My fifth visit to the USA has come to its end so quickly I barely noticed how the week has passed. Now I’m sitting in the Dulles airport waiting for the flight back home and enjoying a pure American lunch in the form of tuna salad sandwich with a can of coke. As it is my tradition, I’m going to make a little record of the impressions collected during this travel.

This year my company delighted me by selecting yet another location in the USA for its annual get-together — Washington D.C. Metro Area — where I have never been before. So I happily packed my backpack, put on my favorite running shoes, grabbed the camera and jumped on a plane hoping to combine business with tourism.

For the first several days I stayed in the center of Washington city, in a walking distance from all the most famous attractions like the White House, the Washington Monument, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the National Mall, the Capitol, Smithsonian museums, and others. And I walked through all of these during two days, savoring fresh air and feeding incredibly friendly but demanding squirrels with chocolate granola bars.

Besides architectural landmarks I also took many pictures of cozy and green neighborhoods, and most importantly I enriched my collection of sewer hatches photos with tons of beautiful specimens. Starting from this trip I decided to photograph the noses of my shoes on the edge of each hatch to convey the idea of its size, which gives me a good excuse to visit all the good places I’ve been to before for the second time at some point.

After the tourism program was over I moved to a wonderful golf resort in Virginia, where I spend two days in productive meetings with my colleagues from all over the world. One of the nights my local friend and colleague took me out and showed me a glimpse of D.C.’s nightlife, which was a lot of fun.

Overall I’m very satisfied with the visit. Despite the busy schedule I had, I feel refreshed and inspired to return to the normal working mode for the next couple of weeks, after which new travel adventures are coming. Alright, it’s time for me to go board the plane. It looks like Kyiv is waiting for me with the wonderful sunny weather!

The original plan to complete my e-book on language learning during winter time didn’t quite work out due to my work on higher priority activities. Nonetheless, I did make a good progress on the draft and will continue to share small pieces from it in this blog, until I finally brace myself and finish the thing. Today I have for you a chapter about finding time for learning a language. Enjoy!

Of all the time I spent to learn English and Spanish only about 10% was dedicated time consciously taken away from other activities, when I sat down, disconnected from the outside world, and immersed into learning materials. Most of that happened during the first stage of learning, when the basic structure of the language was being established in my brain.

The remaining 90% came from two sources:
1. Combining listening to audio materials with routine activities.
2. Substituting leisure information consumption with content in a target language.

My two favorite activities to combine with audio learning are walking and housework. Apart from being the healthiest way to move around, walking is wonderful because in itself it requires very little mental attention leaving 99% of brain cycles unused. So you just grab an iPod loaded with learning material before going out and, voilà, the street becomes your classroom. Similarly with the housework — instead of carelessly mediating or having your thoughts wander while washing dishes, tidying up or ironing, you can make use of this time by listening to a podcast or an audiobook. There are many more activities that can provide time for listening practice: driving, jogging, exercising, etc.

At some point in the process of learning English I made the decision that I later found out to be fundamental for success — I decided that 100% of the content that I consume for pleasure and self-development purposes would be in English. I read books and articles, listened to music and podcasts, watched movies — all in English. In such a way the time that I would have otherwise spent just for relaxation served that same purpose, but was simultaneously used for improving my listening and comprehension skills in English language. Later I applied the same tactics with Spanish and it worked perfectly too. Of course, such approach becomes possible only at a certain point, when you can understand significant part of the content already. But this point definitely comes much earlier than most people think.

I enjoy observing how people manage their personal lives. Everyone has their own special way to organize themselves. Some rely on complicated time management systems and todo lists. Others just relax and play it by ear all the time.

For me finding the right balance between systematic approach and healthy spontaneity has always been an exciting challenge. Since I became a conscious adult, my self-management approach has evolved through many stages. Today I can say that I am a very organized person who spends little time on self-organization thanks to the well-designed system in place.

Recently as I was thinking about what actually constitutes my system I started to notice that many of the practices that I apply for managing my personal life are very similar to the way big corporations run their businesses. Below are some of them.

1. Maintaining Inventory of Assets

Any business executive should know what assets are at their disposal. In the same way I always have at my fingertips the complete information about all the things I own. About a year ago I spent time on creating an exhaustive inventory of personal possessions. Since then I maintain it up-to-date and keep getting smarter in buying decisions, improving the quality of my wardrobe while spending less money.

2. Accounting for Expenses

Any business needs to carefully control its costs in order to remain profitable and grow further. The same is true on the personal level. Luckily a typical person has much less expenditure items than a business, so that there is no need to employ a full-time accountant to keep track of one’s spendings. In fact, I dedicate no more than five minutes a day to personal finance, and I can tell precisely how much I spent on taxis or eating out during any given month over the last three years.

3. Streamlining Processes

Effectiveness of any business is a function of how well its processes are designed. Personal effectiveness is no different. If I didn’t have a process for making money transactions during the day (which simply consists in collecting receipts in the wallet), I wouldn’t be able to account for my daily expenses in just five minutes in the morning of the following day. If I didn’t fold all my T-shirts and pants in exactly the same way all the time, I wouldn’t be able to get dressed neatly in just a couple of minutes.

4. Having a Preferred Vendors List

Big businesses do not go out buying stuff and services from whomever. Instead they maintain a list of preferred vendors. These are few trusted suppliers with very good reputation. Similarly, I have few brands in my wardrobe, buy groceries in few supermarkets, and have breakfast in few cafeterias. This allows me to benefit from loyalty programs, focused shopping during sales season, and even have a couple of free lunches during the year. Now, that doesn’t mean that I will stick to the same set till the end of my days. Like any big corporation I revise my preferred vendors list regularly to make sure that I’m always getting the best.

What follows is a little piece from my upcoming e-book on language learning. Enjoy!

If you decided to learn a foreign language why even bother with self-learning if you can just sign up for a language school? Well, there are two fundamental reasons:

1. Learning in a language school is way more expensive than learning on your own.
2. Learning on your own can be more effective than learning in a school.

Recently I’ve read an advertisement of one of the numerous language schools in Kyiv. It offered six levels of programs in Spanish from beginner to advanced (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2). Each program is one semester long and costs around $250. It means that to get to C2 level I would have to spend $1,500 and attend 3-hour classes twice a week during three years.

For comparison, learning on my own I spent no more than $100 in total on books, audio courses and software and got to the same level in two years. By integrating learning into my daily routines (like commuting or housework) I didn’t have to allocate any separate time during the week and could attend swimming pool or salsa classes instead of language lessons. In the end I used the money that I saved and indulged myself with a wonderful two-week trip to Spain.

But even price considerations aside, I believe that learning on your own is fundamentally more effective than attending classes. The reason for this is that when you learn on your own you are being proactive and curious, which is a powerful catalyst for acquiring and retaining knowledge, while someone who chooses classes passively hopes that other people will select the material and put the knowledge in their head.

From a pure practical standpoint, can you name me one thing that a language school might offer of which I cannot find better on my own these days? Well-structured material? Well, I can find plenty done by exceptionally talented volunteer teachers around the world and distributed for a modest price or for free. Speaking classes with natives? Well, I can choose from millions on Skype and talk with those who share my interests and values.

Let’s face it: nowadays the only unique thing people get when they pay for classes is the feeling of being obliged to learn, otherwise money will go to waste. I don’t need to pay someone $1,500 to deal with my laziness and lack of self-drive. Do you?

The year that is about to end was super-exciting for me in all dimensions. I tried, accomplished, experienced, and learned lots of new things. At the same time I reaffirmed my beliefs and grew my love to all the good things I knew before. My proactive habits became more internalized, more part of me, to the point where I decided to switch to so-called “goalless” approach in self-development.

I feel I no longer need to set concrete goals and create detailed action plans to achieve them. Instead, just by doing things that seem right in any given moment I can be accomplishing big things. Therefore for 2012 I will not be defining any specific goals like I have done before. In fact I got rid of the pages where I had listed my goals for preceding years altogether.

Here are some of the good things that I’m happy to have done in 2011:

• Started treating sleep, nutrition and exercise as #1 priority in life
• Became even better swimmer and runner
• Blogged regularly on Malanke.com and on Malanke aprende español
• Redesigned both sites getting rid of unnecessary clutter
• Optimized self-management approach and systems
• Visited Spain for the first time staying at Barcelona, Seville and Madrid
• Visited Florida for the first time, staying at Miami Beach and travelling to Key West
• Had a great vacation on Crete with my girlfriend
• Became fluent in Spanish with the help of my wonderful intercambio friends
• Read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Spanish
• Participated in a real marathon
• Improved relationships with the people I care about
• Became a better employee and a better manager at work

I’m sure even more exciting things will happen in 2012.

I wish everyone a very healthy and fruitful year.

Happy Holidays!

It’s been three years since I started this blog. Originally intended as a training ground for improving my English writing skills it has served its purpose quite well. Today I’m much more confident in my ability to express ideas in a clear and eloquent way. Now it’s time to step up to a new level and undertake a real writing challenge — create a short book.

It’s going to be a minimalistic non-fiction e-book on the subject of language learning based on my experience with English and Spanish. In it I will share my recipes on how it is possible for adults with a full-time job to become fluent in a new language from scratch in about two years with no classes and with minimal impact on established mode of life. I already have the initial skeleton and several chapters ready. The soft goal is to complete the first draft by the end of winter and during spring finalize it and self-publish.

I invite all of my friends and readers to leave comments to this post telling what they find to be the most difficult and challenging in the process of learning foreign languages and I will make sure to address those things in my book. I look forward to hear from you guys and for now I’m leaving you with the current draft of the introduction below. Hasta pronto!

Introduction

As long as I can remember I’ve always been fascinated by people fluent in many languages. Born to a Romanian father and Ukrainian mother I myself had all the potential to be raised multilingual. But my family lived in Ukraine all the time and dad was busy working, so I didn’t learn Romanian and grew up acquiring only two default languages of my fellow citizens: Ukrainian and Russian.

I was taught English since fifth grade. In 2007 while studying for master’s degree I realized that despite tedious years of learning and getting constant A’s I couldn’t maintain a decent conversation with native speakers or read unadapted literature. Clearly it was time to rethink the approach.

Fast-forward two years.

By 2009 I became fluent in English and it allowed me to change jobs from an engineer in a small telecommunications company to a manager position in marketing department of a global technology firm. Satisfied with such progress I decided to undertake next challenge and learn Spanish from scratch.

Fast-forward two years.

In 2011 as I write these lines I can speak Spanish effortlessly and regularly practice this language with new colleagues in Argentina, where my company has recently acquired a business, as well as with my new friends in Spain and across Latin America. At the age of 26 I proudly count myself multilingual with four languages in the pocket, and I plan to learn one more before reaching 28. Most likely that will be Romanian, the language of my father.

How did I make such progress? The short answer is: smart self-education. The longer answer is this book, in which I share all things that helped me along the way.

As I write these lines I’m living through one of those moments which are best described by Spanish saying “¡Esto sí que es la vida!”, which means “That’s what I call life!”. Why? Well, for a “couple” of reasons… It’s 10 p.m. and I’m sitting on an open balcony at +25˚C listening to Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Mak’er” mixed with the murmur of the sea, breathing one of the freshest airs on Earth, still feeling the aftertaste of delicious Mediterranean dinner.

The name of this paradise is Crete. After spending six days here I have no doubt that the choice of vacation destination my girlfriend and I made was perfect. The island proves to be incredibly tourist-friendly and authentic at the same time, having everything one needs to relax and refresh. Renting a car for four days (which is by the way ridiculously simple and way more cost-effective compared to mass excursions) allowed us to explore many places and form more or less complete impression of what Crete has to offer. And here is everything: beautiful nature, wonderful beaches, romantic little towns, cultural sites and more.

The variety of beaches can equally satisfy people looking for tranquil family vacation and those wanting to try water sports or find seclusion in nature. There’s sand and there’s pebble, there’s deep and there’s shallow, there’s crowded and there’s deserted.

We had a chance to walk through three largest towns on Crete which are anything but large: Heraklion, Chania, and Rethymno. All of them have equally nice old towns with cozy narrow streets, venetian ports and, of course, authentic tavernas. Most of all we liked Rethymno close to which our hotel was located.

Greek cuisine deserves a special word from vegetarian/seafood-eating me for variety and freshness of the ingredients that together form very simple but tasty (and healthy) dishes. If you are crazy olive lover like me, then, yes, this is your heaven. The level of service in all places we went to pleasantly surprised and in general Greeks leave an impression of very welcoming and hospitable people.

Okay, it’s now time for me to sleep to then enjoy the last sunny day here. Ah, and before I go, here’s a small photo album.

There is one specific benefit of practicing order in everyday life that I’ve noticed so many times during the last couple of weeks that it has amassed forcing me to write this post. I am talking about using things as reminders of themselves. The easiest way to explain what I mean by that is to look at my typical routine on returning home after a work day.

I enter my apartment tired and happy after the exciting salsa class that followed a super productive day at work. I have about an hour to unpack, grab a quick supper and get ready to go to bed if I want to wake up refreshed next morning. In addition to that, there are many little things I want to squeeze into the remaining time. In fact so many that I would definitely forget about some if I didn’t practice order in my living space and couldn’t use things as reminders of themselves.

