Amusing Cultural Happenings

During our time in Kyiv, I did become the cheap source of entertainment for the boys. At first they taught me a useful greeting «Здaров брoдяги! Как житуха?», which is translated is essentially “Hey dudes, what’s up?” Next they thought they would teach me “Ukrainian.”
“Sarafan,” which I have now been dubbed, “we are in Kyiv now, you need to learn Ukrainian.” And of course they proceeded to introduce to me new “Ukrainian” words. Needless to say, I was hesitant to believe their legitimacy, and as it turns out they were in fact bad words. I felt like that poor fiancé on “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”!

The second quite hilarious cultural happening also occurred while we were in Kyiv. Often times people joke about saying things wrong in a different language and accidentally offending someone. Well before a couple of weeks ago I thought that was more of a joke than reality. One night while walking with our group in Kyiv I was talking with some of the boys about sports, and eventually started talking about ping-pong. To further enhance the conversation and to illustrate a point I began to act out playing ping-pong, which also included sound effects. Anyway, I guess one of the “sound effects” that I used was actually a profanity, and quite a bad one at that! I didn’t know! I was just trying to talk about ping-pong!