Monday, November 10, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
The Journal Articles
What follows below are the articles that I wrote for the Greenville Community Journal while I was in the Czech Republic.
#1 Where is Home
I think it’s possible that I have fallen into a deep and serious relationship outside my marriage. Don’t worry. My husband knows about it. In fact, this relatively new passion is partly his doing. In early 2004, when he applied for a Fulbright Award to teach abroad, my response was to say, “Take me some place exotic, preferably where I can improve my skills in one of the languages I’ve already studied, but where everything will be completely different from what I’ve ever known.”
So, when my husband announced in 2005 that we would be going to Central Europe, I was a bit disappointed. I’m sure I sounded like a jaded four-year-old when I whined, “That’s not exotic.” Though honestly, I knew little more of the Czech Republic than that it was part of the former Czechoslovakia, one of the bonus words on my third grade spelling test.
The Czech Republic is a tiny country very close in size and outline to South Carolina, right in the center of Europe, not so far from Italy, up and to the right. It is a country which has at least one cathedral in nearly every town or village, more than 2,000 castles and ruins, rolling hills, and rivers which flow eventually into the North, Baltic and Black Seas in an elegant geographic metaphor for the country’s contributions to the rest of the world. The Czech Republic has a long and exciting history which reads like the script of every exciting adventure movie you have ever seen. Saints and kings, lords and rings, Nazis and Commies and reclaimed democracy: Czech Republic has had it all. And what’s missing from its history, you’ll find in the fairy tales that every Czech knows as well as we Southerners know Dixie.
It has a population about two and a half times that of South Carolina, though unlike South Carolina more than half live in the capital city, Prague. The rest are concentrated in small villages and towns.
I was wrong about how different living in the Czech Republic would be from anything I had ever known. It seemed as exotic and in some ways unnavigable as Istanbul. I was so busy with daily life, I didn’t even keep a journal. My letters and emails home to family and friends included cryptic one-liners about my experience:
“People don’t smile like southerners. Even the toilets are different!”
“Only about every three words in five have vowels. We found cheddar cheese!”
“Peanut butter and corn meal are in the foreign foods aisle.”
“I have learned to look out the window while riding on trams. Apparently, only bad girls smile at men they don’t know.”
When the time came to leave, I wept both for the home I missed and one I would miss and the impossibility of having them both at the same time. And when I returned home to South Carolina, I looked at my own culture with fresh eyes and missed my Czech home as acutely as I had my own home here. I found I missed the tolling of church bells and the screech of slowing trams as much as I had missed the peepers and hoot owls in my South Carolina backyard. I still take a basket when I enter a store here, even if I’m buying only one thing because Czech store keepers like it when you take a basket. I work as hard at remembering to smile at strangers as I did to not smile at the old men on trams. And I still get a little excited when I see cheddar cheese.
In a few days, I will be returning to the Czech Republic for five weeks to see Prague and to stay with friends who tell me, in the words of their national anthem, “among Czechs is my home.”
So, when my husband announced in 2005 that we would be going to Central Europe, I was a bit disappointed. I’m sure I sounded like a jaded four-year-old when I whined, “That’s not exotic.” Though honestly, I knew little more of the Czech Republic than that it was part of the former Czechoslovakia, one of the bonus words on my third grade spelling test.
The Czech Republic is a tiny country very close in size and outline to South Carolina, right in the center of Europe, not so far from Italy, up and to the right. It is a country which has at least one cathedral in nearly every town or village, more than 2,000 castles and ruins, rolling hills, and rivers which flow eventually into the North, Baltic and Black Seas in an elegant geographic metaphor for the country’s contributions to the rest of the world. The Czech Republic has a long and exciting history which reads like the script of every exciting adventure movie you have ever seen. Saints and kings, lords and rings, Nazis and Commies and reclaimed democracy: Czech Republic has had it all. And what’s missing from its history, you’ll find in the fairy tales that every Czech knows as well as we Southerners know Dixie.
It has a population about two and a half times that of South Carolina, though unlike South Carolina more than half live in the capital city, Prague. The rest are concentrated in small villages and towns.
I was wrong about how different living in the Czech Republic would be from anything I had ever known. It seemed as exotic and in some ways unnavigable as Istanbul. I was so busy with daily life, I didn’t even keep a journal. My letters and emails home to family and friends included cryptic one-liners about my experience:
“People don’t smile like southerners. Even the toilets are different!”
“Only about every three words in five have vowels. We found cheddar cheese!”
“Peanut butter and corn meal are in the foreign foods aisle.”
“I have learned to look out the window while riding on trams. Apparently, only bad girls smile at men they don’t know.”
When the time came to leave, I wept both for the home I missed and one I would miss and the impossibility of having them both at the same time. And when I returned home to South Carolina, I looked at my own culture with fresh eyes and missed my Czech home as acutely as I had my own home here. I found I missed the tolling of church bells and the screech of slowing trams as much as I had missed the peepers and hoot owls in my South Carolina backyard. I still take a basket when I enter a store here, even if I’m buying only one thing because Czech store keepers like it when you take a basket. I work as hard at remembering to smile at strangers as I did to not smile at the old men on trams. And I still get a little excited when I see cheddar cheese.
In a few days, I will be returning to the Czech Republic for five weeks to see Prague and to stay with friends who tell me, in the words of their national anthem, “among Czechs is my home.”
#2 Behind the Curtain
Yesterday I went shopping for a little dress and used the storekeeper’s kitchen as a dressing room. In Prague, there are quite a lot of Asian goods shops of the sort I learned to frequent when we lived in Brno. These shops take three forms: stalls a lot like American flea markets, stores with great plate glass windows completely populated by a selection of what’s on offer, or a single doorway, festooned along the sides with the items for sale and announced above with a sign. Inside a room about the size of your den, every available inch of space except for a narrow path is covered in goods. Most things have the prices on them, and though it is possible to ask for a discount, it isn’t usual to ask or to get it.
It is this last sort of shop, a crowded doorway across the street from our hotel, where I found my dress. I have wondered what was behind the curtain on the wire at the back of these stores, and what went on behind them. Now I know. Asian shopkeepers live there. When I asked to try on a few things, I was led behind the curtain through an ornate wooden door with peeling paint and into—a kitchen! While the shopkeeper cleared the green beans and dandelion leaves and dented colander he was sorting them in from the small, blue formica topped table, I looked around. Along one wall was a low bench: below it were seven pairs of shoes, including one pair of men’s backory (house shoes). Since street shoes aren’t worn inside homes here, I knew that this extra pair of house shoes meant that the shopkeeper shares his living quarters with one other person.
As he pushed the table aside to clear space in front of the mirror, I saw a washing machine, an electric kettle on the counter, and pot of potatoes boiling on the stove. Like nearly every other Czech home I’ve ever been in, I could see that there were two hot water heaters, one about the size of a high chair, for the bathroom and clothes washer, installed four feet off the floor, and a small, flat point-of-service one on the wall above the kitchen sink.
He closed the door behind him and left me alone. I slid the bolt to lock the door and slipped off my shoes. I distracted myself from my discomfort at undressing by focusing my attention on the rest of the room. The floor was concrete, covered by printed linoleum worn through in unlikely spots. On the walls were two posters, both of American cowboy types, advertisements for some clothing line. From the television reflected in the mirror behind me George Bush leaned over a podium, stood back, flashed one of his boyish grins. Yeah, Georgie, capitalism is a big hit here.
The Asian markets aren’t the only places to shop here, though they are great if you just want to grab something to get by with. And certainly there are other similar shops with a more usual arrangement for trying things on. There are of course also hundreds of wonderful stores and shops on Vaclavske Namesti (Wenceslas Square) along which you can stroll under the trees in perfect anonymity, your way scented by perfume and tobacco shops and adorned by both fresh and glass flowers for sale in kiosks on the cobble stoned sidewalks.
It is this last sort of shop, a crowded doorway across the street from our hotel, where I found my dress. I have wondered what was behind the curtain on the wire at the back of these stores, and what went on behind them. Now I know. Asian shopkeepers live there. When I asked to try on a few things, I was led behind the curtain through an ornate wooden door with peeling paint and into—a kitchen! While the shopkeeper cleared the green beans and dandelion leaves and dented colander he was sorting them in from the small, blue formica topped table, I looked around. Along one wall was a low bench: below it were seven pairs of shoes, including one pair of men’s backory (house shoes). Since street shoes aren’t worn inside homes here, I knew that this extra pair of house shoes meant that the shopkeeper shares his living quarters with one other person.
As he pushed the table aside to clear space in front of the mirror, I saw a washing machine, an electric kettle on the counter, and pot of potatoes boiling on the stove. Like nearly every other Czech home I’ve ever been in, I could see that there were two hot water heaters, one about the size of a high chair, for the bathroom and clothes washer, installed four feet off the floor, and a small, flat point-of-service one on the wall above the kitchen sink.
He closed the door behind him and left me alone. I slid the bolt to lock the door and slipped off my shoes. I distracted myself from my discomfort at undressing by focusing my attention on the rest of the room. The floor was concrete, covered by printed linoleum worn through in unlikely spots. On the walls were two posters, both of American cowboy types, advertisements for some clothing line. From the television reflected in the mirror behind me George Bush leaned over a podium, stood back, flashed one of his boyish grins. Yeah, Georgie, capitalism is a big hit here.
The Asian markets aren’t the only places to shop here, though they are great if you just want to grab something to get by with. And certainly there are other similar shops with a more usual arrangement for trying things on. There are of course also hundreds of wonderful stores and shops on Vaclavske Namesti (Wenceslas Square) along which you can stroll under the trees in perfect anonymity, your way scented by perfume and tobacco shops and adorned by both fresh and glass flowers for sale in kiosks on the cobble stoned sidewalks.
#3 Window Ornament
I like my life here as a window ornament. I hang on the windowsill or sit in it to watch our street every chance I get. The street is three lanes wide, with two sets of tram rails like embedded train tracks and two electrical lines which run above the trams. The wide, mostly uncobbled sidewalks are lined with shops, pubs, and restaurants.
The plate glass windows of the trafika and tabak are so crowded with alcohol and cigarette products, the papirnictvi with stationery, the drogerie with soaps, cleaners, and cosmetics, and the obuvy with shoes that you can’t even see inside the stores. The fruit and vegetables offered at the ovoce and zelenina and the clothes at the odevy creep from their single doorways so people walking by can make a purchase and tuck it into their shopping bags without ever leaving the sidewalk. There’s a wedding attire business which gets more action than the erotic video rental shop next to it, and a provaznictvi selling mostly rope, which I never see anyone go into.
The first week, I spent more time watching the workers replacing and repairing the tram lines than I did the other passersby. Unlike a road crew back home, they seem to be allowed to wear whatever they want to work. One hot day, there was a man in a bright red coverall and boots, one in paint-spattered plaid shorts and old dress shoes, another in long pants and sneakers, both of them shirtless and getting pinker by the minute in the sun.
They also seemed to be allowed a few other liberties. When nearly the entire crew filed into a pub before eleven one morning, I closed the window, thinking, “Well, that’s it for today,” but a little while later, they all returned to work, one of them still clutching a beer, and the street work was finished more than a day ahead of the posted schedule.
But the attitude towards beer is different here. There is even a line in a famous opera, “Beer is a gift from God. It gives us strength and courage.” The first time one of my Czech friends told me about needing to go for a beer after exercise class, “to get her strength back,” I laughed. Beer is the reason I need exercise. Seriously, beer here is like sweet tea for us; it’s what you drink with meals, or if you’re just plain thirsty.
Of course there are some who don’t seem to know when their thirst has been quenched or their strength and courage have been refilled. The first time I heard anything other than hearty laughter and the odd jukebox song coming out of the nonstop (twenty four –seven) pub across the street, I was shocked. We all rushed to the window to see the results of a collision of wills in the form of a beer bottle to some man’s head. The man, nearly too drunk to stand alone, was offered a chair first inside the doorway, where he was silhouetted like a very thin, dripping version of Rodin’s Thinker, then on the sidewalk. His friend kept him seated while people drifted by, though no one stopped or cast more than a furtive glance, and most passersby changed sidewalks well away from the scene. Only one drunken man who seemed to skate in from down the street, glided up, circled the man in the chair, peered into his face, before rubbing his own and drifting off down the street only to return a minute later to do the same thing again. Both the number on the back of shirt and the pattern of his route said ninety six, so we named him Ninety-six. And when Ninety Six wandered off and around the corner, we closed the window for the day.
