While on a trip to Uzbekistan with my family in late 2019, we were walking in the main square of a town called Fergana in Eastern Uzbekistan. While walking we were approached by an elderly gentleman who was excited to see people from the United States. After a few minutes of chatting, we bid the man farewell and kept walking around the square.

A half hour later, we stopped for some water and a bit of break from walking and the very same elderly man comes over again and asks me to write down the Fifty States of America on a piece of paper for him in Russian. I don’t happen to know all of the States in Russian, but I told him I’d give it a shot. After getting a peice of paper, googling the translated names, and finding my pen, I start jotting them down.

I get about two or three states and he looks at my paper and notices that I wrote down California. He stops me to say “I don’t need all of them written down, just the ones that I don’t know”. This causes me to pause for a bit as it now occurs to me that this is task just went from a quick five minute chore to a thirty to sixty minute project.

In total it took about fourty-five minutes of reading out a US State in English, the elderly man confirming whether or not he knows the State and me writing down the translated name.

Here is a short video capturing that experience.

There used to be a video here, but I removed it so I don’t need to spend $10.00 with Cloudflare. You can view the video in your personal iCloud Photo Library.