"Time Zones, Cats, and The Cyrillic Alphabet"

Dear Reader,

Near the top of Nick Merrill's "Sweet Gypsies! This is awesome!!!" list, there are three things that I just absolutely love.

1.) Conversing with people

2.) Learning Languages

3.) Cats

Keep those in mind as you continue to read.

So, there's a website on the internet called Polyglot Club.....It's basically a huge website that connects people  from all over the world that have a passion for languages. ("Polyglot" means "Multilingual") Once connected, people can then converse and share their culture and language. I get messages all the time from people that are wanting to learn English.

"I'll teach you Serbian if you help me with English!" or "hi im ****** im mexican i want to talk more fluency english but i cant haha i want some help because i love speak english but when i try i cant start a good conversation"

........I honestly want to help as many people as I can, but you can only do so much!

Anyways, I got a message from a Russian girl, named Kate Miranova. She's like "I know English, but I want to get better." and I'm like "I can say hello in Russian...." and so, because video chatting with strangers you meet on the internet ISN'T an extremely sketchy idea, we decided to Skype.

There are two major problems with trying to coordinate a video chat with a person that lives in Russia.

1.) There's a 9-hour time difference between Russia and Houston

2.) Your body needs sleep.

But whatever.

So, at 11:30 pm, I began to talk to somebody on the other side of the planet. It was literally mind-blowingly freaky. The sun was streaming into her room, and it was almost midnight here!

This girl, of course, was Russian. Like...RUSSIAN! She spoke RUSSIAN. Because she lives in RUSSIA. And even though she's been studying English since kindergarten, she still has a RUSSIAN accent. I spoke what little Russian I knew to her, and she understood what I was saying!!!

In English, we talked about what Russians think of Americans and vice versa, and I learned a few things. Not all Russians walk around with flapped fur hats on all the time. Remarkable! But the stereotype about them drinking a bunch of vodka? Well, she confirmed that. They actually do drink A LOT.

Oh, and she has a cat.

And I love cats.

A lot.

And it makes me happy that people all over the world have cats....

That is all. NM