The plate glass windows of the trafika and tabak are so crowded with alcohol and cigarette products, the papirnictvi with stationery, the drogerie with soaps, cleaners, and cosmetics, and the obuvy with shoes that you can’t even see inside the stores. The fruit and vegetables offered at the ovoce and zelenina and the clothes at the odevy creep from their single doorways so people walking by can make a purchase and tuck it into their shopping bags without ever leaving the sidewalk. There’s a wedding attire business which gets more action than the erotic video rental shop next to it, and a provaznictvi selling mostly rope, which I never see anyone go into.
The first week, I spent more time watching the workers replacing and repairing the tram lines than I did the other passersby. Unlike a road crew back home, they seem to be allowed to wear whatever they want to work. One hot day, there was a man in a bright red coverall and boots, one in paint-spattered plaid shorts and old dress shoes, another in long pants and sneakers, both of them shirtless and getting pinker by the minute in the sun.
They also seemed to be allowed a few other liberties. When nearly the entire crew filed into a pub before eleven one morning, I closed the window, thinking, “Well, that’s it for today,” but a little while later, they all returned to work, one of them still clutching a beer, and the street work was finished more than a day ahead of the posted schedule.
But the attitude towards beer is different here. There is even a line in a famous opera, “Beer is a gift from God. It gives us strength and courage.” The first time one of my Czech friends told me about needing to go for a beer after exercise class, “to get her strength back,” I laughed. Beer is the reason I need exercise. Seriously, beer here is like sweet tea for us; it’s what you drink with meals, or if you’re just plain thirsty.
Of course there are some who don’t seem to know when their thirst has been quenched or their strength and courage have been refilled. The first time I heard anything other than hearty laughter and the odd jukebox song coming out of the nonstop (twenty four –seven) pub across the street, I was shocked. We all rushed to the window to see the results of a collision of wills in the form of a beer bottle to some man’s head. The man, nearly too drunk to stand alone, was offered a chair first inside the doorway, where he was silhouetted like a very thin, dripping version of Rodin’s Thinker, then on the sidewalk. His friend kept him seated while people drifted by, though no one stopped or cast more than a furtive glance, and most passersby changed sidewalks well away from the scene. Only one drunken man who seemed to skate in from down the street, glided up, circled the man in the chair, peered into his face, before rubbing his own and drifting off down the street only to return a minute later to do the same thing again. Both the number on the back of shirt and the pattern of his route said ninety six, so we named him Ninety-six. And when Ninety Six wandered off and around the corner, we closed the window for the day.
#4 By the Grace of God
Close your eyes for a second and imagine a howling wind, but not a scary one—the kind of wind you hear at a time when you are safe and happy inside, have few worries, and so can take comfort because of the contrast between the safety you have now and the unpleasantness outside. This is the sound that trams make as they accelerate and slow down. It is also the sound of another train as it’s passing the one you’re in.
We took a fast train through the beautiful countryside from Prague to Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the city where we lived for nearly a year three years ago. Gently rolling golden or new green hills outlined in darker greens; sandy beige, pale terracotta or dusky pale mustard-colored houses with red tiled roofs, and lace curtained windows. I see only a few people, and those I do are tending the fruit trees that seem to be a part of nearly every household garden landscape, even in the city.
These are views that never, ever fail to bring tears to my eyes. And no matter how long I have been away, I always feel as if I am coming home to a place that is as much a part of me as it is place apart from me. This sense of belonging doesn’t compete with my love of my own native Georgia, or South Carolina. Rather, it is another home in addition to the one I was born to.
Love of place is one of those things that Czechs and Southerners share, which isn’t surprising when the majority of population can say their ancestors have lived among these hills and valleys for hundreds of years. All of my acquaintances in Brno consider themselves Moravian Czech, and they announce this with the same pride as a southern man might refer to himself as a good ole boy. And a couple of them are so proud of their Moravian heritage that I am sure if bumper stickers were even remotely popular here, they would have them that said, “Czech by birth, Moravian by the grace of God.”
There is also a deep respect for grandmother, and the secure and happy associations that the word conjures up. More than once in this country, I have seen a change in a surly shopkeeper when I was shopping for a gift, or in an impatient security guard with the invocation of a single word, “babicka.” It was understood immediately that the gift I wanted was for my grandmother, that my grandmother had made the sandwich I was being ordered to toss into the trash. I got a smile at the store and permission to carry my food into the museum. It’s a lot like being in the South, in Georgia or South Carolina, and having the correct response to the inevitable question: “Who are your people?” It’s an ordinary occurrence, perhaps even one taken for granted until I am far enough from home.
If home is “the place where they have to take you in,” then this is surely home, too, though like going back to my family and friends in America, I don’t feel like I am being taken in out of a sense of obligation. When I come home to Brno, my friends treat me with the care and habits that their grandmothers treated them. I am welcomed with the affection and attention of old friends, though I have known these friends for only a short time. On my first return trip to Brno eighteen months ago, one of my friends asked what meal I’d like to have when I arrived. When I answered that it didn’t matter, she explained to me that her grandmother always made the favorite meal “for the one who’s been away from home.” My eyes filled with tears. “Babicka.” The word even works on me.
We took a fast train through the beautiful countryside from Prague to Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the city where we lived for nearly a year three years ago. Gently rolling golden or new green hills outlined in darker greens; sandy beige, pale terracotta or dusky pale mustard-colored houses with red tiled roofs, and lace curtained windows. I see only a few people, and those I do are tending the fruit trees that seem to be a part of nearly every household garden landscape, even in the city.
These are views that never, ever fail to bring tears to my eyes. And no matter how long I have been away, I always feel as if I am coming home to a place that is as much a part of me as it is place apart from me. This sense of belonging doesn’t compete with my love of my own native Georgia, or South Carolina. Rather, it is another home in addition to the one I was born to.
Love of place is one of those things that Czechs and Southerners share, which isn’t surprising when the majority of population can say their ancestors have lived among these hills and valleys for hundreds of years. All of my acquaintances in Brno consider themselves Moravian Czech, and they announce this with the same pride as a southern man might refer to himself as a good ole boy. And a couple of them are so proud of their Moravian heritage that I am sure if bumper stickers were even remotely popular here, they would have them that said, “Czech by birth, Moravian by the grace of God.”
There is also a deep respect for grandmother, and the secure and happy associations that the word conjures up. More than once in this country, I have seen a change in a surly shopkeeper when I was shopping for a gift, or in an impatient security guard with the invocation of a single word, “babicka.” It was understood immediately that the gift I wanted was for my grandmother, that my grandmother had made the sandwich I was being ordered to toss into the trash. I got a smile at the store and permission to carry my food into the museum. It’s a lot like being in the South, in Georgia or South Carolina, and having the correct response to the inevitable question: “Who are your people?” It’s an ordinary occurrence, perhaps even one taken for granted until I am far enough from home.
If home is “the place where they have to take you in,” then this is surely home, too, though like going back to my family and friends in America, I don’t feel like I am being taken in out of a sense of obligation. When I come home to Brno, my friends treat me with the care and habits that their grandmothers treated them. I am welcomed with the affection and attention of old friends, though I have known these friends for only a short time. On my first return trip to Brno eighteen months ago, one of my friends asked what meal I’d like to have when I arrived. When I answered that it didn’t matter, she explained to me that her grandmother always made the favorite meal “for the one who’s been away from home.” My eyes filled with tears. “Babicka.” The word even works on me.
#5 Blue Plate Specials
On my first trip to Brno nearly three years ago, I was perplexed by the number of people who seemed to be using food stamps, not only in grocery stores, but in restaurants, too. How could so many people, many of them extremely well-dressed, have food stamps, I wondered. I soon found out, though, that the currency they used wasn’t any sort of public assistance at all. It is customary in the Czech Republic for employers to provide either a cafeteria where the workers receive a free meal every day, or vouchers which the workers can use in pubs or restaurants to get a prepared lunch from the menicka, or what we used to call the Blue Plate specials. Workers can also use these food coupons at grocery stores if they want to make their own lunch or put the vouchers towards the household grocery bill. Since what the employers do is to offer vouchers for a small amount of the face value, everyone who works, I think, takes advantage of them. Who wouldn’t pay about two dollars for a ticket to spend on seven dollars worth of food? Drinks aren’t always included in the meals at cafeterias or restaurants, but beer and soft drinks can be purchased. Even after having lived here for a year and visited here a couple of times, I am still a little surprised to see beer offered and consumed at work.
