Near Miss

In the last part of the story of Hamlet there is a swordfight. Laertes has put poison onto the tip of his sword. Laertes manages to wound Ha...

I have a friend who was working in England. He decided to take a short holiday and drove his English car back to Romania. One day he went ou...

Alex was an Air Traffic Controller in Kamchatka from 1995 t0 1998. After that he returned to Ukraine. His friend from Kamchatka wanted to vi...

In 1986 I was a controller in Constanza Airport Tower. In the morning at about 11 o'clock an AN24 type aircraft made a crash landing bec...

This story happened at a railway station in Ukraine. Three men arrived at the station at 8:05pm and asked the stationmaster the time of the ...

When Dmitri was working in the Tower an Austrian aircraft was coming for landing. The aircraft was about 10 km from the runway. At that mome...

Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī(Persian: مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi was born in...

The Ottoman Empire(1299-1922) was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Turkish-ruled state. By 1300, there were Ghazi principalities all over ...

Istanbul is Turkey`s most popular city. It is a cultural and historical centre. It is located on the Bosphorus Strait and is part of the nat...

Pylyp Orlyk, a Zaporozhian Cossack, went into exile after Tsar Peter I won the Battle of Poltava and conquered Ukraine. He was declared the ...

Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko are two of the top boxers in the world. They are from Ukraine and are brothers. Both have PhDs are have the ni...

I want to tell the story of a illustrious Russian man, Yuri Gugarin. A lot people know him because he was the first man in space.It was on t...

Igor Sikorsksy was a Ukrainian inventor. He was born in Kiev and lived there before the Russian revolution. After the revolution he emigrate...

A law introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev prohibited alcoholic drinks: 1. People began to make their own domestic alcohol; 2. The black market s...

In Ukraine if you win something you must pay tax. I had a friend who won a car in a prize draw. But he couldn't take the car because the...

In 1999 the west side of Turkey was hit by a big earthquake. After that the government introduced a tax to help people affected and cities d...

During Ceauşescu's time if you had not married after 30 years old you had to pay a tax! AUREL & GAVRILA

In Turkey everyone over 18 must vote, if they don't they have to pay a fine. This law they say is democratic, but it isn't democrati...

Either before or after the wedding the bridegroom has to pay money to anyone (maybe a small child) who stops the car. In Turkey it must be a...

On the occasion of the 100th Near Miss Blog JOHN & GEOFF would like to thank all of their wonderful students for their contributions--yo...

If it's not your wedding, a wedding in Turkey is great fun! You can drink, you can eat, you can do traditional Turkish folk dancing and ...

After the wedding ceremony, and before the bride goes to her new house, the bride throws up a glass or a bottle to break it. It's believ...

Yesterday my friend and I went to the supermarket to buy some beer. We took a box and went to the till. There was a young girl--pretty and n...

When I was a student at university I was well off because my father supported me. But when I graduated my father didn't give me money an...

I live in Cluj-Napoca. Cluj-Napoca is in the centre of Transylvania in the northwest of Romania. Transylvania is a beautiful country: with h...

This tragi-comic story happened in Istanbul many years ago. A man came to Istanbul. It was the first time he had been in such a big city. He...

In my childhood I used to play football with my friends. One day, because of too much enthusiasm, I fell down on a sharp stone that caused m...

When I was 5 or 6 years old my friends and I decided to eat oranges and went to an orange garden. It wasn't our garden but we ate the or...

When I was 4 or 5 I had an incident with my sister. We used to sleep in the same room and I went to sleep earlier than she did. When she cam...

When I was a child I liked playing with my dog. It was a German Shepherd. I decided to connect him to my sleigh and use him like a horse. Th...

My family goes to our village every summer. When I was six years old we went again to Trabzon. I was playing with my friends near the path. ...

You have to make a grid of dots 10 horozontal x 10 vertical in this game. The first player has to make a line between two dots. The next pla...

1. Draw a grid 10 x 10 2. Name columns left to right A-J 3. Number vertical columns 1-10 4. Dispose ships: 1 battleship 4 squares; 2 cruiser...

You must draw a grid with 10 x 10 squares marked left to right A-J and 1-10 top to bottom. You have a fleet that includes 1 battleship marke...

In this picture there are three houses 1, 2, 3. These three houses need sources of energy: G = gas; E = electricity; W = water. You have to ...

This game is for two players. The game has rules as follows: The first player thinks of a word and writes the word with dashes instead of le...

When I was 9 years old we were living on the 2nd floor. One morning my parents asked me about the previous night. What was I doing? But I co...

When I was six one of my neighbours got a small German Shepherd puppy. I often went close to him with a stick, made him angry, pushing him t...