While waiting for a meeting to start, we were looking around the room amused with the items on display on a shelf and at the walls around the room. The collection is owned by the Mayor of a highly urbanized city near a free port and part of a prominent family of politicians in the area. Among the things on the shelf were trophies and plaques, product samples (some looked like they had already reached their expiration dates), and other mementos or souvenirs from trips or given by visitors.
What caught my attention, after closer inspection, was a map of the world. My staff pointed out what appeared to be text in Greek but then I quickly recognized that the map was Russian and the text in Cyrillic. I am not an expert in languages nor am I conversant with Russian but I could recognize the text and could figure out the names of the places as I am familiar with the geography. It also helped that I tried to figure out Cyrillic from the chess books I had before that were published in the former Soviet Union. While the text were in Russian, the notations for chess games were in the international algebraic standard that allowed for easy understanding of the moves recorded from the games of prominent grandmasters of the USSR such as Botvinnik, Tal, Smyslov, Petrosian, Spassky, Korchnoi, and Karpov. These were old books from the 1960's and 1970's so Kasparov and his generation were not yet featured in the books.
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| Part of a framed map of the world, I took a photo of the Philippines with Sabah on the lower left corner. The reflections on the photo show a shelf on the left and a window with blinds drawn down in the right. |
I ended up amusing myself by attempting to decipher the Cyrillic equivalent of the English alphabet as I browsed the map for the names of places in the Philippines. I took the photo above for posterity as it was also probably our final presentation of our study to the Mayor and his staff that day and maybe the last time I will see that map hanging on his office wall.
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