valerie
April 22, 2022 - saw this on a paper in our teacher’s office. I asked my (British) coworker about what it meant and he said, “oh, I don’t think you have lollipop ladies in the US.” I guessed that maybe it was the name for someone who sells lollipops on the street…he said that a ‘lollipop lady’ is the name for someone (usually a woman) who stands in the street when children are crossing the road. I said, “oh, in the US we usually call this person a ‘crossing guard’”, and his response was that our name is boring. I can’t disagree…another phrase I’ve thought about recently which I think sounds more fun in British English than American English is ‘zebra crossing’ (a crosswalk)
April 19, 2022 - hummus, a useful snack. To be fair, I think the word ‘useful’ comes from a small translation error of the Russian (masculine) adjective полезный. While it can be translated as ‘useful’, when used to describe food we say ‘healthy’ in English. Many of my students say that certain foods are ‘useful’, so this one seems to be pervasive
April 17, 2022 - a picture of last night’s dinner at Navat (a well-known restaurant chain in Bishkek which serves traditional Kyrgyz food). There were manti which had Chinese chives inside (韭菜 in Chinese, джусай in Russian, which actually sounds similar to the Chinese name), laghman, plov, some salads (including a caesar salad and an eggplant salad) and (tandoor) naan and boorsok in the basket
April 16, 2022 - this? My friend ordered it at dinner together. She mentioned ‘baklava’, but it seemed different from what I normally think of as baklava. Seeing that it was made with cheese made me skeptical at first, but it was quite good
April 15, 2022 - fancy karaoke club with colleagues (there were around 20 of us altogether, not everyone is in the picture)
April 10, 2022 - I really wanted to try a ‘burger’ from a burger stand by a supermarket I sometimes go to, and I finally did. It was good, but unfortunately I had a call as soon as I arrived home so I couldn’t eat it warm 🙁 (I say ‘burger’ because it had chicken inside…here ‘burger’ is just anything with a burger bun, no matter what meat is inside. I know some people say ‘chicken burger’, but at least where I’m from in the US, I think ‘chicken sandwich’ is more common, even for something with a burger bun)
April 3, 2022 - no idea what the event was, but there were a lot of bikers out on the road this morning as I was doing some shopping
April 1, 2022 - hard to show it because of the curvature of the can (and no, this is not an April Fool’s joke!), but for some reason 我爱你 (‘I love you’ in Chinese) is written in the blue behind the white ‘coconut milk’ name? And there’s nothing on the can which indicates it is a Chinese product or has anything to do with China other than the vague brand name ‘Asia Gold’
March 31, 2022 - ‘Household chemistry’ sounds to me like it should be the name of a love song, maybe with some rock-inspired elements
