιότερη διάλεκτος με ρίζες στα μυκηναϊκά ελληνικά, η Αρκαδοκυπριακή διάλεκτος ή νότια Αχαϊκή, που μιλούνταν στη μέση της Πελοποννήσου και στην Κύπρο. Θυμάται κανείς ότι ο Όμηρος αναφερόταν στους Έλληνες ως Αχαιούς. Και μετά ήρθε ο Αλέξανδρος και ο Χριστιανισμός και όλα αυτά, και έγινε χάος, και το αποτέλεσμα ήταν παντού η Κοινή.

EN: Before that I watched e number of videos in English that somehow had something to do with mental capacities, including one about amusia, which designates the opposite of musicality. I have once bought and read Oliver Sachs' Muzicofilia (in a Romanian translation), but it is surprisingly rare to get more details on amusia. The title of the Youtube lecture was something like "What we can learn from congenital anomalies" by I.Pereto - a title that doesn't really tell you that the focus is on musical skills and the lack thereof. But the general conclusion seemed to be that lack of musicality tends to be an inherited trait AND that the problem isn't to perceive the sounds, but to make sense of them in the brain. I somehow expected that.

And from there I got to watching several videos about sleep, including one in Romanian: "De câte ore de somn ai nevoie pe diferite planete" - which is a totally idiotic angle, since it would be the light on-off schedule of the airship that would dictate our habits, and nobody in their sane mind would try to introduce 'days' of several hundred hours. I also watched a Hispanophone video about "La ensoñación excesiva", i.e. the propensity to daydream too much, and one about polyphasic sleep. The argument here was that we only have slept 6-7-8 hours in a row per night since the got electric light, because we since then have stayed awake in the evenings. Before that we allegedly went to bed went the sun set, woke up in the middle of the night, had sex with our hypothetical spouses and/or peed in the champer pot or ate something, and then we fell asleep again and woke up at sunrise. Well, maybe ...

And finally I watched a video by E.Zapinsky intitulated "Exposing FAKE YouTube Polyglots (by becoming one myself)". The special angle here was that mr. Zapinsky would try to make a Youtube video in a language he didn't speak (Polish), and that was quite entertaing (and also fairly revealing - cheating isn't as easy as you might think!), but before that he showed parts of an older video with E.Marini, who had short discussions with a number of people in a handful of languages - and luckily Zapinsky concluded that Marini ws the real deal. I could have testified to that too, since the video was made outside the Polyglot Congress venue in Budapest, and I was standing in the background and witnessed the whole session. OK, I couldn't judge Marini's level in the Slavic languages, but I knew enough of the rest to be duly impressed. However I haven't met him since that event, and I haven't seen any i-speak-15-languages videos published by himself. Maybe he just doesn't like to be a public figure.

And what about the Slavic languages, you may ask? Well, I can read them better than I can understand them orally, but I did watch a couple of videos about paleontology in Czech, including one about critters from the Amazon area. But I was glad that I could turn on subtitles in something easier, otherwise I would have been lost.

Dead-critters-in-Czech.jpg

[Iversen]

I'm going to write about two things today: museum drawings and Czech goodnight texts (in that order).

The last couple of days I have been busy making drawings at home. When I started out making those drawings I used the drawing utensils and paper etc. provided by museums for their kid visitors, and even when I later bought my own colour pencils everything was done in situ, i.e. in the museum while I was there. But then somewhere along the path I decided to do a few drawings just in black and white and then add colours at home or in a hotel room, and even later I did some drawings totally at home based on my own photos and things I found on the internet - but only from places I had visited recently. I also did some drawing of places that had been closed down by their owners (so that they could spend the money on liars and office fidgeters and corruption and other harmful things). Most of those places were in Denmark, because I had only bought my crayons just before visiting Dresden and Praha and after that I stayed in my own country. That meant that the places I had visited abroad before that had missed the opportunity to get their portrait done. I have since then tried to fill that hole, and I am reaching further and further back in time, but only with places where I have a lot of my own photos - and I also have to remember the places well.

GER: Und jetzt ist die Situation so, daß ich ziemlich viel in Deutschland gereist bin, weil es so praktisch gleich südwärts von Dänemark liegt. Ich bin zum Beispiel durch das Rheintal gereist, während man noch für 9 Euro einen Monat Freifahrt kaufen konnte (eine Corona-Maßnahme zur Rettung des Tourismus - jetzt nur für Deutsche erhältlich und sie kostet 49 €). Aber ich habe in den Museen leider zu wenig fotografiert . Andererseits habe ich ganz viele Fotos von Orten in Schleswig-Holstein und Hamburg und Berlin gesammelt, weil ich schon oft mehrmals dort war. Seit gestern habe ich deshalb 14 Museen dort gezeichnet, und ich werde heute noch ein Paar Zeichnungen hinzufügen.

Unten zeige ich zuerst das etnographische Dahlem-museum im Südwesten von Berlin - wahrscheinlich meine einfachste Zeichnung je. Und danach meine Zeichnung (mit Quellen) vom Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, welches ich fast jedes Mal besucht habe, wenn ich Zeit in Hamburg hatte, weil es der Nachbar vom Hauptbahnhof ist. Auf der anderen Seite ist die Kunsthalle, aber mir fehlten einige Innenaufnahmen.

F7029a06_depressed.jpg

F7029a02_Hamburg_K&G-mu.jpg

Ich habe auch Schloß Glücksburg/Lycksborg östlich von Flensburg gezeichnet, welches dem heutigen dänischen Königshaus seinen Namen gegeben hat (während es noch Dänisch war). Ich war seit 2003 nicht mehr dort, daher haben sie die Innenräume wahrscheinlich etwas verändert, aber ich werde das nächste Mal eine neue Zeichnung anfertigen. Ich habe mit meiner Schwester vereinbart, dass wir im Frühjahr dorthin fahren werden.

Platt: ik höff ook Slott Lycksborg (Glücksburg) tekent, ofschoonst ik nich dor siet 2003 wesen bün - aver ik höff vele Postkarten un fotos vun dunntomaal. Ik höff mit mien Süster afspraakt, dat wi im Fröhjohr nochmal de Slott besöken schöllt, un dann maak ik eene nee tip-top Tekening.

EN: As for the goodnight readings: yesterday I grabbed a bilingual printout about an exhibition at the National Gallery in Praha rom my goodnight readings materials chair beside my bed. Actually I have mentioned it before because I found it mysteriously hard - harder than for instance the texts about the Praha Zoo and some excerpts from other homepages from the museums there. I did have a French Google translation to help me, but it was still a struggle. So now I have transferred it to the notestand, where I keep my study texts. And then I read about the Zoo instead - eeazy peeazy no problems - I hardly used the translation into Corsican...

CZ: Veletržní galerie je velká šedá betonová krabice, která byla vyrobena pro komerční účely, ale nyní je národním uměním muzeem. Udělal jsem tam kresbu, ale je to trochu oplzlé, takže to ne vidíte. Místo toho vám ukážu svou kresbu z technického muzea poblíž řeky.

F6808b06_narrodni-galeria.jpg

F6811a06.jpg

[tractor]

In the Norwegian version of The Julekalender, they speak a micture of Trøndersk (Norwegian dialect) and English.

[Iversen]

OK, new years eve - some kind of event that happens once every year. This time it's raining cats and dogs and there is a strong wind which will top around midnight, so those who have invested in expensive fireworks are busy blowing things up now around 20 pm where the weather only is terrible. But I have just bought food for a couple of days and no fireworks, so I couldn't care less. And in spite of the rain I don't have any pets that might be scared by the noise. By the way: the last time I watched some really impressive fireworks was earlier this year when I happened to be in Copenhagen the day our new king Frederik X was crowned (or whatever Danish royalty does to mark such occasions these days - besides waving to the people and riding in a carriage and having a banquet at Christiansborg).

F6620a03.jpg

I have been busy drawing museum drawings of places In Germany and Austria and a couple of other places which I have visited earlier. In principle those drawings should have been made in situ, but if I have visited a museum several times I may have a reasonable number of photos, and besides large museums may have homepages with photos I can stuff into the gaping holes.And then >I can draw them. I can also search for images with Google, but people have a tendency to make many photos of just a few things and none or very few which I can use for my drawings.Alas I don't have any of the latest drawings on the computer I'm using right now, so you'll have to survive on things I have made public earlier.

As for languages: I have studied several bilingual Czech+something else texts and made wordlists, which now shall be subjected to the obligatory repetition round. But once again my main activity has been to watch videos with subtitles in carefully chosen languages. One of my most interesting discoveries has been the ultra-productive Parpalhon Blau, who makes videos in Occitan. I had a course in Troubadour poetry during my study years, but apart from that it is not a language that I intend to study - but I would like to have it on my list of almost comprehensible passive languages. In other words I can't elaborate on this in Occitan, but I do know a bit of Catalan so here goes:

CAT: El vídeo que em va fer conèixer al en Blue (Gabrieu) va ser, en realitat, una conversa entre ell i una senyora catalana (potser senyora Linguriosa?), on cadascú parlava la seva llengua -i és clar que s'entenien. Vaig arribar a aquest vídeo a partir d'un vídeo sobre els dialectes catalans, part 1 i 2 de Couch Polyglot, i despréz vaig veure un vídeo d'Ecolinguista on persones que parlaven francès, italià i català havia d'endevinar paraules occitanes, i això va funcionar, però sense problems d'inteniment . En un altre vídeo, eren paraulles en el noruec d'Østfold que un suec, un danes i une islandesa havien d'endevinar. I com era d'esperar, el problema aquí era que cap dels altres entenia res de l'islandès, però jo tenia alguns coneixements previs i sobrevisqué.

GR: Έχω δει και ένα ιταλικό βίντεο για αρχαιοελληνικές διαλέκτους.

EN: apart from that I have watched a number of Anglophone videos , including a long one with an American lady who had lived for 22 years in Denmark and now told us what she had learnt - like for instance that that you can be friends with people for 22 years without ever being invited to their private homes. On top of that a video about the Ediacaran faune (some very old stuff from before the Cambrian explosion), and a paleontologist here was ecstatic because he had found an animal that probably had both an arse and a mouth (but no brain yet). By the way, I remember from the Quiz QI a definition of a kiss: something that consists of a tube (in two sections) with an arsehole at each end. OK, back to more sober stuff - or maybe not: I watched a couple of videos about people who had earned the Darwin award, which was invented to celebrate fools who cleanse the gene pool by killing themselves in absolutely idiotic ways. One of thse videos was in .. was it Romanian or was it Spanish? I'm not sure. I also saw a video (in English) about at black lady who was removed from 1. class in a plane, but then it turned out that she owned the airline. Bullshit. And I saw snippets of a couple of videos more of the same kind in other channels, but clearly concocted along the same lines by the same braindead fool. Discrimination should of course be combated, but not through obviously fake assembly line waste.

But at least I watch Anglophone videos with subtitles in other languages -and often with the sound turned down.

[Iversen]

I have got an email about a week ago informing me that the registration for the upcoming gathering in Brno at the end of May is open, and I had actually decided to register- but then I ran into a serious problem: I have read the homepage, and as far as I can see it doesn't mention language tables. Last year in Praha I spent practically all my time at the tables (apart from one lecture about one Icelandic word - and museum visits during the lunch breaks), so this is for me an essential point. In Praha I got the chance to prove to myself that I'm conversational in a fair number of languages because of those tables, and I have no intention of listening to lectures instead - since my proposal for a lecture in 2019 was turned down I have sworn never again to propose any lectures, and under those circumstances it would be humiliating to listen to others who were lucky enough not to get that kick in the face - except maybe if there is a lecture in a language where I sorely need some listening training (though I can use Youtube for that). So I have sent an e-mail to the gathering people asking whether they intend to have tables or not. If not, then I don't go.