Here’s what usually happens. My first thought is that I must make sure my swimming gear is taken out of the backpack to dry up during the night. So the first thing I do is put the backpack on the empty floor in the middle of the room. Then while changing clothes I remember that I will need ice next morning. With that I go to the kitchen and take the ice container out of the freezer and put it on the empty table. While the water for the ice is being boiled in the kettle, I return to the living room, see the backpack and start unpacking it. In the process I remember that I need to sync new podcasts to my iPod so that the next morning I have my regular Spanish lesson on the go. But I decide to do that after the supper, so I just put iPod on the empty desk next to the laptop. After finishing with the supper I notice the ice container and see that the boiled water has cooled by now, so I fill the container and put it in the freezer. Back in the room I see the iPod on the desk and it triggers me to turn on the computer and sync the podcasts. While sync is in progress I see a lone video file on the empty desktop and that reminds me that I promised to email it to a friend, so I do that…

I could go on and mention many other things I do that evening, but I think you get the idea by now. There is no need to worry about todo lists or implement complicated GTD systems, because things can remind of themselves. The only necessary condition is the discipline to keep the surrounding environment in order.

This is a continuation of my previous post, in which I shared the experience of making an exhaustive inventory of personal possessions. Now, as I promised, it’s time to explain the philosophical background behind this activity.

I first started thinking on this subject consciously on the day when I was moving out of my university dormitory. It was the end of the first well-defined period of my adult life — college years. And I remember very well the day I first entered my dorm room with a mid-size bag that contained clothes, shoes, tableware and the rest of things I needed for everyday life. Six years later, after packing the wardrobe, after collecting books from the shelves and after drawing numerous sacks from underneath the bed, I found myself having difficulties putting everything in a mid-size car. That made me feel obese in spite of my 60 kilos. I asked myself what it would be like if I decided to move at the age of 50? Would I need to rent a truck?

That was how the obvious realization came to me: people tend to accumulate things as they go through their lives. And at first it may seem logical: we add new hobbies, we develop new habits, so we get new things. But is it indeed so? Maybe we just substitute old hobbies with the new ones and develop new habits in place of the old ones? If you think of it, there’s finite amount of time we have every day, every month and every year. Which means that there’s only so much attention we can give to each thing. If we take on something new, we inevitably leave behind something old. And when we are leaving something behind the hardest is to part with the material thing. For example, it may have been years since I last played tennis, and I clearly have it very low on my priority list for the foreseeable future, but I still keep the racket under the bed, just in case. Also there I have a pair of dusty roller blades, a couple of worn-out footballs and several bags with who-knows-what. Does this sound familiar? Fortunately it’s no longer my case, as I now proactively manage my possessions and own only what I need and use. Let’s see how I do it on the example of my shoe wardrobe.

Following is the methodology I use:

1. Analyze all the situations for which I need shoes and create a list of categories;
2. Define requirements for all categories;
3. Define required quantity for each category;
4. Select brands that fit the requirements;
5. Gradually build and maintain the inventory based on the “one in — one out” rule;
6. Periodically review and adjust the list of categories.

My current inventory looks like this:

1. Classic shoes. These are shoes worn for formal occasions with suit and tie. The main requirement is imposing look. Required quantity: 1 pair of boots and 1 pair of shoes. Brand: Tommy Hilfigher.
2. Casual shoes. These are shoes worn to look good and to feel good. The main requirements are style and comfort. Required quantity: 1 pair in light color, 1 pair in dark color. Brand: Camper.
3. Performance shoes. These are shoes made for walking. The main requirements are durability and comfort. Required quantity: 1 pair of boots, 1 pair of shoes, 1 pair of sandals. Brand: Ecco.
4. Sport shoes. These are shoes made to enjoy favorite sports. The main requirements are comfort and durability. Required quantity: 1 pair of running shoes, 1 pair of football shoes. Brand: Nike.

This same approach I use for managing every other types of possessions, including clothes, gadgets, sport accessories, etc. And since implementing this system I have observed numerous benefits of having it, which could be nailed down to five main advantages:

1. You don’t spend time on maintenance of what you don’t use.
2. You increase quality of what you own by not increasing the quantity.
3. You make better buying decisions with no impulse shopping.
4. You become lightweight and easy to move.
5. You help the poor and the planet.

I’ve done it! Yes indeed, I’ve read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in original Spanish version. The satisfaction and immense sense of accomplishment that I feel now resulted from nothing but a public promise to complete this undertaking by the end of spring, followed by three month of dedication and commitment.

The manner in which I approached this task may have seemed funny or even a bit robotic to most people. To remind you, I calculated the average number of pages I had to read every day to finish the book in time and started reading according to the schedule. My daily norm of 6 pages at the beginning took about 70 minutes to go through and by the end of it the time required reduced to about 30 min. The number of words looked-up in the dictionary went from 30 to just 7—8 per page.

So what did I get out of this effort? Well, aside from dramatically improving my Spanish language skills (not too humble, huh?), I also observed and learned a couple of things in the process that I want to share in this post.

First, I affirmed my belief that order and routine don’t make an activity boring and in fact, given the right attitude, they can serve as catalyst to multiply the pleasure. To answer the question I got asked most often by my friends, whether the necessity to read on schedule kills the joy in it, I’d say a flat no. I’ve absolutely enjoyed the masterpiece savoring the tiniest details I would have certainly missed if I read it at a gulp translated to my native language.

Second, I realized that one hour of time is an incredible asset and should be valued higher than any treasure. A couple of times due to unforeseen personal or work matters I deviated from schedule slightly and later tried to catch up. It turned out that it incredibly difficult to do without affecting other things like work or beloved leisure activities. So after catching up with my longest delay of five days I made everything possible to not deviate again.

And lastly, my most important revelation lies in that I understood the power of dedicating morning hours for personal development. I’ve read about this endless number of times, but never discovered the full potential of it. Although I’ve been doing abs exercises and swimming before work for several years now, I haven’t ever tried doing any brain activities at dawn.

During last 83 day my morning regimen looked like this: 5:45 waking up, shower, 6—7 reading, 7—7:30 breakfast, 7:30—8:15 transit to the pool accompanied by an audio lesson or a podcast in Spanish, 8:15—9:15 swimming, 9:15— 0:30 transit to work with stopping by the favorite cafeteria for second breakfast accompanied by another Spanish audio.

Now that I’ve finished the book I can use the 6—7 timeslot for working on whatever other goals I might come up with. In fact, I started calling this period “my precious morning hour” and the watch photo on top of this post captures a moment before this hour begins on one of the days during the challenge.

During my previous visits to the U.S. I had a chance to see three corners of the country: the North-East, where I’ve been to NYC, Boston and Philadelphia; the South-West, where I’ve spend some time in Las Vegas and in the Bay Area; and the North-West, where I’ve explored Seattle with its suburbs. That’s why before my fourth visit I was secretly hoping that my company will select the remaining fourth corner — Florida — as the location for next annual meeting. And so it happened!

I’ve arrived to Miami International Airport on Monday afternoon carrying only one backpack, which is my favorite Dakine Network model. This was my most minimalistic travel to date, and it demonstrated cleary that having quality gear combined with smart planning can make travelling much easier. Despite the small load I brought all I needed, including laptop, photo camera, casual clothing and shoes, 2 sets of official clothing, swimming gear, and even 2 thick books.

Now, given that I’m a bit lazy today and knowing that pictures are worth a thousand words, instead of describing my experiences in detail I will recommend you to check out my Miami and Key West albums. I will just say that besides work-related meetings, during my 5-day stay at Miami Beach I’ve enjoyed swimming in warm and incredibly salty ocean, acquainted myself with Art Deco architecture, participated in beach volleyball tournament with my colleagues (in fact my team won bronze medals), partied at one of the best nightclubs of the U.S., talked in Spanish with my colleagues from Argentina and Chile, did yoga on the beach, traveled all the way down to Key West island, seen alligators at Everglades National Park, and had lunch at an authentic Florida farm.

After all that it was kind of sad to leave Miami but there’s time for everything so I moved up to Seattle where I’ll stay for a couple of weeks, working from the local office of my company.

Back in November 2010 I made my first concrete step towards minimalism in practice by making a categorized list of all the things I own. Since then I’ve been carefully updating the inventory, observing changes and contemplating the effect, which just having such list has on quality of day-to-day life and especially on buying decisions. Four months later I’m ready to share some results.

Now, before going any further, I’ll lay down the rules that I follow with the list of possessions. First, I include only durable goods (meaning no consumables like shaving cream or wine bottles). Second, I count only items that are my personal (since I’m living alone at the moment, it’s pretty much everything anyway, including dishes, towels, an so on). Third, I group some items as one (for example several identical pieces of underwear count as one item). Fourth, the list is exhaustive (meaning that even the pin from Radiohead’s concert in Prague, ivory elephant from India and fridge magnet from NYC are all counted).

So what are the current numbers? Okay, the total number is 183 and here’s the breakdown by categories:

• Shoes: 13 items
• Clothing: 33 items
• Underwear: 9 items
• Accessories: 14 items
• Sport gear: 25 items
• Tableware: 7 items
• Linen: 10 items
• Tools: 9 items
• Souvenirs: 17 items
• Gadgets: 16 items
• Books: 31 items

Now that I have the numbers what do I do with them? What am I trying to achieve? Well, this is simple. My immediate goal is to reduce quantity while improving quality of things. For the nearest future I’m shooting for 100 items. I have already identified a big number of things to donate (like books that I’ve read and have no plans to read again or clothes that I almost never wear). So I’m sure the reduction of old unnecessary stuff will happen successfully.

Another thing I need to take care of is preventing new unnecessary stuff from coming in. There are two parts to this. First, I shouldn’t buy what I don’t need, and second, I shouldn’t get as presents what I don’t need. On the first one I can assure you that after composing the list I developed an incredibly strong immunity to any kind of impulse shopping. The second one is trickier. Isn’t declaring that you don’t wish to take any presents offensive to one’s friends and relatives? Well, I’m sure my friends will understand, and I’m sure they hate spending time trying to think of an affordable and useful present same way as I do.

This said, I should tell that it’s still possible to make my minimalistic soul rejoice with a material thing. It’s just that that thing should be exactly the one I really miss. For example on last Valentine’s day I got as present from my girlfriend a pair gorgeous Nike running shoes, which made me extremely happy, because these shoes were exactly the ones I wanted. Same way even now I wouldn’t refuse iPhone 4, Audi A3 and several other things. And of course I always happily accept quality consumable goods, like fresh fruits in moderate amounts, nice wine, cashew nuts and so on. But the best present still is just a good company of friends. So do come over and don’t worry about presents!

Well, there’s certainly more to say on the subject on minimalism and I’ve already had some interesting discussions with my friends on this topic. In future I hope to write more about both philosophical principles and practical advantages of minimalist. Stay tuned.

Today is the first day of spring according to the calendar. As usual Ukrainian weather does not hurry to adjust accordingly but I’m sure it’s just a matter several weeks. For me the winter that just ended was awesome in all regards. In fact I was able to achieve 2 of my 3 yearly goals set up for 2011 in just two months — I got a decent photo camera and went to an unforgettable trip to Spain. So now in remaining 10 months of the year I can fully concentrate on my third and the most ambitious goal of becoming fluent in Spanish.

A serious goal requires decisive actions so I’ve come up with an idea of a public challenge that should motivate me. During this spring I will be reading a big book in original Spanish version with the goal to finish it by May 31. The book is “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez and the edition I have has 500+ pages, which means that I’ll have to read about 6 pages per day on average. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal, however with my current speed I’ll need to spend at least 60 min a day. Such slowness is explained by a special thoroughness I exercise while reading books in languages that I’m learning. For example, I look up every single word that I don’t know and make a note on it. The effectiveness of such approach can be debated, but I’m sure that it will work for me, because it has already worked with the English language.

To make it even more accountable I will be reporting on the progress regularly in the comments to this post. As of today I’m on schedule — 6 pages have been read ;)

Hector Lavoe sang in his famous salsa song “todo tiene su final, nada dura para siempre”. So indeed my wonderful two-week trip to Spain has come to its end. Soon I’ll be back to fierce February colds of Ukraine diving back into work and day-to-day activities. But before that I’d like to record the things that impressed me the most during my stay in this beautiful country. To make it simpler I’ll nail it down to only five items.

1. Weather — A Sunny Paradise

It was incredibly warm for this time of year anywhere I went. In Barcelona I enjoyed sunny weather with average temperature of about +17° C. In Seville it was warmer, up to +20° C. Even in Madrid, which is far from the sea in the middle of the peninsula the thermometer didn’t drop below +12° C. What I noticed though is that this kind of weather is considered quite cold by Spaniards, because when I walked around in a T-shirt most of people around me were wearing sweaters and jackets with scarves.

2. Food — Menú Del Día, Tapas, Healthy Food Buffets

Before coming to Spain I’ve heard quite different opinions about Spanish food ranging from “it’s a gastronomical heaven” to “it totally sucks”. The traditional dishes known to me were limited to paella (which is basically what’s called in Ukraine “плов”) and tortilla (which is equivalent to Ukraine’s “омлет”). I also heard something about tapas but that was vague.

