There was just one flower on the small young magnolia tree along my walking route this year (its record so far was three flowers, I think). But that one flower was huge, as usual.

9 April


10 April:


12 April, showing some minimal sun damage (or just natural fading), but otherwise still at its best and most open:
(Sorry, I passed by when it was already a little too dark and it shows in the quality of the photo).

It's a Norway maple (Acer platanoides).



A better view of the flowers (and a worse view of the bee, alas). It looks like an old worker bee whose wings have seen better days.


Just the flowers and a fir tree in the background:


This is a school building with its yard, by the way.

No, I have no "legitimate" reason to study Hebrew; it's just my linguistic curiosity and admiration. I can only hope this doesn't end just as badly as my adventures with other foreign languages of no practical use to me.

It started with some joke in my Russian-speaking Facebook company about how somebody should start singing Hava Nagila to freak out some antisemitic guy he met somewhere... so I googled Hava Nagila (it isn't so well-known here in Bulgaria). And then I found a video that used it as background music on a Bulgarian site... and there was the beginning of some other song at the end of the video, and I loved the sound of it, but I didn't know what it was until I started googling the first words as I heard them (in the Roman alphabet)... and it turned out to be Shalom Aleichem, of which there were plenty of different performances of YouTube, and the language itself sounded to me just as melodious as the music. And then the autoplay of YouTube "decided" that the next right thing for me would be Jerusalem of Gold in Ofra Haza's performance... and I was doomed. :)

So, after many attempts to decipher the lyrics of all of the above songs from various translations into English and occasionally Bulgarian and actually beginning to recognize repeated simple words in the process, I finally got a craving to actually start studying the language and see where it gets me. So I did some more googling... and before I knew it, I actually started studying that scary mysterious alphabet, which is now much less mysterious for me, but still very scary - and the spelling conventions are even scarier. :)

And one of the most frustrating things is how I can recognize more and more letters... only in this particular font in the subtitles to Ofra Haza's performance: