Russian memories

40 years back, the Russians launched this stamp, not long after I had appeared on the planet. Can you feel the Socialist glory with all those shades and hues of red?

This stamp came to me a couple weeks back, the lone Russian stamp in a pile of stamps from (mostly) Southeast Asian countries. How it got into the pile, I will never know. But it took me back to my junior high school days.

I was the penultimate geek, the introverted smart kid with no social skills whatsoever. Over the years, I naturally bonded with others who did not fit in. One of my good friends was YS, whose family had just arrived from Russia. This would have been the late 70s, I think, not a time known for the open-mindedness of middle school students in Texas.

He was a smart kid and well-motivated but had no friends besides me. We rode the bus together and one day a bunch of local rednecks-in-the-making were trying to start trouble with him as we got off the bus. This was a couple years before I would dive into Gandhi, MLK Jr., and Thoreau, but I knew something was wrong and that I needed to do something.

I stood next to my friend and interposed my body between him and those who would taunt or strike him. I have no idea why they didn't try to attack me at that point. Neither of us said anything back to them. He just kept walking and I kept shielding him with my body. Finally they got bored and left us alone.

We never talked about that incident. There were much more important things to talk about, such as classes in school and the stamps he had smuggled out of Russia. Hard to believe today, but apparently it was a big deal at that time. Still, it can be tough to separate a boy from his stamps.

He gave me a couple and they briefly rekindled my interest in stamp collecting, which had fizzled by the time I moved from Nebraska to Texas. These were classic Russian space program stamps, unusual in size and a rarity for me.

They lie buried somewhere in a mountain of books and papers and other debris in my father's basement in Nebraska. Seeing this stamp, I need to get back to Nebraska and dig those others out.

two more from Africa

Zambia this time, not one of the usual places I get stamps from. Both are self-reflexive, stamps about stamp collecting, which is a first for me. It would be really fitting to get the actual stamps shown on these stamps, and put them all together. And then if there were a stamp of the stamps OF the stamps...doubly self-reflexive?

it seems there was a kind of stamp collectors' gathering in London in 1990 (almost two decades ago...) - I can't imagine whether it would have been exciting or dreary.

日本語 hints:
self-reflexive: 自己を映し出す (maybe self-referential is better: 文字／作品が自己に言及した - from Canon dictionary

decade = ten years. Note other deca / deci / 10 -related words like decathlon (Olympic sport with 10 events), deciliter. By the way, when my wife was 10 months pregnant, she wore デカパン. So deca- or deci- is a prefix (接頭語、接頭辞) related to the number ten.

dreary = dull and boring

two from Africa

I have only a handful of stamps from African nations, but just ran across several at once. Here is a pair from Ghana. And an unusual pair at that - the Queen of England together with a fertility doll?? It was random chance, how they came to me.

日本語 hints
only a handful = a very small number of
run across = find by accident; and unplanned discovery
fertility doll....someone help me here. I find things like 生産力 and 豊穣 in the dictionary, but that doesn't feel right.

Also, notice that "pair", even though it contains two items, is treated as singular for grammar purposes: This pair of stamps IS from Ghana.

more Chinese birds

Here are a couple more bird stamps from China which caught my eye lately. I don't have a regular source for Chinese stamps yet, so they come in on a highly irregular basis. When I lived in China in 1999, lots of people were collecting stamps. I sometimes brought stamps over from Japan and everybody wanted them. Now when I ask my Chinese friends if they know anyone who wants to trade stamps with me, the answer is always the same: no.

日本語 hints:

Today's vocabulary is not too tough. Only one thing stands out: the prices of the stamps, 1.6 元 and 2 元. Almost all Japanese people give　元 a Japanese reading, "gen", even when speaking English. But no English speaker would ever understand this. It would be better (no, correct) to use the Chinese "yuan", which is spoken in a rising, second tone. It sounds a bit like the English word "you" and the letter "n" but spoken quickly: you-en. Or, more simply, it would also be correct to use "RMB", the internationally known abbreviation for 人民币, or ren min bi, another way to express the currency in China.

There, now we have two nice vocabulary words:
abbreviation = 頭文字
currency = 通貨, the unit of money used in a country. The currency in Japan is the yen.