The most interesting findings to me were related not to specific dishes or recipes (although jamón with tomato bread and crema catalana were quite something!) but rather to the modes of taking food. Cafeterias, buffets and restaurants open not earlier than 12 p.m., oftentimes 2 p.m. During daytime there are two options available: eat “menú del día” or “comer de carta”. With the first one you pay fixed price of €10–16 depending on the place and can select from predefined set of dishes of the day: first dish, second dish, dessert and drink. The other option allows you to select any dishes from the menu, but pay for each separately, which will end up not less than 50% more expensive.

During nighttime, there are again two options: “cenar” or “ir de tapas”. The first one is a typical going out to the restaurant, nothing interesting there. The other one is much more authentic. Instead of just going to one place for the whole night you go to several places spending in each usually up to one hour drinking beer or wine accompanied by tiny plates of food. These small portions are called tapas and can be made of anything including bread, vegetables, ham, and most importantly seafood. I totally liked the experience of going for tapas because of its variety and, frankly I can’t seat over one plate for more than 20 minutes.

Another thing that I totally enjoyed in Barcelona and Madrid was all-you-can-eat buffets specialized in fresh and healthy foods. In Barcelona there are two chains operating: Lactuca and Fresc Co. Each of them has several restaurants in the city. In Madrid I was able to find only Fresco Cos. The concept is simple you pay €8.95 on weekdays or €10.95 on nights and weekends and can help yourself to as much food as you want in whatever combination you want, selecting from variety of salads, vegetables, fruits, soups, pizzas, pastas, desserts, drinks. To me it was like a vegetarian’s heaven: tens of kinds of lettuces, vegetables, olives, all local from Spain. Now, the most interesting observation related to these buffets is that most of the time they were half-empty, while at McDonald’s next door people stood in line to get their cheeseburger menu for about the same price. Indeed, people better value what they don’t have.

3. Cities & Towns — A Labyrinth Full of Tangerine Trees

All cities and towns I had a chance to visit are incredibly “user-friendly”. I would rate them by overall experience starting from the best one as follows: Barcelona, Toledo, Sitges, Seville, Madrid. Yes, the capital didn’t impress me much, maybe because it’s too big-cityish and very similar by its vibe to Kyiv. Seville I will remember forever as the only town where every single time I went out of hotel I got lost, so complicated are the labyrinths of its ancient streets. The tangerines trees planted all around full of ripe fruits were something new to me. And, of course, I couldn’t resist the temptation to tear one off and try it. Now, apparently the type of tangerine trees they plant in towns is different from those in gardens because despite its sexy look the fruit tasted, well, bad.

In Catalonia I was lucky to get both feeling of a big city (Barcelona) and a small town (Sitges). The last one is courtesy of my colleague, who invited me to spend a day there. Delicious lunch at open terrace next to the beach under clear sky and +20° C and surfers desperately trying to catch the wave will be my memories of Sitges for a long time. Now, Barcelona seemed to have everything a citizen might wish for: optimal population density, nice transportation system, modern infrastructure, historical center, beaches, parks, good restaurants, shopping districts, everything.

My last excursion was to the capital of Castilla La Mancha region wonderful town called Toledo. It’s 45-minute bus ride away from Madrid and I had serious doubts about going there. But after all I decided to go and now I don’t regret it at all. The whole town is located on a big hill with the most remarkable buildings being castle and cathedral. The interweaving narrow streets connect these two with a couple of cozy squares and gardens. It’s in one of these gardens where I had my best menú del día with sangría (local refreshing drink made of vine and lemonade) to the tune of Spanish music.

4. Lifestyle — No Going Out Before 10 p.m. & No Shopping on Sundays

So, do Spanish people really have siesta? The short answer based on what I’ve seen would be yes. I even got a couple of photos with people taking a nap outside at midday time. In small towns like Sitges most of shops are closed during 1—4 p.m. I also noticed the overall lateness of local people. They have their lunch not earlier than at 2 p.m. and go out for dinner starting 10 p.m. So if you’re an early-riser like me you can be sure you’ll always get the best table.

One of the big surprises to me was to find out that most of the businesses are closed throughout Sundays. I think this is because Spain is mostly catholic. But it was kind of illogical to see thousands of tourists wandering around and all shops and malls being closed. And it’s quite contrary to Ukraine where Sunday seems to be one of the most popular shopping days.

5. Nature & Land — Olive Trees & Mountain Roads

When planning my trip I intentionally wanted to use all possible means of transportation, first to just check them out and second to get the best feeling of Spanish land and nature. It’s one thing seeing it from a plane and quite different contemplating it in a bus window. So my transfer from Seville to Madrid was a 6-hour bus ride all the way from the south of Andalucía to the center of the country. On our way the view had changed gradually from green fields full of olive trees to rocky mountains with forests and snowy peaks. The look of green fields and gardens made me think that people working on them do care about their work, no wonder then that half of the vegetables available in Ukrainian supermarkets come from Spain. But most of all on the way I was impressed by roads in mountains, which sometimes curved around cliffs or hung up in the air at heights of 50-storey building. Needless to say, that through the whole journey the roads had at least two lines in each direction so no dangerous overtaking were necessary.

So these are in short my biggest impressions of long-awaited visit to Spain. I’m sure I’ll come back very soon already being fluent in Spanish by then. Next time I’ll definitely come with a good company and most likely choose dates in May or September to get the real feel of Spanish beaches and to have a couple of bicycle tours through Catalonia or maybe Galicia…

So, dreams do come true. I’m starting to write this note sitting in Barcelona airport waiting for my flight to Seville. It’s been 7 days since I arrived to Spain and I love everything here: beautiful city, wonderful land, mild weather, friendly people, and of course Spanish language. The last one makes me especially happy because after studying it on my own for some two years I got a chance to immerse into an environment where it’s spoken and actively apply what I’ve learned.

I don’t know if it’s because of my Romanian roots or maybe because of having listened to so many podcasts in Spanish but I don’t feel out of place here at all. So far I haven’t had any problems communicating with locals. A couple of times I was even able to throw in a joke, which to my surprise was understood and laughed at. So as they say here: “querer es poder”.

If you excuse me I’ll now go and board my plane and continue from there, okay?

So, I’m now up in the sky enjoying Mediterranean Sea view. Where were we?

The primary purpose of my visit to Barcelona was to attend MWC 2011, which turned out to be a great educational experience. All technology leaders from all over the planet have gathered in one place to showcase their cutting-edge products and discuss latest trends. During four days of the event I had pleasure to be accompanied by my colleagues from 5 different countries with whom we went to explore local cuisine every night. Tapas, tortillas, paellas, crema catalana, flan are just the few of the variety of delicious things I discovered here. I even made an exception in my vegetarianism to try famous jamón.

Of all Barcelona sights I’ve probably seen the most famous ones and all by walking: Las Ramblas, Gaudí’s masterpieces, El Barrio Gótico, Barceloneta, numerous parks. The city is as pedestrian-friendly as it gets. But even for the lazy ones, metro and buses routes take just a couple of minutes to figure out. Another thing that deserves a special mentioning is the place where I stayed. It’s called MelonDistrict Marina and is a kind of student residence hall. The buildings are brand new; the tiny rooms are very comfortable and (most important!) minimalistic, furnished with IKEA stuff.

Now, there was only one thing that I didn’t quite like at Barcelona and it was Catalonian language. Not that I have anything against it, quite the opposite, I respect people cherishing and preserving the local language, but for me it was confusing a bit given that I didn’t feel very much confident with Spanish at the time I came. But where I go next there should be no more confusion, because my next destinations are Seville, Madrid and maybe Toledo.

Okay, so now I’m off to the heart of Andalucía, which some call the most real and authentic Spain you can get. We’ll see. Stay tuned with my photo reports. Saludos!

I’m now sitting in a cozy compartment of a train which carries me through the snowy meadows and forests to the very western edge of Ukraine where in some 30 hours I’ll celebrate New Year. This is a wonderful time to take a look back and reflect on all the goodness brought by the year 2010 and, of course, to set up ambitious plans for 2011.

In all regards 2010 was an exciting year for me. On all fronts I achieved notable improvements and grew even stronger my love to the things I do, be it work, swimming, mambo dancing, or learning Spanish.

Before I jump into detailed report on how I performed against 2010 goals, I’d like to share really quickly my wild enthusiasm about my first specific steps towards becoming a minimalist. I’ve been excited about the idea of minimalism for quite a while inspired by reading the works of Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi. Actually, I’m certain that minimalism was somewhere deep in my genes forever, because as long as I can remember I preferred things in lesser quantity and of better quality. In childhood, for example, I would rather get one tiny Lego set once a year than a new cheap Chinese toy every day.

Definitely the major event which was a giant leap towards my minimalistic ideals was my move to a new apartment this fall. I was incredibly lucky to rent probably one of the most wisely designed apartments in the city which despite it’s small size perfectly fitted all my stuff. While moving in I inventoried all my personal possessions including garments, shoes, tableware, tools, gadgets, books and even souvenirs like fridge magnets and pins. The total number of things I ended up with is 160 and shows that I was on this way already, maybe just unconsciously. The result of the exercise — a categorized list of possessions — allowed me to define the optimization strategy, which already allowed me to reduce the total number and proves to be helpful for making better buying decisions. In the new year I plan to lessen the number of things I own even further to fit into 100.

Now I’m going to quickly review my 2010 goals which were structured by activity and I’ll start with salsa dancing. It’s funny that during this year I understood that the dance I love so much and in which I want to develop my skills should be actually called mambo and not salsa. In fact “salsa” seems to be a commercialized umbrella term under which many people gather quite incompatible things with quite different philosophies behind them. I’m not going to get into detail here and just limit myself to telling that I’m positive that I enjoy dancing on 2 to a jazzy and mamboish music (aka salsa NY) rather than pop-influenced on 1 (aka salsa LA). In terms of the specific goals I think I achieved all of them becoming quite good, regularly attending parties and appearing on some cool pictures.

In swimming, where my goals were probably the most aggressive, I did not formally achieve my timing objectives, but the process of trying was a pure pleasure. I was able to improve 50m freestyle from 42” to 36” instead of planned 35” which is already only about 1.5 slower than the world record holder. This means that if I participated in a professional competition I would be past half the distance and well on my way back by the time the leader would reach the finish. Isn’t it an achievement for someone who by the age of 22 couldn’t swim at all?

On languages front I tried to make the best use of every available second and did the maximum possible amount of listening and reading both in English and in Spanish. What I understood very clearly during this year is that there cannot possibly be a point in time when you could say “now I finished learning this language”, instead it’s a never-ending process of continuous improvement. And I can’t find appropriate words to describe the feeling I get when listening to an authentic news program from Spain I realize that one year ago I wouldn’t make any sense of what they’re saying and now it’s crystal clear.

I hope I haven’t bored you completely by now but still I better move it to a closure by sharing with you my goals for the year 2011. This time I’m going to be super-simple (I’m now minimalist after all) and just have three bullets:

• Buy a decent photo camera
• Become fluent in Spanish
• Visit Spain

For those who are interested to see what failures I hushed up in this post my complete report on 2010 goals is available at the respective section.

Well my friends, writing this post was the last item on my todo list for 2010 so I’m now off to enjoy my mini-vacation in a good company. Or maybe I will ask my good company to be the first-eye reviewer of this post if she would be so kind ;)

I wish happy and prosperous New Year to you and your families. Keep dreaming about good things and keep improving!

It is known that Ukraine is a bilingual country where everybody understands Ukrainian and Russian languages. In day-to-day life part of the population speaks Ukrainian (western, central and northern regions), another part speaks Russian (eastern and southern regions). In some places you can hear a funny mixture of the two languages called “суржик”.

There is, however, an erroneous belief that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar and some people go as far as to say that the two are almost the same.

Hearing this drives me mad so I feel obligated to contribute my modest share into the dissolution of this fallacy. Without further ado let’s take a look at the two excerpts below and see if any of the words look similar.

• В отличии от хозяина он, по крайней мере, старался cодействовать делу. Хотя даже эти попытки оказались тщетными.
• На відміну від господаря він, принаймні, намагався сприяти справі. Щоправда навіть ці спроби виявилися марними.

The first fragment is in Russian and the second is in Ukrainian. They both mean the same and could be roughly translated into English as “Unlike the host he at least tried to facilitate the case. However even these efforts proved to be useless.” As you can see there isn’t a single pair of words that share at least a commont root. Of course this example is a bit of an extreme, and of course there are many words that have the same origins, but the fact is that Russian and Ukrainian are one of the most remote pair among all Slavic languages and share only 62% оf vocabulary. This is by the way much less than between Spanish and French (75%) and about the same as between English and German (60%).

Let’s see on some more examples how significantly basic nouns, adjective and verbs can differ between Russian and Ukrainian. The following sets are written in the English/Russian/Ukrainian order.

• Time/время/час
• Man/мужчина/чоловік
• Interesting/интересный/цікавий
• Red/красный/червоний
• To see/видеть/бачити
• To work/работать/працювати

Lastly, it’s interesting that many Russians don’t understand Ukrainian at all. When my friends and I were in Czech Republic Russian tourists came over to us asking questions in English thinking we were locals when in fact we spoke Ukrainian among ourselves.

Everything here in Ukraine lets you know that summer has passed. It’s the weather, which as if suddenly awoken from a deep dream realized that it was lagging behind and is now trying to catch up with the calendar by raining and blowing cold wind. It’s the usual traffic jams of cars with people who have just returned from their vacations and are desperately trying to remember how to work.

But everything has its own time, so I thank the summer and excitedly greet the autumn, which I’m sure holds even more fun stuff for all of us.

During last three months tons of interesting and exciting things happened to me. To record the most pleasant experiences, achievements and discoveries I will award top prizes in several nominations “The Best … of Summer ‘10″. So, here we go.

Non-fiction book — “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely

The book acquaints readers with the discipline of “Behavioral Economics” and contains a lot of amazing  experiments showing how predictably irrational people really are. Most of all I liked the chapter explaining the difference between social and market behavioral norms.

Fiction book — “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka

Well, I know that it’s a part of high school curriculum and shame on me for not reading it ages ago. But late is better than never. Fundamental story for an intelligent person to read.

Movie — “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” directed by Juan José Campanella

Recommended by my favorite Spanish podcaster Mercedes León this Argentine movie left a strong impression on me. Thrilling, emotional, technically perfect and with a brilliant ending.

Purchase — MacBook Pro 13-inch

With no doubt this is the best consumer device I’ve ever laid my hands on. Perfect design, incomparable usability and absolute conformity with what I value in things — quality and simplicity.

Event — Rostov-on-Don Salsa Congress “Third Front”

After this event, I can declare myself completely and hopelessly addicted to salsa NY and mambo music. Great organization, unforgettable atmosphere, wonderful people, and a lot of fun. Many thanks to my teacher Dima for introducing to this culture.

Music — Ray Barretto and Tito Puente

This summer I discovered for myself two great legends of latin jazz and mambo. Once you tried dancing to their rhythms, you fall in love with this music forever.

Software — OmmWriter

With switching to Mac a whole world of new software has opened to me. The biggest impression so far left the beautiful and minimalistic text editor OmmWriter, using which I’m actually writing this post. No distractions whatsoever, just a sheet of paper and the flow of your thoughts.

Website — Onoma.es

Great online resource for Spanish verbs conjugation which clearly shows where the irregularities are. Very light, convenient and usable design. I actually switched to Onoma for quick conjugation lookup.

Achievement — Improvement of 50m results in swimming

I have to admit that the swimming goals that I set for this year may be a bit too high. But if they weren’t such who knows how I would perform. During summer I achieved 40” in freestyle, 46” in butterfly, 49” in breaststroke and 59” in backstroke on 50m. And we’ll see if I can’t get to where I planned for 2010.

This is about it. Of course I could have added much more nominations, like for example award Rostov’s cafeteria “Пить Кофе” (on the photo above) with “The Most Delicious Food” prize. But then I would probably take too long.

And what about your summer prize-winners in these nominations?

Finalmente siento que estoy listo para escribir mi primer artículo en español en este blog. Hace casi dos años que practico español y cada día me gusta mas. Es un placer ver como despacio pero con seguridad mi nivel de idioma mejora y profundiza.

Desde el primer día cuando empecé conocer el español he tenido observaciones interesantes sobre esta lengua. El primero es que todos los aspectos de español que no existan en inglés, existan in ruso y ucranio que yo hablo como lenguas maternas. Y todo que puede parecer extranjero para gente ruso y ucranio, es común para anglohablantes. Lo que sobrentiendo son las cosas como conjugaciones de verbos y géneros de sustantivos que presentan un obstáculo difícil para estudiantes de español cuyo idioma materna es inglés. Por el otro lado los aspectos como artículos y presente pasado son las cosas que producen problemas grandes para estudiantes rusos y ucranios. Así que pienso que tengo muchísima suerte de poder hablar ruso, ucranio y inglés antes de empezar estudiar español.

Otro observación es que todo en español es muy lógico y claro. Ya sé que es muy difícil para creer, especialmente para un novicio mirando a más que cincuenta formas de un verbo. Pero apenas se orienta un poco, cosas vienen en orden. Así creo que español tiene una sistema de escritura genial en su simplicidad. Lejos correspondencia prácticamente total entre letras y sonidos, no hay ningunas dudas sobre acentuación. Es porque hay sólo una regla dirigiendo la lectura, y si no se cumpla, se usa el acento agudo. Otra cosa que me encanta es que todos los verbos tienen uno de las tres terminaciones posibles: «-ar», «-er» o «-ir». Y no hay ningunas otras.

También me gustaría compartir con el mundo los recursos y trucos qué me han ayudado mucho y sin cuales no podría llegar a mi presente nivel. Generalmente los métodos que uso con español son en linea con los dados en mi articulo anterior sobre inglés. Trato de sumergirme en el idioma todo el tiempo libre. Como en todas las cosas es el más difícil al principio y apenas llegas al nivel donde puedes puedes usar materiales totalmente en la lengua que aprendes, se pone muy atraído e interesante.

Alegados abajo son todos los recursos y materiales que he usado durante mi viaje con español hasta la fecha. Quiero expresar mi sincera gratitud a todos trabajando en los. Mi especiales gracias van a Mercedes León de Español Podcast para producir el mejor material de español segunda lengua y distribuirlo gratuitamente a todo el mundo.

Podcasts

• Coffee Break Spanish podcast (80 episodios, ≈24 horas de audio)
• Show Time Spanish podcast (40 episodios, ≈16 horas de audio)
• Spanishdict.com podcast (60 episodios, ≈11 horas de vídeo)
• Español Podcast (140 episodios, ≈65 horas de audio)

Cursos

• Michel Thomas Spanish audio cursos (4 cursos, ≈23 horas de audio)

Libros

• «El coronel no tiene quien le escriba» de Gabriel García Márquez (99 paginas en letras grandes)

Tecnologías

• ABBYY Lingvo 12 instalado en mi ordenador y en mi Nokia E51

En mis próximos planes tengo leer varios libros en español original (primeramente de Jorge Luis Borges y Gabriel García Márquez) y escuchar de algunos audio libros inadaptados.

Para concluir quiero decir otra ves que creo que es posible obtener un buen nivel de idioma extranjero sin asistir ningunas clases y sin gastar dinero. Come se dice en español, querer es poder.

Having jumped into a workweek immediately on arrival from Lviv I didn’t have time to make a record of the wonderful time my friends and I had there. It’s better late than never though, so here it is.

To put the story short, everything was just perfect and I got reassured in my opinion that if all Ukraine could become like Lviv we would proudly call our land Europe, not only geographically but also mentally and spiritually.

Positive impressions began just when we located our rented apartment. Half-blindly picked and booked over the Internet for less than modest price, it ended up to be roomy, tidy and situated in the old town, right in front of Potocki Palace (major tourist attraction). What a pleasure it was to come back home every evening to a place like that.

Then there was food, lots and lots of food. Local cafes and restaurants with their delicious cuisine, excellent service and cozy thematic interiors can actually lead one to obesity given that the average check is less than $10. I definitely gained a couple of kilos there.

The primary purpose of our visit — rock-festival “Stare Misto” — also was above any expectations. The way everything was organized reminded me of Radiohead’s show  in Prague — enough room for the audience, no jams on entrance and exits, friendly security personnel and, of course, high quality sound, all for $10 ticket. A special surprise to me was the song with which Okean Elzy started their performance. It was their oldest song “Tam, de nas nema”, the one with which they became popular back in 1998. As I had never been to their concert before I found it very symbolic.

The only thing that came as a small disappointment was attending local salsa club. In that regard we are obviously pampered by the abundance of schools and parties in Kyiv, so what we saw in “Havana” club there didn’t impress us at all and even seemed a bit vulgar.

Some other things that I will remember from this trip were the huge double rainbow we saw at the central square one day and amazing pauper poet, who for twenty minutes was entertaining us with his impromptu verses in the park.

The four days passed very quickly and it was kind of sad to board the train back home, but thought that overnight ride can bring us back any time we want raised our spirit. Anyway, now at least I have the tradition of visiting Lviv every year in May.

As they say you never know what may happen to you in the next instance. Same with me, how on earth could I imagine myself being affected by the worst air travel disruption ever when I was peacefully packing my things to return home from the U.S.? However it’s also true that every (ash) cloud has a silver lining. So instead of getting frustrated and blaming nasty Icelandic volcano I resolved to enjoy this unexpected chance to extend my stay in Seattle. Not only did I spend more productive time working with American colleagues but also experienced Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Chinese and Mexican cuisine and of course attended the biggest local salsa party.

Before coming to Seattle I had an impression of it as a cool city with a massive artistic and alternative culture. That’s probably because I used to be a great fan of grunge music which basically originated here. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were the foundation of my music taste formation. And I should say what I actually saw wasn’t at all disappointing. Walking through Capitol Hill district at night and seeing so many “creative” individuals, art shops, galleries and clubs with live music couldn’t leave any doubts about city’s “coolness”. But apart from that Seattle, as well as the areas surrounding it, is very neat, clean and green. So it’s not for nothing that Washington has its nickname “The Evergreen State”.

One of my first must-see tourist destinations was, of course, the famous Space Needle. I first read about it in Chuck Palahniuk’s book “Invisible Monsters”. Characters from the book went on top of the tower’s observation deck and threw their notes for the future on pieces of paper down by the wind. Being a good tourist I, of course, didn’t follow their example and litter from the top but made a couple of wishes inside my head anyway. The panoramic view of downtown and Puget Sound were definitely worth its $17.

The other impressive place I happened to visit was Seattle Public Library. From outside it’s a big futuristic building made of glass. Inside it’s the most amazing reading temple I’ve ever seen. The floors are organized as a giant spiral, which runs to the upmost level, where a huge reading room with a transparent roof is located. I couldn’t stand the temptation of the place, picked up a book about Abraham Lincoln dated 1945, and spent a couple of pleasant hours reading.

The only thing that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate was probably Seattle’s famous coffee shops as I am not a great fan of coffee. But nonetheless I stopped by at the world’s oldest Starbucks and some others where tasted cocoa and hot chocolate. My vegetarian needs were fully satisfied by visiting Pike Place Market which apart from being a big tourist attraction with its fish and crabs actually offers a good selection of vegetables, fruits and berries.

So at this point my next attempt to fly back to Ukraine is scheduled on Thursday, but we’ll see how it goes with Eyjafjallajökull. Guessed what that meant? ;)

The fun on my trip started back in Kyiv with the taxi ride. In the middle of Easter night I ordered a cab to pick me up from home and take to the airport. When I was getting inside the car I heard a song playing which was very unusual for taxi drivers in Kyiv. It sang: “If you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair…” I looked at the driver with amazement and told him about this incredible coincidence. You still don’t believe that universe knows everything? I do, for sure.

The long two-leg flight passed easy. Stopover in Amsterdam gave a chance to catch a glimpse of the Netherlands and get evidence that I do want to visit Holland in future. I arrived in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon and was met by rain. Half an hour subway ride from the airport to downtown, walking a couple of blocks and I am in the modest hostel called Adelaide. The place is a bit old and worn-out but fresh free breakfasts and free Wi-Fi made my stay there pleasant.

The next four days I was on vacation so I couldn’t lose the opportunity to see major tourist attractions in the city. I went to Pier 33, saw Alcatraz, walked on Golden Gate Bridge, climbed on Telegraph Hill and wandered around China Town. The city is pretty small, so one can see a lot just by walking. But if necessary, convenient and easy to understand public transportation system can help to get to remote destinations. It’s interesting that there are several independent transport authorities operating in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And, of course, I checked out all of those — MUNI (busses, trolleys and trams), BART (subway) and CalTrain (trains going south of Bay Area).

As a keen salsa learner I couldn’t miss a chance to see how it is danced in California. Having done little research on the Internet I found out that one of the best places to dance salsa in the Bay Area is the club called Cafe Cocomo. So I went there on Monday evening, took a class for beginners and stayed for the disco. To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed much by either the class or the disco. Maybe that’s because Monday is a kind of “losers’ day” there, I don’t know. But what we have in Ukraine is much better than what I’ve seen there, that’s for sure.

One of the other things from my traveler’s wish list that I accomplished was visiting Stanford University campus. It took one hour ride on CalTrain from San Francisco down to Palo Alto and 15 minutes walk from the train station to get to one of the coolest university campuses I’ve ever seen. The atmosphere there is very cozy and inspiring. If I lived in the Bay Area I would certainly come there once in a while during summer to relax on the green grass with a good book.

My vacation was officially over on Thursday night with beginning of the annual meeting hosted by my company (which was by the way primary reason for my visit). But to tell that the fun was over then would be to lie. Not only the meetings themselves were very productive and useful but also the informal part included such exiting things as dinner cruise around Alcatraz and under Gold Gate Bridge, and attending baseball game with San Francisco Giants.

