Polyglot Monday

When I was 16 years old, I lived in southern Iran with an Iranian family that had 3 sons, the eldest, Omid, a year younger than me.  I was an exchange student for the summer of 1969 with American Field Service (AFS).  Communicating was a challenge.  I would study Farsi with the son who was entering first grade.  The language is written right to left with the Arabic alphabet even though it is not an Arabic language.  However, numbers are written left to right.  A challenge, indeed.
Learning some Russian is the biggest language and communication challenge I can remember since 1969.  The cyrillic alphabet, while written left to right, is confusing.  I have a hard time recognizing words as a whole, instead having to phonetically plow through them, frequently getting stresses and vowel sounds completely wrong, not always knowing which letters are silent and which pronounced.  Sign language and gestures are coming in handy.
There are 35 channels on the TV in the Iris Congress Hotel room: some in Russian, English, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and Arabic.
The people sitting around me at breakfast are speaking Arabic, German, Russian, Chinese, and English.  The breakfast staff handle it all without knowing all the languages.  I think the reception staff handle it by knowing English and Russian.
Learning a language necessarily requires learning about a culture as well.  This meeting of languages and cultures inspires me.
Tomorrow I'm planning on Red Square, the Kremlin, the famous Moscow Metro and who knows what else?
خداحافظ
До свидания!
Au revoir
auf wiedersehen
Ciao
Adios
Until we meet again,
Bill