видно по глазам - you can see it in the eyes

| tralev | trenton | russian |

I read a post today from Rene Coignard where he tells the story of unexpectedly being spoken to in Russian at a McDonalds in Germany. It reminded me of this time that I went to the Grounds for Sculpture in Trenton, NJ.

painting of a lake near a lake

I was wandering around the grounds and enjoying all the wonderful sculptures when I came across a lake. There were two women standing near the shore and they were both chatting in Russian. Then one of them looked over at me and shouted to me in Russian “Hey! Can you take our photo?”

I was shocked for a moment because I was standing at least 30 feet away and I didn’t speak a word before that. I walked down and took their photo and then asked, in Russian, “How did you know I spoke Russian?”.

The woman smiled and said, “видно по глазам”

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Occupation and Preoccupation

Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025

What do we do when the facts don't matter?

As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…

via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 17, 2025

Generated by openring