So I must say that I really enjoyed my stay in this wonderful city by the bay and I will definitely come back here some day. Now sitting in the airport I’m saying good bye to San Francisco and the state of California moving to my next destination — Seattle — where I’m going to spend four days working with my American colleagues. And of course I’m looking forward to see what’s interesting is there in the land of Kurt Cobain.

Since my first reading of “The 7 Habits” I’ve been possessed by the idea of creating my own personal mission statement. You know, that self-defined concise written expression of the purpose of one’s existence.  And as it is obviously not the most trivial thing to do, I decided to approach it slowly and carefully.

First, I did a lot of reading on spiritual and personal development topics. In particular, following the chain of references by my favorite authors I discovered the works of Mahatma Gandhi and Dalai Lama which impressed me very deep and actually changed the way I see things in the world. Then, little by little I started acquiring yet non-verbal feeling of what I definitely must reflect in my mission statement. The next step of choosing the right words was probably the most challenging one. To break it down I set up a couple of simple lists and over the course of several weeks had been accumulating items there. Among others, for example, I had the following lists:

• Qualities I want to possess throughout my life (e.g. calmness, integrity, kindness, etc.)
• Areas of life I want to focus on (e.g. family, friends, communities, work, etc.)
• What I want to do to myself (e.g. grow as a person, grow professionally, learn new skills, etc.)
• What I want to do to others (e.g. inspire, serve, make happy, etc.)

Once the lists were ready I began to squeeze the juice out of them, omitting synonyms and blurred expressions,  trying to leave only the essentials so that each word that was left had the most meaning in it.

The last step was to come up with core values based on the lists and wrap some binding words around them. As I wanted my mission statement to be one sentence long, easy to read, understand and follow this last step was quite a tricky one.

So without further ado here is what I’ve come up with:

“My mission is to bring happiness to people around me by adhering to my values of responsibility, proactiveness and open-mindedness, while constantly inspiring friends, family and community with my self-discipline and personal growth.”

In the process of working on the mission statement I have also developed what I call a personal tagline as a byproduct. In Twitter terms it would be called “one line bio”, I guess. Anyways now I am using this tagline in my profiles in different social networks. Here is how it goes:

“Open-minded and self-disciplined bloke enjoying life of simplicity and order.”

I should say that spending time to create a mission statement brought a good degree of satisfaction and inspiration to immediately start with some new big undertakings. However it also makes me curious about how durable this mission statement will be, as I know for sure that a person’s perception of life changes significantly over time. It’s quite possible that I will want to change it in the future, we’ll see. Then this post will be a sort of time capsule. But for now I will guide my actions and decisions according to my current personal mission statement.

And what about you my friends, do you have your mission statements written already? Or maybe you are planning to write one?

The year 2009 is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe that it has been one whole decade since the millennium. The time does pass quickly and it’s true that the older we get the faster its pace seems to become. Caught in the minutiae of everyday life, we seldom get a chance to reflect on the big picture. That’s why New Year, being a tangible check point, gives us wonderful opportunity to think over what we’ve done during last year and set up our goals and resolutions for the next.

Described in one word, 2009 was the year of awareness for me. My sensation of life seems to have shaped itself to some definite and stable form. I was trying to spend every minute consciously, by doing good things that will have impact in a long run. During the year I gradually came the point where I feel ready to define my values and start developing my own personal mission statement (using Stephen Covey’s words). And even though I’m still thinking about exact wording, I know for sure that I want my life to be based on self-discipline, integrity, open-mindedness, non-complaining, and abundance mentality.

At this post I would like to report to my own self about the last year’s accomplishments along two different lines. First, I want to appraise how good I adhered to my plans and goals and then tell about the fascinating new things I experienced, learned and started during this year. Also I want to share some interesting personal statistics and of course, I’m going to set up some challenging and exciting goals for the year to come.

The Report 2009

So, I’ll start with my goals. At the beginning of the year, inspired by “4-Hour Workweek” I wrote down all the things I wanted to do, to have and to be in 2009. In terms of “to do” I basically wanted to get my first ever travelling experience. And I am happy to say that the year has brought me even more than I expected. Apart from planned trip to the U.S. in March, I got a chance to visit nothing less than “Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” in July, celebrating my birthday in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and in the sky above North America. Then, there was unforgettable trip to beautiful Prague for the best purpose I could imagine — live Radiohead performance.

From “to be” perspective my goals were related to developing new and strengthening existing physical and mental skills. First, I wanted to learn to swim decently and technically correctly in all for known strokes (freestyle, butterfly, breaststroke and backstroke). This goal was achieved and now I feel quite comfortable in swimming pool. I am still about two times slower than world record holders, but usually there are not too many people in the swimming pool who are faster than me.

Another bodily skill I wanted to develop was roller skating. Here I haven’t shown as much diligence as with swimming but achieved some progress anyway. In particular I learned how to have control on the wheels, do inclined turns and skate backwards.

A couple more undertakings I gave to myself in the field of languages learning. On English front my goal was to become fluent and get rid of accent. Here I would say that I accomplished the goal at 90% level. By this moment I don’t have any problems with listening, reading and writing but still feel some constraint when speaking. However it’s definitely not something one more year of intense practice couldn’t wipe away.

Another endeavor of mine was to learn basics of the Spanish language all by myself relying just on online sources available for free. My goal was to become able to build basic sentences and understand adopted speech. The result here, I must admit, could be better. I would estimate the completion level as 60%. But anyway I have learned main grammar rules such as verbs conjugation patterns in different tenses and persons, subjunctives and so on. Now all I need to do is to enrich the vocabulary and practice more.

In the goals related to material possession I showed modest results. I wanted to get myself a bicycle, a semi-pro photo camera and a wrist watch for active life style. And it was only the latter that I did get. But it is not something that makes me sad.

So that’s about it for my Goals 2009. I liked having those with me through the year. It was a pleasant experience to check items in the list with the sense of accomplishment. So I encourage everyone to set up  ambitious goals and move towards achieving them fully enjoying the process.

Statistics 2009

Through the whole 2009 I kept a log of all of my physical exercises such as swimming as well as mental activities like reading. This allows me to calculate some funny statistics now.

For example, the total distance that I swam during the year equals 167 kilometers (it’s about 450 meters per calendar day!)

And here is the calculation of  the average time I spent each day listening to educational materials, podcasts and audiobooks:

• Total Listening time: 363 hours (15 days!) = 60 min every day
  • Listening to English podcasts: 154 hours (6. 5 days) in total = 25 min every day
  • Listening to English audiobooks: 170 hours (7.1 days) in total = 28 min every day
  • Listening to Spanish podcasts: 16 hours (0.7 days) in total = 3 min every day
  • Listening to Spanish audiobooks: 23 hours (1 day) in total = 4 min every day

What do you think about spending 15 full days of the year listening? It’s actually 1/24 part of the year!

New Experience in 2009 — Salsa

The bravest thing I did in 2009 was my decision to learn dancing. Why is it brave? Well, because in elementary school I had choreography lessons and the teacher used to tell me that I was hopeless and as graceful as a bear.

The choice of dance was made in favor of salsa due to its social nature and relatedness to Spanish-speaking culture. I made the first attempt to attend classes in March but very soon abandoned them, because there was no good order and system in place which I conceive to be the necessary part for any learning process.

I got back to the idea in the summer, and resolved to start attending serious classes starting in September. After doing some research on Kyiv-based salsa schools and different salsa styles I decided in favor of Bailamos Salsa School and Los Angeles style. So on September 9th I pulled two friends of mine and we attended the first lesson. In October eager to learn even more we started attending another school called S-Tres where we learn salsa New York style. Now, after four months, having been to several salsa parties I am happy with my choices seeing real progress and enjoying the learning process. ¡Viva la Salsa!

New Initiative in 2009 — Gotosuccess Club

One summer evening I was watching Ignite sessions at Google when an idea struck me. It was the idea to create a closed club for friends, where we could do the same as those famous inspiring people do — meet regularly and speak on interesting topics, share observations and ideas. I wanted this club to be a place where no one ever complains but everyone thinks creatively, where people find synergies between each other’s professions, jobs, skills, hobbies, interests, where they generate ideas for future business and social projects, develop presentation, speaking, listening and discussion skills. So I quickly shared my idea with friends and shortly we had our first kick-off meeting scheduled. We named our club “Gotosuccess Club”. As of this moment the club has ten people and we have met eight times keeping fortnightly schedule. Everyone seems to enjoy and benefit from these meetings and I see a great future for this organization.

Goals 2010

So, now it’s time to set up interesting and challenging goals for the year 2010. In the same spirit as the last year I have created a page on this blog which will be my reference throughout the year.

I wish you all a very Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

I’ve been longing to write a piece on vegetarianism ever since I decided to try it fifteen months ago. Up until this moment, however, I didn’t feel like I was into it for enough time to really appreciate the changes involved. Now that I have gathered a handful of observations I’d like to put those here, just for the record.

To give some background I shall tell how I end up becoming a vegetarian in the first place.

In July 2008, just after graduating from university I met the first real embodiment of vegetarianism in my life — Kate. She told me that it had been six years without meat for her and that she felt great about it. As we shared many common interests we soon made friends, and I became intrigued by this vegetarianism thing.

At that time my university hostel accommodation was expiring and I had to find a place to rent. I was not very successful in my searches, so Kate kindly suggested that I could take her apartment during the summer, while she would stay in her native town with parents. So I agreed.

When moving in I remember thinking “All right, while staying here I am not to bring into this home anything that is against its owner’s views. If I want meat I shall do it elsewhere”. It so happened that during next couple of weeks I didn’t go out, nor did I visit any friends. Having suddenly realized that I had spent half a month without meat and felt quite good I resolved to extend the period, now as a conscious experiment.

My friends and relatives immediately found out about my decision and started asking what the reason was. The only answer I had was “just curiosity”. It was indeed interesting to try something new and to remain for some time on the side of minority.

Later, I somehow began to find many things that supported the idea of vegetarianism in me. I was discovering new kinds of fruits and vegetables, the ones that I completely ignored before. I started to be more disciplined generally in terms of nutrition, completely excluding junk food and cooking for myself more often and with greater variety. And also I started to read writings of wise eastern men such as Dalai Lama, Shunryu Suzuki and Mahatma Gandhi whose philosophies based on compassion and non-violence encourage vegetarianism as a natural way of life for a man. So I continued my experiment, and currently don’t see myself ending it in near future.

During these fifteen months I have participated in numerous discussions about pros and cons of vegetarianism and faced many stereotypes deeply embedded in our society. In general I think most the arguing that goes around can be roughly divided across three different aspects:

• Health aspect
• Practical aspect
• Moral aspect

So, let’s start with health. The arguing here usually goes like this: “It is unhealthy to be vegetarian. Your body will not be getting enough protein. Human was designed by nature to be fed by flesh. Don’t harm yourself, eat meat!” Well, there are many reasons not to believe this.

Another aspect is purely practical. People argue about whether being a vegetarian is cheaper or more expensive, whether you will create more problems for your friends who may invite you over for a meal, whether it is possible to still enjoy picnics and grill parties. Well, I think here everything really depends on the attitude. It takes just a little creativity to have fun in any circumstances. As I once said to my friends when they asked me what venue I preferred as a vegetarian for us to meet in: “I don’t care even if you invite me over to a steak house because I enjoy your good company rather than your choice of food.” As far as the cost of vegetarian lifestyle is concerned I think that nowadays it is not cheaper and may be even more expensive to be a vegetarian. This is especially true during the winter when fresh vegetables and fruits become very expensive. But again, being creative and maintaining good balance between vegetables, cereals, nuts and dairy products can make it easier.

There is also moral (or philosophical, or spiritual) side of the issue. This, I think, is a private matter and choice of each individual. To me, for example, it seems quite natural not to eat something that you are not capable of getting for yourself from the very beginning. I mean that if I had to kill an animal to get meat I’d rather not do that. The idea of killing doesn’t resonate with my nature and I can proudly say that I don’t feel like a predator at all. People tend to forget that the species designed by nature to be a predator don’t require roasting or boiling the meat, and they don’t get nauseous by looking at blood.

Summing this all up, I must say that everyone lives according to their own choice. But it’s important to have an open mind and respect the choices of others.

I love when things are in order. For me this is the necessary condition for any productivity. I sometimes think that my passion for order in everything is too strong and may even be considered by someone as a sort of paranoia. But it is not so. At least while it helps me be more efficient and agile.

There are people who think that order is the sign of boredom and it takes too much time to practice it, which otherwise might be spent on some fun activities. However, for me it is not true. I believe that keeping things in order isn’t time consuming. It may seem so in the beginning, until the habit is fully developed. But in a long run it actually helps to save a great deal of time. Also order doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be creativity. I for one cannot do anything creative when surrounded by clutter.

