To Russia, With Love

Today I began my regularly scheduled walking tour of the area that I'm working in, and this month it's South Brooklyn. More specifically, Brighton Beach / Coney Island. Yes, the same Coney Island where they have the infamous Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest every Fourth of July weekend. Yes, the Coney Island that has the east-coast equivalent of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Yes, the Coney Island that has inspired the delictable "Coney Island Hot Dog", which has....some kind of ingredients on it that...are...from...Coney Island (OK, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I know such a thing exists, just like the elusive minivan taxi here in NYC!!) Coney Island (which isn't really an island) is home to America's connection to the Russian mafia and thousands of other Russians. So, today I ate some authentic beef stroganov served by a lovely Russian gal at a coffee cafe that was playing Euro-techno and was filled with the sweet music of the Russian language (:-\ ??). In the heart of Brighton Beach, which I caught a glimpse of when passing it on the subway, has Russian signs on buildings (and no English) and the beach itself looked marvelous with our beautiful, warm (~55 degrees), sunny afternoon. I was tempted to take my three layers off and go for a skinny dip, but I withheld the urge...for any spectators sake.

I realized that I haven't given anyone an update on my Spanish classes. I will not embarrass myself by attempting to write something legible, but suffice to say that the further I get in Spanish, the better I realize my German is. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can see that my German is actually pretty good. I can put sentences together with ease, I can conjugate verbs without thinking about it, and my vocabulary is pretty extensive. It's a good feeling to realize how far I've come with learning a foreign language and to realize that the five years of German I took and the two summers I spent there were not wasted! On that note, someone told me about a website called meetup.com that has all sorts of random meeting groups for a million different events, including one for people like me that want to practice speaking German. So, I went ahead and signed up for that one, maybe I'll miss a Thursday-night cardio class sometime and meet up with some other kraut-speakers at Hallo Berlin down in Hell's Kitchen (I love saying that!) for some beers and bratwursts...or knockwursts....or tueringers...or bockwursts...or weisswursts....or....well, you get the idea.

Bis dann,
J. Riley