(Thursday, February 11th, 2016)
A language correction – I’ve been meaning to correct this but decided I would not go back to edit old posts, too much energy and it sets a precedent I don’t want to maintain.
But, this is fairly important, so worth a mini-post. I heard some words that I understood in Russian, so I assumed Russian. And I had heard that many crew for freighters are Croatian, so I assumed that what I couldn’t understand at all was Croatian.
Both wrong.
The officers, senior and junior but one, are Romanian. It is Romanian they are speaking. One junior officer is Filipino. The seamen are Filipino. Everybody speaks English well.
Anyway, as I got to know some of the officers, and after a beer or so, I told them that I understood some Russian words and thought at first they were Russian. They had a good chuckle over that. They are not Putin fans, let’s just leave it at that. They said that the Russian that I heard was probably that same sort of thing as when somebody speaking English says something like “Muchas Gracias”, or “Sie Vous Plais”, confusing the non-English listener. They said that there are some useful Russian idioms that they use, but no, and they chuckled again, they aren’t Russian.
I asked what the Russian idioms meant. They said no, we’re not going there. Chuckled again. I’ll be on this ship for awhile, so maybe later I’ll ask again.
Do you talk to any seamen?
Oh yeah, I do. I don’t have quite as much opportunity. We talk at the odd party, and since beers are involved and lots of people are involved, I don’t get the same quality of conversation that I do with officers at lunch or up on the bridge or in my hallway, for example. They are young, for the most part, and are all really nice to me.