Here are some of the manifestations of order in my daily life:

• In my wallet I always have all the bills laying strictly face-up and sorted from the highest denomination to the lowest. It only takes a couple of seconds to arrange but it makes me much quicker when it comes to pay for something.
• On my bookshelf I have separate piles for English, Spanish and Russian books. Of course, this is more aesthetic than practical, but it encourages me to read when I have a free minute.
• In my wardrobe I have long-sleeve shirts on one side, short-sleeves on the other. I also have a separate corner in there for those shirts that I already wore once after last washing (usually I wear one shirt twice before washing it).
• On desktops of my computers I have absolutely nothing — really, not a single icon. This area is strictly for the documents I’m working on right now. This helps me concentrate on a task at hand. As soon as I’m done with it I put resulting files to a respective folder for future references. These folders are organized very plainly and simply. I no longer bother with multi-level filing and practice plain one level structure. For it is easier now to be searcher than filer (I use Windows Search, which indexes all folders such as “Personal”, “Jobs”, “Guitar”, etc.)
• On my iPod I have all the metadata in perfect order. All album covers are in place, all genres are specified and so on. This makes experience of listening and surfing through music so much fun. For this I love Apple’s products — their functionality and user experience seem to be all about order, very simple and thought-trough.

And this list can go on and on. Having order in the kitchen, for example, inspires me to cook more often.

I’ve found for myself that to achieve order it is first necessary to simplify everything that can be simplified and get rid of all unnecessary things. In fact I always associate order with simplicity and minimalism.

To illustrate this I have a good example. Probably everyone at any given point of life has their favorite garments that they wear more often than others. I am always like that. Usually these are clothes I bought last, so that they better reflect my current moods and fashion visions. At the same time there are attires from the old days that got lost somewhere deep in the bottom which I haven’t touched for years. So what I did recently was I dug out those old pants and t-shirts, said good bye to them and donated to people who needed them more than I. And, voilà, now I have full visibility and perfect order in my wardrobe. And this strategy is applicable for anything.

In virtual world it is also easy to keep order even despite tremendous information overflows of modern age. Terms such as “metadata” and “indexing” are just a few of many concepts that help in organizing virtual assets. People who create software tend to be very intelligent, you know. Usually they provide all the necessary instruments for keeping things in order. Take a look for example at Google’s docs or email — the pinnacle of simplicity and usability in software. The entire infrastructure for perfect order is there, so why not use it? Even Microsoft’s Office is very good. The same holds true for WordPress, Firefox and many other brilliant software examples.

I am happy to constantly discover more and more ways to bring a little bit more order in my life and the lives of people around me. What pleases me most is that it is like never-ending process of continuous improvement. Once you learned how to enjoy it your life becomes so much better.

One of the things that changed my life for the better during the last year was developing and sticking to so-called “daily routines”. These are simply a set of activities done in approximately the same time of every day. I first came across the idea on Leo Babauta’s blog and became very interested in making this concept work for me.

Now that I have my daily routines up and running for more than six months I think it’s time to share my recipe of constant good mood and persistent feeling of accomplishment with the whole wide world.

I’ll go through each part of a day one by one.

Morning

I begin my day getting up at about 6 a.m. Here I must confess that I always use “snooze” feature of my alarm clock. However this is not because I don’t have enough will to get up when I planned. What I do is I set up alarm clock half an hour in advance of the time I actually need to wake up. I don’t know why but it gives me a huge pleasure to realize in my sleep that I have half an hour more to luxuriate in a warm bed. Anyway, after hitting “snooze” button for about 6-7 times I finally get up and run straight to the bathroom to wash up and brush my teeth.

Then goes yoga. As of today I spend about 30 minutes for doing 25 basic asanas. I know that it’s too fast of a tempo and I will definitely start doing it more slowly as soon as I teach myself to get up earlier. In the end I also do popular 8 minutes program for abdominals, the cheerful music from which is now the inseparable attribute of a morning for me.

The next big thing is breakfast. I always prepare something light and healthy (as if it could be different given that I am a vegetarian :)). My typical meal is something like cottage cheese with fresh fruits and honey or maybe some cereal with nuts accompanied with a glass of grapefruit juice or a cup of herbal tea. After breakfast I dress up, pack my bag and head right to the swimming pool which has become a kind of second home for me.

At the pool I spend 45 minutes in water following self-developed syllabus and strictly measuring results with a stopwatch. As of now the program is following — 800m freestyle, 200m butterfly, 200m backstroke, 200m breaststroke, 200m freestyle. Once done with swimming and taken a shower I jump out of the swimming pool building grinning from ear to ear happy with myself for being so incredibly disciplined.

Half an hour subway ride brightened up by reading a good book brings me to the work where at last conventional working day begins.

Day

The first thing I do at work, oddly enough, is having second breakfast. This is because swimming provokes enormous appetite in me. Later during the day I try to have two more meals — lunch at 1 p.m. and second lunch at 4 p.m. It is often said that eating smaller amounts but more frequently is doing good for health and for some reason I tend to believe it completely.

During my active working hours I honestly do the work I’m getting paid for. The main principle is to never fall into “quadrant IV” activities no matter what the current situation with workload is. The term, as you might have guessed, comes from Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits” (in my opinion the best chapter on time management ever written). The idea is to do strategic and long-term self-initiated tasks during times of low workload instead of wasting activities such as aimless web surfing.

Evening

Evening is the least reliable part of a day in terms of regular self-development activities. Oftentimes it’s necessary to work late, help out friends and relatives, or maybe just go to a Birthday party. That’s why I leave most of my evenings free for improvisation. But even here there is always a place for some routines. This is because I usually try to end all social engagements before 9—10 p.m. so that I don’t get back home very late.

In remaining 2—3 hours before going to bed I cook and eat supper, do some reading in English or Spanish, play guitar and work out. The latter has become one of my favorite activities. For after it I feel great and it costs me absolutely nothing as I use public sports ground near my home. While working out I also adhere to a self-developed program which is very easy and fun. It involves pull-ups, exercising on parallel bars and jumps with skipping rope.

The last thing I do each day after taking a shower is relax with a cup of warm milk and sum up all the good deeds I performed and the results I achieved during the day. Technically for this purpose I use my own invention — Personal Development Forms. These are simple spreadsheets reflecting such areas as Body Development, Mind Development and Personal Finance. I probably will write a separate post to describe this system in detail (maybe on the first anniversary since I implemented it). For now I will just tell that in those spreadsheets I keep detailed logs of my yoga exercises, swimming, working out, reading, etc.

This pretty much concludes my typical day. And of course, there may be frequent deviations from described routines caused by travels and other life matters. But the idea here is to stay disciplined enough and make the best of each day.

This year’s summer proved to be very exiting. A lot of bright and positive things have happened to me both externally and inside my head. I’m happy to say that I remained loyal to all of my self-development commitments.

Indeed, I have continued to swim, exercise and do yoga regularly. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and language learning. I still practice playing guitar and roller-skating. And what is the most important here is that all these activities keep bringing me more and more pleasure and satisfaction. I even started to think of myself as a self-development addict.

My traveler’s outlook was enriched by unexpected journey to the entertainment capital of the world Las Vegas in the middle of July and wonderful trip to the heart of Europe — Czech Republic in late August where I fulfilled two of my biggest dreams at once — visited Prague and attended live Radiohead concert.

There were many things that I discovered, found to be of great use and loved during the summer.

First I will recall my findings in the area of Spanish language. As I wrote before I currently learn Spanish using only materials targeted to English speakers. I had already been listening to several podcasts aimed to teach the basics of Spanish when I accidentally came across very good audio materials based on Michel Tomas’ method of language learning. During one month I listened to four audiobooks called “Foundation Spanish”, “Spanish Advanced”, “Spanish Language Builder” and “Spanish Vocabulary” course. I’ve found those audiobooks really effective and I believe that now I have no problems with most of typical tenses and grammar constructions.

In educational reading I enjoyed “The Practice of Management” by Peter Drucker. This is really solid and adult management stuff. It’s hard to imagine that this work was written in 50s because most of the principles still apply nowadays.

In self-development area my major discovery was “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz. This eye-opening book is definitely the best motivational works I have read so far. As I said I want to buy many copies of it in Ukrainian and Russian language and give away to every person I care about.

Another huge thing is the podcast I stumbled upon in iTunes called Pickup Podcast. Despite its unambiguous name it’s not all about picking up women. The hosting guys are self-development maniacs and they talk about ways to increase your value as a person, to have more quality life. I downloaded all eighty something episodes to my iPod, started listening from the very beginning and by now almost caught up with up-to-date episodes.

So, I thank the summer for its warm weather, cheap fruits and vegetables and looking forward to even more productive and exiting autumn!

Yesterday I returned home from a wonderful trip to Czech Republic, where accompanied by five friends I spent great seven days exploring Prague and attended the concert of my favorite music band Radiohead. From there I brought tons of positive impressions and for the first time in my life I didn’t really want to go back home.

Prague is definitely the most beautiful city I’ve seen so far and looks like a great place to live. Everything there seems to be in a perfect order, very neat and cozy. The whole town is like one single place for a romantic walk. Labyrinths of tiny narrow streets, paved squares surrounded by marvelous architecture inspire the soul and awaken the desire to do something creative.

It is not surprising then that thousands of tourists from everywhere are seen all around Prague. I was amazed to see even bigger diversity of people than in New York City — Spanish, German, Dutch, American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli and many others. It’s worth saying that we didn’t have any problems communicating with locals because the Czech language is very similar to Ukrainian and most of youth speaks some English.

Having only seven days and wanting to see as much as possible we run through major tourist sites in express mode. Among others we’ve been to Prague Castle, Prague Zoo, all major cathedrals, bridges, squares and parks.

Also we spent two days out of Prague going to Karlovy Vary and Kutna Hora. Deciding to check out all available means of intercity transport we went to Karlovy Vary by bus and to Kutna Hora by train. The 200 km bus ride cost us about €6 one way. For that price we got bus equipped with an attendant, free coffee and… free WiFi connection during the whole journey! The last thing made my jaw drop especially low.

The transport in Prague itself is pretty expensive for visitors. One ticket that gives you permission to travel up to 75 minutes on metro, bus or tram costs about €1. I think during 7 days each of us spent not less than €25 on public transport. But the service is worth every cent of its price. The trams are comfortable, silent and air-conditioned and they go strictly in accordance to the schedule.

The debut play of Radiohead in Kafka’s town seemed to be quite an important event in city’s cultural life. I’ve seen at least two major newspapers with Thom Yorke on the first page and big advertising posters were seen in many crowded places. The organization was really good, especially for us from Ukraine who are used to barbarous security personnel and poorly thought-out logistics during concerts in Kyiv. The sound quality and overall atmosphere were great. I stood most of show with my mouth wide open not believing that I am really there watching and listening.

Overall I left very satisfied with the trip and now all I want to do is make my small contribution in changing Ukraine to be as good of a place as Czech Republic!

I am really happy to be born in Ukraine. This gives me a huge advantage over any American, Englishman, Frenchman or German. You may wonder what possible advantage there may be. Well, my answer would be that we learn two of the most complicated European languages in early childhood — Ukrainian and Russian.

Then in school and university we learn some English which is rapidly becoming vital for everyone willing to get a well-paid job in this country. So by the age of 22 majority of educated young people have at least some command of three languages.

Certainly, in every other country they have foreign languages as a part of standard curricula as well. But the structure and grammar of Slavic languages is much more complicated than that of Germanic and Romance ones.

It’s so entertaining to see explanations written for English-speaking learners of Spanish about nouns that have genders (”el libro” vs. “la vez”) or different verb endings for different persons (”yo hablo” for “I speak” but “usted habla” for  “you speak”). We Slavic people understand this momentarily because it’s nothing compared to dozens of cases with different spelling and pronunciation which every Russian or Ukrainian word may take.

Nonetheless English proficiency is of vital importance to learn any other language. This is not only because there is the biggest amount of books and quality materials available in English, but also because English is the most straightforward and flexible tool for any kind of explanatory stuff. I honestly tried to use Russian materials for learning Spanish at the beginning and it proved to be no more than 5% as effective as using English ones.

For myself I distinguish three main stages in language learning process. And there are tools and techniques that work most effectively for each stage.

1. Build foundation
2. Build walls and roof
3. Decorate and finish

The first stage is present when you start from scratch as I did with Spanish nine months ago. Usually most people start with second stage as they have already taken classes in school or college.

The second stage is usually the longest and the most difficult. This is where you internalize tons of vocabulary and become proficient in creating language structures. By the end of this stage you can be qualified as the fluent speaker of foreign language. At this point most educational programs end.

The third stage is all about becoming equal to native by getting rid of the ugly accent and incorporating fancy idiomatic language that only natives can use impromptu. For instance, do you know what such expressions as “to touch the base with someone” or “three strikes and you’re out” mean? Do you use them? Do you pronounce words “pick” and “peak” in the same way or differently? This is something you’re supposed to get on the third stage.

Where do I see myself on this track? I guess I am in the beginning of stage 3 with English and in the beginning of stage 2 Spanish. This gives me hope that I might be competent to give following advices.