Last week, we were treated to lunch at my friend’s workplace cafeteria. With his voucher, he was given soup (which is almost always offered at midday meals), a large fried schnitzel, potatoes, a small bowl of cucumber salad, and a small glass of fruit tea---pretty much a normal Czech lunch. For me, having spent some of my childhood in the company of my grandparents, this is my idea of the perfect lunch. Soup, meat and potatoes, and little bit of salad. Who could ask for more? Honestly, it seems to me that nearly every Czech dish is great comfort food. My favorite is Svickova—a slice of bacon-infused beef with a sweet creamy sauce, garnished with a tiny bit of cranberry jam and whipped cream, and served with knedliky. Knedliky to a Czech is like biscuits or cornbread to us Southerners. It’s somewhere between a biscuit (in taste) and light bread or angel food cake in texture. It can be made with either wheat flour and rolls or with potato flour and is cooked in large pinecone shaped rolls by boiling and then sliced with a length of thread. Some people call them dumplings, and although knedliky aren’t at all like our dumplings, they are every bit as good. Like us Southerners and our cornbread, knedliky isn’t a big deal to Czechs unless they don’t have it.
When I’m not in the mood for sweet, or am missing some taste of home I order pork or chicken, with or without sauce, that comes with cooked shredded cabbage. Or I order my husband’s favorite, Kureci Kapsa, which is cheese and ham cooked into a chicken breast and served with potatoes cooked any one of the at least five different ways they are offered every where: boiled, roasted, fried, made into pancakes the texture of a flat crabcake, or mashed. My husband has a weakness for the croquetty, small perfectly round fried potato balls.
It seems to us that it is common for children to be allowed dinners that back home would be the sole prerogative of grandparents to offer. More than once, my son has had his homesickness here appeased with a meal of Ovocny Palacinky, Czech pancakes and fruit. It’s what we would call French crepes filled with preserves and topped with whipped cream and caramel or chocolate sauce. The favorite meal of one of my son’s friends here is Parfait: one gigantic sundae. I’m not kidding about the size: the biggest thing Dairy Queen has to offer is tiny by comparison.
Last week, we were treated to lunch at my friend’s workplace cafeteria. With his voucher, he was given soup (which is almost always offered at midday meals), a large fried schnitzel, potatoes, a small bowl of cucumber salad, and a small glass of fruit tea---pretty much a normal Czech lunch. For me, having spent some of my childhood in the company of my grandparents, this is my idea of the perfect lunch. Soup, meat and potatoes, and little bit of salad. Who could ask for more? Honestly, it seems to me that nearly every Czech dish is great comfort food. My favorite is Svickova—a slice of bacon-infused beef with a sweet creamy sauce, garnished with a tiny bit of cranberry jam and whipped cream, and served with knedliky. Knedliky to a Czech is like biscuits or cornbread to us Southerners. It’s somewhere between a biscuit (in taste) and light bread or angel food cake in texture. It can be made with either wheat flour and rolls or with potato flour and is cooked in large pinecone shaped rolls by boiling and then sliced with a length of thread. Some people call them dumplings, and although knedliky aren’t at all like our dumplings, they are every bit as good. Like us Southerners and our cornbread, knedliky isn’t a big deal to Czechs unless they don’t have it.
When I’m not in the mood for sweet, or am missing some taste of home I order pork or chicken, with or without sauce, that comes with cooked shredded cabbage. Or I order my husband’s favorite, Kureci Kapsa, which is cheese and ham cooked into a chicken breast and served with potatoes cooked any one of the at least five different ways they are offered every where: boiled, roasted, fried, made into pancakes the texture of a flat crabcake, or mashed. My husband has a weakness for the croquetty, small perfectly round fried potato balls.
It seems to us that it is common for children to be allowed dinners that back home would be the sole prerogative of grandparents to offer. More than once, my son has had his homesickness here appeased with a meal of Ovocny Palacinky, Czech pancakes and fruit. It’s what we would call French crepes filled with preserves and topped with whipped cream and caramel or chocolate sauce. The favorite meal of one of my son’s friends here is Parfait: one gigantic sundae. I’m not kidding about the size: the biggest thing Dairy Queen has to offer is tiny by comparison.
