On Wednesday I was taking a cab to dinner when the cab driver started talking to me. It actually makes me a little proud that I was able to follow this conversation at all. In the past I would have just looked at him blankly...
Anyway, I'm going to try my hand at a dialog so here it goes:
"where are you from... cuba?"
"no, I'm from America"
"oh...something something Americ(some kind of ending) beautiful" Here I thought he was hitting on me so I made some non-committal noise.
"what America is not a beautiful country."
"OH!" I thought to myself!
"Yes" I answered. "America is very beautiful."
"Baku too?"
"yes, Baku is also very beautiful." Like I'm going to say No Baku is ugly.
"Ah this is very good!"
Silence for awhile, we drive through some traffic, and a few idiots do stupid things.
"I once had a friend who was Cuban."
"oh?"
"Yes, very pretty. She was also Black." The word for black in Russian sounds very similar to the N word in English, I almost said "What did you say about my Mama? But then I remembered a conversation I had with my language teacher about what to call black people, so I relaxed. He continued....
"Her name was (I immediately forgot the name."
"oh that is a pretty name." meanwhile I'm thinking to myself why are you telling me this.
"She loved me."
"hmmmm."
"She returned home to Cuba, and I couldn't go because something something Mama."
"Oh." What should I say to that, especially since i didn't understand all of it. I then asked to get out early and gave him an extra dollar because of the story. BUT, I then told this story to my language teacher, who got very excited about Cubans (she claims he was complimenting me by asking if I was from Cuba since all Cubans are beautiful).
She said that while she was a student, they had tons of Cubans in Baku studying. Apparently at the college she went to, the first two floors of the building were classrooms and the upper floors were dorms. So every day at the beginning of class the professors would send a student upstairs knocking on the dorm doors to tell people to come to class. One day my teacher was selected for the door knocking duty and she was knocking on doors, then she came to the door of one of the Cubans and she knocked. Suddenly the door was open and standing there in the doorway was a naked Cuban boy... one hand on the door the other covering his privates. She said she was speechless. Then from behind him in the room up popped two women (I cannot say whether or not they were also Cuban, once again my language skills have failed me) also naked. And they said "HI, X, come join us!" She was astounded (and I think she is still astounded to this day!) and she fled. She got back to class, and the teacher asked her if she had woken everyone up, and she said yes they would be down shortly. Before too long had passed, he came into class as if nothing was amiss.
I really do think she was slightly enamored of this Cuban. Even after all this time she still has that look when she describes him. She said he was tall, slim, with a good male figure. Long straight legs, and a cute little butt! (all this was in Russian, can you believe it!)
This is why learning languages can be so much fun!