Advices for Stage 1

1. Find best tools and sources based on collective wisdom of the crowd
   • Use highest rated podcasts in iTunes directory
   • Use highest rated workbooks

Advices for Stage 2

1. Read and listen as much as you can
   • Paper books in subway
   • Audiobooks and podcasts while walking or in bus
2. Isolate yourself to the language you’re learning as much as possible
   • Don’t read in a language you’re not learning
   • Don’t watch movies and TV shows which are not in you target language
   • Don’t surf Internet in your native language
   • Switch to language you learn in everything you can — you diaries, sticky notes, etc.
   • Talk to yourself in target language — try describing things around or recall day events when you walk alone
3. Motivate yourself in the way that work for you
   • Buy books which you will read 100% because they are too expensive to just sit on your shelf
   • Twitter to everyone around that you enrolled in learning language and determined to succeed
   • Associate language you’re learning with the things you like most — I for one love music, so listening to Beatles is the most pleasant English learning exercise for me. The same holds true for Buena Vista Social Club and Spanish.

Advices for Stage 3

1. Talk with natives and carefully watch their reaction
2. Find language partners in Skype
   • Use communities of people willing to find language partners (livemocha.com, italki.com, etc.)
   • Use communities relevant to your interest (for instance, if you’re into fashion — find someone on lookbook.nu, like snowboarding, or guitar, or dancing — there are social networks around anything out there)
3. Travel a lot

Did you notice that I never mentioned a language school? This is because I belong to people who think that the only thing that language school really does is bring discipline. I don’t need it because lately I’ve become self-discipline addict — it’s much more fun and way cheaper :)

Everything is within your personal power.

Happy learning!

Today I’m turning 24 and I’m having the most peculiar birthday program ever. In the morning I was swimming in luxury pool in Las Vegas and now I am sitting in Los Angeles international airport waiting for Munich flight on my way back home.

The age of 23-26 is named by many psychologists as “the quarter life crisis period”. In this period people usually try to find their own selves and understand the purpose of life for the years to come. I think psychologists have a point giving such a strong definition. But crisis doesn’t necessarily have to be long, does it?

It will be difficult to describe how many inner changes and broken stereotypes I’ve undergone during the last year of my life. Looking back I am tempted to think that the most important role in that process played a series of lucky incidents. All the people I’ve been meeting, all the books I’ve been reading, all the events I’ve been attending couldn’t be more in the right place and in the right time. Its incredible how what seemed spontaneous events can actually appear as well-planned self-development campaign over the time.

I think in many senses my eyes opened more widely in observing both the external world around me and my smaller personal world. The way I felt a year ago is nothing compared to how I feel now.

Here I would like to give my thanks to everyone who was helping me during the first 24 years of my life.

I want to thank my parents for their care and that solid foundation that they have laid for my education and future growth. I want to thank personally my father who since my early childhood respected my opinion and treated me like equal (especially for trusting me to drive grandpa’s car when I was so short that could only observe the road ahead under the steering wheel :))

I want to thank my ex-girlfriend Ann for her insights on relationships between girls and boys, great experience she gave me, for strengthening my character, for leading me to try snowboarding, and, of course, for all the good times we’ve had together.

I want to thank Kate, my most special female friend who graciously let me live in her cozy and incredibly inspiring apartment for such a long time, who revealed to me the beauty of vegetarian way of life and acquainted me with yoga, artistic movies, Pedro Almodóvar, Woody Allen, Latina dances, soul and lounge music, and quite a few other valuable things.

I want to thank all of my friends, school and university mates, coworkers and partners for their time spent on talking to me and having fun together.

Particular thanks go to Vitalik Kopylov, for being the best mate and partner for pleasant intellectual talks; Vic Molokanov, for teaching me how to play guitar and the theory of two instincts that rule the world; Nick Martyniuk, for being reliable friend and roommate during happy university years; Laslo Bovgar, for radically critical view on the world, for playing bass in our band, and for borrowing me money a countless number of times; Rus Romanenko, for showing me that it is possible to start creative business in Ukraine from scratch; Olenka Galushko, for the best hair styles ever and for that head-massage thing; Anton Kulhevskyi — for his continuous nagging about my fears and for acquainting me to swimming; Andy Gnatiuk — for being my dearest swimming partner.

I am happy to know everyone of you. Happy Birthday, dear me. Cheers!

Scarcity frame or scarcity mindset is the state of mind in which one is afraid that some material or mental resource that he might have is in limited supply. This state nurtures negative emotions like greed, envy and jealousy. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. People with abundance mindset are never afraid to share their potentially fruitful ideas because they know they are always capable to generate more. They are never scared to lose material possessions because they know that the mind is their biggest asset.

Lately I’ve been reading many books on self-development in different areas, ranging from purely spiritual affirmations to the most mundane aspects of life like pickup. And everywhere all the troubles people have seem to root in scarcity frame. However, in practice understanding this while reading is not enough. Apparently it takes some time and effort to switch from scarcity to abundance completely.

What I realized is that I myself am very far from not having scarcity thoughts now and then. I found that I often compare myself to others, being afraid in the back of my mind that they might be better than I in something. The area in which this is particularly true for me is relationships with the opposite gender. It usually drove me nuts when the person I considered my partner started communicating with someone more capable than I in any area of life, be that snowboarding or business, it doesn’t matter. What a stupidity, is it not? This also may be called inferiority complex, I guess.

So, what I’m starting to do right from now on is becoming conscious of any shabby impulse inside my mind to finally liberate myself from that scarcity mindset.

It’s the last Friday before summer and I think it’s a good time to look three months back and summarize what I’ve been doing and what I’ve accomplished during this spring. Indeed there’s been a lot of interesting first-time-ever kind of events for me.

The most remarkable experience, of course, would be traveling to the United States, unforgettable acquaintance with diverse and liberal New York, neat and cozy Philadelphia and Boston. Spending ten days there very much broadened my mindset and inspired for changes both in attitude towards life and everyday behavior. For one thing I brought from there is quite a pack of great books which I’ve been reading through all these days.

Another inspiring trip I took was here in Ukraine. I finally visited probably the most European of all Ukrainian cities — Lviv. I can’t believe that all this time such a beautiful place to spend a weekend was right under my nose and I never went there. However, in some sense it’s a good thing to leave something pleasant for the later. I call this “dessert approach”. In that way I often don’t watch a movie or read a book that everyone I respect praises and finds brilliant until the very last moment. So that at the time I decide to do that I know for sure that I will definitely enjoy it.

Some positive changes took place on my personal development front. The most notable is that now I firmly stuck to getting up early (not later than 6:00AM) and doing morning daily routines. That, first of all, includes 30 minutes of yoga exercise and 1 hour of swimming (or on some days jogging).

For discovering yoga I’m enormously thankful to my neighbor and friend Kate, who has shown me some basic stuff and bore with me when I was hardly able to bend my numb back. I started small, but during three months I can really see the progress and I am determined to continue development in this area.

As for the swimming pool, now I feel like a cool dude there. Indeed there are not many people who swim more and faster than I do. I have already achieved some of my “early goals” like being able to swim 2km freestyle or breaststroke without stops or do 25m butterfly in 8 swings. But, of course, this is not the point here. What I really like about swimming is that it is a steady physical activity that affects all parts of a body evenly and there isn’t any chance to damage one’s muscles or something like at gym for example. In its very essence, swimming is calming and refreshing. ¡Viva Natación!

Good shifts also happened at my work. We moved to a brand new office with open-space planning and now I can really appreciate the work in a large and agile international company. The other thing is that I organized my documents system using tips from “Getting Things Done”, incorporating those with my personal observations and inventions powered by Google Docs. This resulted in a significant productivity increase and peace of mind. Thanks a lot for that, Mr. David Allen! I also practiced working from home, which is now very easy to do with all the Internets, VPNs, VoIPs and stuff. That has some great advantages — for instance, you don’t have to spend time commuting, which frees it for some useful activities.

At last I have to mention what I lately call “mind development” areas. These are the books that I’ve been reading, the movies that I’ve been watching and the music that I’ve been listening to. To keep it short I will just list all that I walked through during the spring with short comments.

Non-fiction Books:

• “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki.

It was my first acquaintance with Japanese Zen tradition. I bought the book in the U.S. referred by Leo Babuata and read it while in plane over Atlantic Ocean. There is very much to reflect upon after reading this book.

• “The Power of Less” by Leo Babuata

I bought this one mostly to pay my respect and gratitude to Leo for his inspiring blogs Zen Habits and Write to Done — very positive and inspiring reading.

• “Path to Tranquility”, “The Art of Happiness”, “The Art of Happiness at Work” by Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama has become a model for my mind development. I have never saw a book by a man so sincere and humble, yet so very intelligent and wise. These books affected my attitude towards life such as no one has done so far. I’m happy to live on the same planet in the same time with such people.

• “Getting Things Done” by David Allen

This book came right in time for me as I switched to management and executive role at my job. Having a lot of tasks I was beginning to feel overwhelmed with them I was trying to find the way to handle them all. The book is very practical and will be of great use for anyone whose job can be described as “knowledge work”.

Fiction books:

• All seven books about Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling

It may seem childish to read Harry Potter through at the age of 23 but there was an enormous use for me in terms of English language development — the book is full of casual dialogs and people descriptions. I listened to audiobooks read by Jim Dale, who is the best narrator I’ve ever heard. However, it wasn’t only a language learning issue that made listening so pleasant. I have to admit that J. K. Rowling did a really good job writing last books being under fans pressure.

Movies:

All the movies I watched were advised by my good friends so there’s not a single bad one there:

• “Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón”, “La Ley del Deseo”, “La mala educación” by Pedro Almodóvar
• “Diarios de motocicleta” by Walter Salles
• “The Science of Sleep” by Michel Gondry
• “Once” by John Carney
• “Love Actually” by Richard Curtis
• “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” by Julian Schnabel
• “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex”, “September”, “Shadows and Fog”, “Bullets over Broadway” by Woody Allen.

Music:

Here I have to mention that I finally started using last.fm service in its fullest potential. I now can analyze what I listen to and to discover more great music.

• Yann Tiersen

This was referred to me again by Kate and I found this French composer very talented and his music very beautiful.

• Meditative and spiritual music by Deva Premal, Krishna Das and The Buddha Experience.

I discovered the power of meditative music while started doing yoga. It creates very calm atmosphere and makes it easier to achieve not-wandering state of mind.

Now that I have only two days of vacation left I feel it’s time to report on how I have spent available time.

The idea of experimental vacation came to my mind at the end of April. At the time I was reading Dalai Lama and thought that it would be great to have some time to reflect on what I’ve read and forget for a while about everyday work-home regime. A bunch of national holidays at the beginning of May came right in time. So I made an initial plan of what I wanted to accomplish within ten days and started enjoying the process.

Firstly I paid visits to my relatives in Chernivtsi and Cherkasy. Spending some time with family inspired me even more and on my arrival to Kyiv I was firmly determined to arrange not less than “intellectual mini-retirement” for myself.

The first thing I did was prepaid everyday swimming pool attendance and set up alarm clock for 5 a.m. Every next day I got up early, made 30-40 minutes of yoga and went to swimming pool. After three days of such morning routines I decided that I wanted to stick to it at working days as well. The reason for this is that by 10 a.m. I felt incredibly well with great sense of accomplishment and the rest of the day was like a phoenix song. Conscious physical activity indeed provokes the power of mind and thought. In the following days I caught up with my Spanish podcasts, finished a couple of pending books and audiobooks, organized my musical collection in Songbird, and met my friends.

However the most beautiful part of the vacation proved to be the trip to Lviv. Now that I think of it I can’t believe how come that I’ve never been there before. The city is so fantastic, welcoming and pleasing. Narrow streets with cozy cafés and authentic shops, beautiful architecture, kind people who speak in their native language make it look very European. My friend said about Lviv: “Here’s what all Ukraine should be like”.

Lviv is a very nice place for people of artistic professions. It’s full of galleries, museums, and special shops. We’ve been to artistic shop for painters, a couple of musical shops, and several art-cafés. The prices are less than moderate and the experience is more than great.

During the time of visit I made friends with two awesome guys who play ethnic drums and one of whom dances salsa. With them we made some noise in a musical shop where I tried playing “Korean replica of American Gibson” kind of guitar, danced salsa in one of the central city squares and simply had a great time.

I think it won’t be long before we go to Lviv again to make more in-depth exploration, spending more time in museums and galleries to dive more deeply into city’s creative spirit.

And now it’s time for me to go and enjoy the rest of remaining days. ¡Hasta pronto!

Unbelievable. Radiohead is coming to Prague and I’m going there! Whoo-hoo!

My friend called today and said that Radiohead will perform an open-air gig in Prague in August. After no more than 2 seconds of doubts we agreed that this is our chance and we’re not gonna missed it. No matter how high the price is and how difficult it will be to get the tickets we should go there. Right away I abandoned my plans to visit Poland this year.

After that initial excitement I nearly died when saw on official Radiohead site that all the tickets had been sold in less than one day. I became frustrated — it just couldn’t be truth. But luckily there was another place where tickets were being sold — some local Czech site.

So, now we have an adventure to go through — make all necessary arrangements and collect some money to materialize two dreams in one — visit Prague and attend a Radiohead live performance!

I just couldn’t resist the temptation to write this post on the altitude of 35,000 feet* above the ground… well, not ground, but Atlantic Ocean, I suppose. The first reason for that is I’ve never done it before, and the second is that I want to record my impressions of USA trip while they are still vibrating.

