We were walking around the house this morning, me and Nadia. We visited different playgrounds. She doesn’t enjoy them all too much, but we stayed on one for some time. Where I’ve seen an interesting advertisement.
Near one of the playgrounds, a shop opened recently. They have this advertisement for notebooks for kids. It’s the school season coming [very soon], and I found it being funny:
Looking at at the advertisement, I was like ‘hmm totally normal,’ like, you know, I’m used to prices being in euros or dollars. So, makes sense, you know.
Like 5.90 euros… but the price was in local currency! Hryvnias!
It’s ₴ 5.90 ₴ 4.90. The difference is one fucking hryvnia! Which is… well, about € 0.02 today.
That made me laugh because it’s like, the discount is like one hrivna difference.
Imagine a banner with
€ 5€4.99. Or in this very case:
€ 0.11€ 0.09.Makes sense, isn’t it? (After all, the name of the shop is ‘Копійочка,’ which is a penny, the coin.)
It looks so silly and so absurd to me that i thought it’s funny, in a way.
Coin
And to continue this story, yesterday’s evening when I was taking Hnat from his nursery school, all of the sudden he told me we cross the road here. And we went a completely different way to home. It was our first time we crossed the road.
We don’t need to do that usually. And we went very new path home. Obviously, it’s very long, but he showed me that his mother (my wife, Solomia) she showed him the way some long time ago and he wanted to show me this new way.
And I was like ‘okay, let’s go there if you want.’
Well, it was good. We have three parks here around us, and so most of the way we were strolling through the park. I told him if he wants we can walk there as well sometimes. Because I like walking different paths, not going the same road again, again and again, and again, and—
We found a coin in the park. Two hryvnias.
And I was like, ‘Hey, look, money! Cool!’ And we have this little how to name it— a tradition of ours, it’s not really a tradition… but, when we see money coins (not just money like someone forgot or lost their purse, but a coin) somewhere, it’s like a sign of good luck. Even despite the money is a joke…
Two cents!
Ah, no. Four cents. Sorry.
I mean, in the countries with stronger economics, you can find one euro, one dollar coin, and… I don’t know, something like that. And at least it’s something but in Ukraine, one dollar is about 40 or 45 hryvnias. And the biggest coin we have is like 10, so it’s like a quarter of a dollar / euro. And that’s a lot by local standards. It’s like 10 hryvnias, they’re quite big and you won’t find them casually. You won’t lose them that easily maybe. So, if you happen to find any coin lying around, anywhere… it’s like one or two hryvnias.
So, yesterday we found two hryvnias.
And Hnat told me like: oh if we’d be that lucky, one day we buy a car!
We don’t have a car right now, but I think we’d buy one any time soon. We have some issues with it.
Jokingly, I told him that ‘yeah, but car is much more expensive than just a coin lying on the ground. You won’t find a money like that luying on the ground. We even have a saying for it.’
‘For this amount of money,’ I told him, ‘we can topple your water bottle with drinking water.’
You can buy drinking water off the special kind of machines: you put money, and you can use like a litre or whatever amount of water you paid for. 2 UAH is less than one litre! And one litre of water is about 2.5 UAH. So, for 10 UAH which is 25 cents you can buy four liters of drinking water. Not bad!
So, I just told him that for this amount of money we can only buy you some water and that’s it. Well, still a sign of good luck for us. Because… well, it’s like you’ve been attentive enough to notice the coin. And that’s it… not that that amount will change anything, obviously.
So, this advertisement today… I enjoyed it being there. I thought ‘are you guys for real or what?’
I think I’m going to practice some short forms talking formats for my blog. And hopefully, I’d get back to the state of talking more easily in different languages. Because, these days I speak mostly one language, Ukrainian. That’s not my native language, but it’s kind of native today. Native verbal language, because as I’ve told before, writing in English is still easier for me than writing in Ukrainian. But talking… it’s the opposite, because I have very little practice with English recently. And quite a lot of practice in Ukrainian.
So that’s it.
Also, by the way, I’m testing the audio being in the RSS feed. It should work like a podcast, if I have just one audio. If I have more than one, it should be like the first one being like a podcast, and the next ones they just should be embedded into the post itself.
I’m going to test how it works.
I transcribed this with Whisper and then rewrote it.
Took me a while to find out Arch’s repository
whisper-cppis having some issues, but recompiling was very simple (with some ChatGPT assistance for speeding up the search), and so I think I’m going to use this software to recognise my audio records.
It was more difficult to edit the transcribed audio than to write the whole thing by hand, so I’m not really sure I’m going to utilise that. We’ll see.
Ah, and we saw this dangerous tree!
Hnat recognised the number on the tree. Asked why it’s there.