Last year I had hourlong conversations at the tables in Portuguese, Spansk, Catalan (if my memory doesn't delude me), Italian, Romanian, French, German, Dutch, Danish and Swedish -and also in Greek, though I had problems hearing and understanding what the others at the tables said because of the noise around us. I think there also were Esperanto tables, but I spoke that language plus English plus a little bit of Scots in other places at the venue. As far as I remember I didn't get the opportunity to speak Icelandic or Latin or Afrikaans or other of my fringe languages, but maybe I could have looked for speakers of those languages. Anyway, I do remember my visit to Praha with fondness because I got my active oral skills in more than a dozen languages thoroughly tested - and if they make something similar at Brno then I'm going there too, else I don't.

And what else (apart from even more Youtube videos)? Well, I reread the conference book from the Esperanto UEA congress in 2011 in Bellahøj, Copenhagen yesterday. Why? Well, the Esperanto magazine mostly tells about meetings somewhere, but the conference book described all the topics of the different lectures, followed by biographies of some famous dead Esperantists, and that was not quite as boring to read as those stereotype references to gatherings around the world.

EO: Tiam mi ne studis Esperanton, sed kiam mi vidis, ke ili volis fari kongreson en mia propra lando, mi decidis partopreni. Bone, mi salutis en Esperanto kaj aĉetis kelkajn librojn, sed alie mi estis plejparte pasiva ĉar mi fakte ne povis paroli Esperanton. Ekde tiam mi ĉeestis kongresojn en Lisboa, Lille, Nitra kaj Galway kaj tie parolis multe, sed la nura afero kiu interesas al mi estas la sciencaj prelegoj. Kaj ĝenas min, ke la aliaj prelegoj estas laŭtlegitaj, ĉar estas postulo ke ili devas esti submetitaj al iu komitato por publikigo antaŭ la aranĝo. Mi ne estis al la Esperanto-kongreso ĉi-flanke de Corona.

CZ Navíc jsem se zaměřil na češtinu. Nacvičila jsem si seznamy slov o minimálně 600 slovech (viz obrázek!) a přečetla pár textů jako zábavu před spaním. První sbírka textů byla o zoologické zahradě v pražské Troii a o extremofilních bakteriích (snadno!), ale druhá by si zasloužila komentář - který stále neumím napsat česky. A když nejedu do Brna, není se není žádný spěch naučit česky.

EN: The second collection consists of three pages, which I must have produced in spring just before my visit to Praha. Page two and three contain some morphological tables from Wikipedia, and the first page contains sentences I might theoretically have used in Praha, run through the Goggle translate mill - things like "nemluvím tímto zvláštním jazykem" (I don't understand this weird language) and "tyto věty budu studovat ve vlaku do Prahy" (I'm gonna study these sentences in the train to Praha). Well, that didn't happen, and apparently I just forgot about those sheets after my return home.

Now that I have seen the 'language guide' page again, I can generally understand it - and also see where GT has taken its liberties! On the morphological tables I must say that I did see things that reminded me of my green grammar sheets, but with some confusing elements - or lack thereof. For instances I hadn't notated the infinitives of the verbs, and they do have a role to play. For instance some verbs have "-ou" in the 3. p. plural, others have -i (or iji), and the rules are much clearer when you know the infinitives. In the noun tables I noticed that the locatives often resemble the datives rather than the instrumentals, so logic would dictate that they should follow the dative, and the instrumentals should follow at the last position. I'll have to check my green sheets to see what I have done there - I don't actually remember, but I fear that I have followed the conventions.

Anyway, I have spent a fair amount of time on Czech (especially after my incessant touring around Denmark to make museum drawings has ebbed out), and I can see that it has had an effect. Speaking Czech - well, not yet. Writing it - yes, but I spend a inordinate lot of time checking those pesky diacritics and other features of the Czech orthography - plus looking words up, of course. I still don't know whether I'm going to Brno (which I have visited in 2019 on an excursion from Bratislava, where I DIDN''T participate in the gathering ), but there is no point in focussing on speech if I don't get any chances to speak the language in situ.