I gave up my original idea to record every day as a separate post.  In fact I had neither enough time nor enough will to do that. However what I did is I uploaded new photographs every day, so that I wouldn’t have to remember how some particular place on the photo is called. Day-by-day photo report on can be found here.

I had a lot of expectations before this trip. First I thought that it would be a great chance to improve my English by being in native environment. Second I expected inspiration boost caused by diving into different cultural environment and visiting places I could only read and hear about before. Then I had some pure practical reasons, such as buying tons of books which are hard to find in Ukraine. And looking back for the last 9 days I can surely say that all of these expectations have been met more or less.

Together with my friend and ex-colleague Ian we spent 7 days in New York City, 1 day in Philadelphia and 1 day in Boston. Most of the time we just walked, trying to see as many as possible in available time. We covered almost all neighborhoods in Manhattan, all central parts of city in Philadelphia (which is beautiful city) and Boston (together with Cambridge, where visited MIT and Harvard University campuses). However we were quite neglect to some of the “must-see” tourist sights: neither did we take a ferry to the Statue of Liberty, nor did we go on top of Empire State Building.

In all the places we’ve been people were very polite and willing to help on any occasion. A woman in a bus kindly offered to swap her seat with my friend so that we could sit together. A man in Boston approached two of us staring in the map and asked if we needed help getting around.

What is very different from Kyiv is the great extent of social and cultural freedom we’ve seen, especially in New York. People all around wear what they want and how they want. Everyone whistle a tune when listen to their iPods. The first man I saw on the American continent was the guy in JFK airport who directed our plane with the flag, and he had nice long dreads on his head. One man was showing yoga tricks to his girlfriend sitting in subway train in rush hour. The most recent impression was the band of break-dancers performing on a tiny piece of floor inside swiftly running subway train.

One of the things I loved most about New York is its navigation system. Wherever you are it’s always clear where you need to go to get to desired destination. The plates with street names are on every crossroad. The signs in subway are very clear and readable.

The other thing I liked was audio announcements in Greyhound and Peter Pan buses, which are awesome. If you think about it, it’s really a small thing when driver address to the passengers before beginning each route. But the way they do it makes you believe that they love their job very much.

The only thing I didn’t like about the USA at all has to do with food and grocery stores. I don’t know for sure, maybe we just didn’t go to proper places, but from what I’ve seen our Ukrainian food supermarkets are much better. Although Americans seem to be totally concerned now about eating healthy now (everywhere it says “organic”: organic vegetables, organic fruits, organic milk, etc.) still 80% of the products on the shelves are snacks and processed food.

Now that I’m witnessing the dawn of the last day of March let me finish this post by some bragging :). I’m carrying back with me quite a few of books from my wish list. Among them: “The Power of Less” by Leo Babauta, “The Practice of Management” by Peter Drucker, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and, of course, some Spanish-language ones: “Cien años de soledad”, “El coronel no tiene quien le escriba” by Gabriel García Márquez and “Ficciones” by Jorge Luis Borges.

* While being in the USA I didn’t move a single step towards better understanding of feet as well as ounces and Fahrenheit’s degrees – I just saw the number on the screen. Metric system rules! ;)

It feels really great when your dreams come true. I am really happy now, sitting in cozy little hostel room in beautiful Harlem, Manhattan. The first ever long-distance traveling experience, the first ever visit to the United States, the first ever acquaintance with New York, the multicultural capital of the world. All of this produces so many emotions that it’s hard to fall asleep even despite huge tiredness of all day walking.

New York leaves amazing impression on someone from Ukraine who’s never been abroad. The city is so diverse and motley, so liberal and contemporary, that your head can’t stop spinning around trying to catch everything. The fashion is by no means limited. As my friend put it: “The word ‘weirdo’ isn’t applicable in this city”.

People are very nice and polite. Everyone says “thank you” on each smallest occasion. People with so many cultural backgrounds can be seen around, that word “Babylon” is first that comes to mind. During one day in New York I heard people around me speaking at least ten different languages. A heaven for polyglots, this city is. Spanish is heard about just as often as English, which pleases me a lot.

During our first day of excursions we walked half the way down Manhattan, starting from Harlem, heading through beautiful Central Park and making long stop at Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibitions there are very impressive. I’ve never seen so many world known masterpieces with my own eyes. Seeing original canvases created by Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso couldn’t leave me untouched.

After getting so much esthetic pleasure, we set forward to Broadway, Times Square and Empire State Building. Peeping into several shops on our way we realized that prices on clothes and electronics are about the same as in Kyiv. Here the world “globalization” came to mind.

Altogether, during the day I took almost three hundred photos, so that I would be able to tell my friends and relatives about New York in the smallest detail.

Looking back at last three months I can say that I’ve never had such a great winter time experience before – active, pleasant and exciting. Usually by the end of February I felt weak and lacked vital energy. Every new spring I used to find myself in a very low physical and emotional state - three months of inactivity would left substantial mark on my condition. This winter, however, was very different. And there are several reasons for that.

The main reason, I think, is that I’ve finally become aware of the fact that the life is passing and there is no time to be wasted. I started to think of ways how to fill my days with interesting and useful activities to avoid living in a standard “work-home-work-home” mode.

I’ve discovered two things that sustain good physical state in wintertime – swimming and snowboarding. The former had become my obsession more than a year ago, but only now do I realize the full potential of doing it regularly. The time spent in water swimming effortlessly is the most peaceful and calming. It is also the best time to organize thoughts, let alone significant physical boost it brings.

As for snowboarding, it’s very different. It gives more of an extreme kind of experience. But not only that is the reason why it’s so exciting. Personally I love the whole subculture of snowboarders – all those teenagers and youth in loose motley pants and jackets wandering around. There is something enchanting about it. You should try riding trolleybus #40 from Protasiv Iar in Kyiv at about 10pm in wintertime to see what I mean.

The other important reason to feel great lies on the emotional and intellectual side. During winter I haven’t betrayed any of my good habits (I’m still vegetarian, I still read only in languages that I’m learning, and I still don’t watch TV). Moreover I’ve developed some cool new habits inspired mostly by Leo Babauta – every day I dedicate some time to my goals. I also have read several great books (“One Hundred Years of Solitude”) and watched wonderful movies (Pedro Almodóvar’s works in Spanish language).

The main idea that overflows me now is that life has plenty to offer, we just shouldn’t  be lazy to see and truly enjoy it!

Average person who uses public transport in Kyiv spends about 1.5 hours a day commuting using subway, buses, trolleybuses, trams, and fixed-run taxis. If you multiply that number by the number of working days you’ll get about 33 hours per month, which is more than 4 working days. A couple of years ago I started to analyze what typical person does while commuting and based on that started to adjust my habits to get as much value of these hours as possible. To keep this post brief I’ll just list the most important things I’ve come up with and subsequently stuck to:

1. Be prepared to commuting as though it’s some important ritual. For example I decide what I’m gonna read or listen to while in transport before leaving home. For me it’s the same routine as deciding what to wear. And, of course, you never go out without clothes, do you?

2. While in transport always wear headphones either playing music or podcast or audiobook. If you read a paper book, music will help to isolate outside noises and avoid distractions.

3. Don’t be indiscriminate consumer of advertisements. This is really a problem in Kyiv. If you take subway coaches and look at their inside walls you’ll see them stuffed with low-quality ad prints (I mean quality of content of course, not printing). And 80% of people spend all their time watching around and carefully reading what new gimmicks are being offered. When I see this I remember citation of B. S. Prabhupada, who told: “People are deceived just because they want to be”. Value your time.

4. Doing nothing or relaxing in transport is 100% negative choice, because unwillingly you’ll start to listen to what other people talk about, which is almost always complaining or any other junk for the brain. Also you may start peering at the advertisements which isn’t good either.

And here are some of the results I’ve achieved just by applying these rules:

1. Improved my English from intermediate to fluent, spending no money on courses or tutors.

2. Developed sustainable habit of reading at least one fiction and one non-fiction book in month without affecting any usual activities of my life.

3. Now I can sometimes catch myself on eagerly anticipating the time when I’ll need to dive underground and to have another self-development session.

I’ve just come back from the slope and while being there and looking at people I suddenly felt inspired to write this post. From the name it may seem that I’m kind of a cool guy who already knows the rope, which isn’t that true. Actually I stood on a board for the first time less than a year ago, so when I write ‘beginners’ what I mean is ‘first-timers’, because frankly I hardly doubt that I could be classified any higher than ‘beginner’ myself. But anyway I’ve already grasped the basics and did it in a pretty short term so I feel like, well… competent to write this. And hopefully someone will find what’s below useful. Here we go…

Mistake 1: ‘Whenever I’m in critical situation I should listen to my body – it will tell me how to act.’

This one is common for any type of skill you try to learn which differs from those mother nature has given to us. I mean when our instincts were programmed — whoever did it — he didn’t think that one day man would decide to ride the piece of wood skating from the slope.

So how does this mistake show itself in snowboarding? Every time you are scared by uncontrolled high speed when skating down you tend to bend your body back away from where you’re headed. This is totally wrong. What you have to do is shift your weight forward which will allow you to relieve back foot and pull up.

This is just one common example and there are tons of others. So every time you don’t understand why you can’t control you board think about whether you do what you should or what your unqualified body tells you to do.

Mistake 2: ‘I’m not gonna use ski lift until I overcome my fear of the peak of the slope and until I learn how to ride confidently.’

This is a false thing to think. Here’s why.

Imagine a guy who’s trying to learn how to swim in the swimming pool. He already knows how not to drown but he tries to comprehend swimming technique. What he does is he swims 25 meters and then he gets out of the water and starts to run around swimming pool, after running for 10 minutes he goes back into water and makes another 25 meters. Do you think this approach is going to be more effective than just to swim? I don’t. Hope you caught the idea.

If you want to learn something really quickly and effectively you have to concentrate on that thing and put away everything else. So do use ski lift from the first day on the slope. This will accelerate you progress significantly not only because you will concentrate on skating down instead of climbing up dripping with sweat, but, you will also crash you fear of the peak in the egg.

Mistake 3: ‘I will learn how to slide down on the back edge of the board, then of the front and only then I will learn how to ride with the nose in front and make turns.’

This one is a little bit contradictory and may not seem obvious especially for those who’ve just read some kind of beginner’s guide. Actually it is important to learn how to control the edges of the board, no doubt of that. But what many people do is skate on one edge of the board all way down drawing something similar to Christmas tree on the snow. Whenever they reach the border of the slope they don’t turn switching active edge of the board but instead slowly start to skate down with another foot in front.

Believe me that this isn’t good idea. It’s much better to slide all the way down with your forward foot in front than all the way on the heels changing board’s direction. It will not only make your learning much more effective and fun, but you will also end up with not getting tired in a short time, because turns allow you to load your heels and toes equally.

Good luck, and have a nice snow wherever you are!

Happy New Year!

Yesterday I came back from Carpathians where I had celebrated New Year with my friends (and friends of my friends, etc.) and gone for some crazy snowboarding sessions.

We arrived to Slavske by train early in the morning on 29th of December. The extreme part of the trip began right away on our way from railroad station to the house we were staying in. Our landlord Igor came for us to the station with his neighbor Ivan, who was driving ancient soviet automobile “UAZik”, which is definetely the most popular vehicle in town due to its cross-country abilities. Amazinlgly all 11 people easily managed to get inside UAZik (well Igor was not actually inside the car — he hanged in the back seizing spare wheel :)). It turned out that our house was situated on the hill and to get there by car in winter time one should be a really fearless driver. Luckily Ivan was one of those — he calmly stepped on the juice and madly rotated steering wheel while UAZik climbed up the hill hitting stony walls on each side of the narrow road.

The house we were staying in turned to be a cozy little building made solely out of wood with one big room on the first floor and two small bedrooms on the second. All necessary facilities like bathroom, shower, and hot water were right inside.

Having several mountains available for skiing and snowboarding around the town we decided to go to the Trostian mountain first which subsequently proved to be a good choice. My deepest impression of the first day was encounter with the rope tow. It was a pitiful sight — me trying to get up the highest slope grasping the tow with my hands. The fun thing is that I succeeded but I felt so exhausted on top of the mountain that I had to lie for a good ten minutes in snow to recover. Eventually I mastered the art of using that tow and did my ascents without any efforts.

The next two days we also spend on Trostian discovering new pathes with my fellow-skiers althouth several times I did ride alone on pure-snowboarding routes where skiers can’t go because their skis dive into thick masses of powdered snow.

Then came the most fun New Year party I’ve ever had — I woke up 30 minutes before New Year, quickly celebrated it, and 30 minutes after I was already asleep again — all for the sake of snowboaring next day.

On the first of January we went to Zakhar Berkut — another famous mountain in the town which is even 10 meters higher that Trostian. There we got a little bit disappointed because the prices to use the crowded chair lift (which is the only way to get on top of the mountain) were somewhat steep. Moreover the routes and the slopes turned out to be less interesting which determined our decision to spend the last day on Trostian.

The brightest impression of the last day for me is vivid bruice on my forehad which I got when tried swift slalom on the narrow crowded road with stony wall aside. Anyway it didn’t darken overall satisfaction of the trip at all.