Tonight I rode home from work the long way, which is a mile or so longer than my usual route.

It’s a route with less traffic than the usual, so I felt free to work on my assignment for the course in Conversational Russian that I’m taking. It’s a non-credit course that meets one night a week, which deprives me of one bike ride a week, too. So an extra mile here and there helps to make up for it.

Our main assignment this week is to learn the song Cheburashka. I recorded the song from this YouTube site to my MP3 player, I printed the lyrics in large characters so I could read it on my handlebar bag. (This is where a route with hardly any traffic comes in handy. I’m kind of slow at reading anything in Cyrillic characters.)

To capture the audio I had used a program called Blaze Media Pro, which I just downloaded and installed last night. So far I like it better than another such program I’ve tried. I will probably pay the $50 so I can use it past the trial period. More Russian songs downloaded to my MP3 player will get me out riding more.

On a quiet route like this one I could try to sing along without fear of anyone laughing at me for singing out of tune or with bad pronunciation. I think my tires were a bit low; in any case it seemed I had to huff and puff more than usual, which meant my attempts at singing along with Gena the crocodile got worse instead of better as I went along.

In class there had been some discussion as to whether the instrument should be translated in English as harmonica, accordion, or what.   I had nothing to contribute on that subject, but when I went home and looked up accordion on Wikipedia I learned that the instrument is a fairly recent invention, if you call the 1820s recent.   (The English subtitles on this particular clip call it a concertina, which is probably right.)

A lot of my history rides have to do with the period between 1812 and 1832,  which was not only an important period in Black Hawk’s life and in settlement era history in southern Michigan, but was also the period when this instrument was invented.   Wikipedia says it quickly spread throughout Europe and got incorporated into folk music traditions.

I guess there’s no rule that says traditions have to go back many centuries in order to be traditions.  Not even in Europe is that a rule.