600_Czech_words_(repetition_round).jpg

[Iversen]

I would have written a few things here a couple of days ago, but as we all know the dreaded 504 error has returned - hopefully just for a short period to scare us, but who knows? Among the things I have watched on TV during the dark period was the annual Cabalgata de Madrid.

SP: En el Año Nuevo 2014-2015 visité Andalucía: en avión a Málaga y en tren y autobúses a p.e. Ronda, Sevilla y Córdoba. Los españoles tienen fama de amar el ruido, pero cuando yo me paré a medianoche en una plaza central de Sevilla huve silencio completo. La gente se escabullía por la plaza y susurraba entre sí (las chicas con grandes orejas de Minnie Mouse para oír mejor), y eso fue todo lo que sucedió. Bien, el día antes de me retorno de Málago yo vine en autobús por la costa oeste hacia Málaga, y se veía que había preparaciones para algo. Y la tarde del día de Los Tres Reyes llegó la explicación: una procesión enormemente larga por las calles de la ciudad - aúnque todavía sin fuegos artificiales. Los españoles no celebran la Navidad, celebran los Tres Magos/reyes. Y este año vi una emisión larga en TVE con la Cabalgata de Madrid que, a diferencia de mi experiencia de 2015, se desarrolló en horario diurno. Los alemanes tienen su procesión de carnaval, los españoles sua mítica trinidad.

Las previsiones meteorológicas, en particular para la costa este, eran tan amenazadoras que algunas ciudades habían trasladado su desfile al sábado, otras lo habían prepuesto para el sábado, y algunas ciudades lo habían cancelado para dar aún un banquete superfluo a los principales parásitos de la ciudad. En el hecho no sé si Madrid había cambiado sus planes para este año - me acabo tan sólo de ver que había una transmisión en directo en TVE, y me quedé atrapado allí. Plaza de los Cibeles ...

F5120b03,5_Cabalgada_de_Malaga.jpg

POR: Em Youtube vi, entre outras coisas, algumas transmissões turísticas da América do Sul. Tudo começou comigo pesquisando no Youtube algo sobre Iguaçu (ortografia portisiana!) e vi uma transmissão que me lembrou da minha própria viagem à região com as magníficas cataratas. Depois, vi um vídeo do mesmo YouTuber sobre Ollaytantamp no Peru, que também visitei - mas era estragado por uma música de fundo desagradável (una mujer aullando).

SP: Afortunadamente, también hubo una transmisión más tranquillo en español sobre el mismo lugar, y después vi una transmisión sobre las ruines de Sacsayhuman cerca de Cusco - y sí, por supuesto, yo también estuve allí. Cusco está a 3,3 km de altura y llegué allí por avión desde Lima al mar, pero afortunadamente no tuve ni el mínimo signo de mal de altura. Hubo otros en mi grupo que se sintieron mal después de llegar, pero yo simplemente abroché el cinturón y me fui a una torre alta en la ciudad donde subí hasta el rey Inca en la cima. Nullo problemo. Y al día siguiente hubo un paseo en bicicleta por los Andes antes de la caminata por en sentiero de los Incas..

F1507a03-vida-en-el-pueblo-de-Ollantaytambo.jpg

EN: As you may have read above I have sent an e-mail to the gathering people to ask whether there would be language tables this year, but they have so far not even bothered to answer, and their homepage doesn't mention language tables anywhere. So in all likelihood I'm NOT going to Brno. I simply don't understand why they would kill the most rewarding part of the event, but because I liked the tables at Praha so much I started out learning Czech when I returned from the gathering in the spring of 2024. The presumed lack of tables in Brno does in a way make that decision seem slightly premature, but because of my timeconsuming travelling around Denmark in 2024 I have at least not spent too much time trying to reaching that lofty goal - and just having some passive skills in one more Slavic language is also fine. So I'll continue to study Czech, but primarily as a written language (which includes using the language for subtitles on Youtube, but precludes attempts to learn to do smalltalk fluently).

GR: Η νυχτερινό μου διάβασμα πριν τον ύπνο ήταν ένα ελληνοαγγλικό λεξικό. Δούλεψε άριστα...