#6 Ticket to Ride
My son has learned the phrase, “the imp of the perverse,” and we’ve all been using it lately. Everybody knows what this imp is: it makes you do what you know you oughtn’t to do but you do it anyway. This week, I decided to give my imp of the perverse full rein. I smiled at old men on trams all day (and this trip I actually got smiled back at a time or two.) I rode facing the front of the tram when I stood, instead of the sides, as the Czechs do. And sometimes I played around and instead of holding onto one of the four orange rails hanging along the ceiling of the tram, or onto the back of a seat, I stood surfer-style in the aisle. I took the seats marked on the windows with a green cross, but gave them up to the elderly or infirm, since it is for them, and not the merely middle-aged and tired, like me, that these seats are reserved.
I didn’t, however, talk loudly to my traveling companions or use my cell phone, or act like I was being offered some black market jewelry for sale when the tram inspector flashed his badge. I had to draw the line somewhere.
Riding public transport is a big thrill for me. What can I say? I grew up in a tiny town, and the biggest city aside from Brno that I have ever lived in was Athens, Georgia, where during my first week I rode a city bus past my stop twice before I figured out how to make the driver stop. Here, public transport is cheap, or at least it seems to be. For less than a dollar (10 Czech crowns), I can get a non-transfer ticket for a ten minute ride, and for five crowns more I can ride for an hour and get on and off the trams, buses, and the trains as many times as I want.
But my favorite is the two hour, six zone ticket for a mere thirty-seven crowns (a bit more than two dollars) because I can take a slow train into the countryside for an hour and then come back. The slow trains stop at almost every tiny station they come to, even the ones with grass growing tall along the tracks and peeking out from the cracks in the platform tiles. The conductor announces each station over the loud speakers, but if you miss it, or can’t hear it for the screaming of the brakes, you can see the names on blue metal signs that don’t swing in the wind as the train pulls in. Except for the occasional Coke machine that often sits brightly against the slightly sooty station wall, most of these stations look abandoned. But the train still stops and someone almost always gets on or off.
I like to take these train rides this with my husband and son sitting in the high-backed brown vinyl covered seat across from me, so I can
look from their faces to the passing landscapes, like a collection of 19th pastoral paintings, in the huge window beside us.
I used my twenty-one crown, sixty minute ticket yesterday to visit someone in Holasice, a tiny village just ten minutes from Brno. After we got off at the station, we crossed the tracks and walked along a worn path framed on the sides with wildflowers, many of which reminded me of the blooming weeds I like back in America. Next to a Queen Anne’s Lace was growing a leggy plant with small papery, pale lilac blossoms somewhere between cosmos and a poppy. Its name in Czech means “the one who waits.”
I didn’t, however, talk loudly to my traveling companions or use my cell phone, or act like I was being offered some black market jewelry for sale when the tram inspector flashed his badge. I had to draw the line somewhere.
Riding public transport is a big thrill for me. What can I say? I grew up in a tiny town, and the biggest city aside from Brno that I have ever lived in was Athens, Georgia, where during my first week I rode a city bus past my stop twice before I figured out how to make the driver stop. Here, public transport is cheap, or at least it seems to be. For less than a dollar (10 Czech crowns), I can get a non-transfer ticket for a ten minute ride, and for five crowns more I can ride for an hour and get on and off the trams, buses, and the trains as many times as I want.
But my favorite is the two hour, six zone ticket for a mere thirty-seven crowns (a bit more than two dollars) because I can take a slow train into the countryside for an hour and then come back. The slow trains stop at almost every tiny station they come to, even the ones with grass growing tall along the tracks and peeking out from the cracks in the platform tiles. The conductor announces each station over the loud speakers, but if you miss it, or can’t hear it for the screaming of the brakes, you can see the names on blue metal signs that don’t swing in the wind as the train pulls in. Except for the occasional Coke machine that often sits brightly against the slightly sooty station wall, most of these stations look abandoned. But the train still stops and someone almost always gets on or off.
I like to take these train rides this with my husband and son sitting in the high-backed brown vinyl covered seat across from me, so I can
look from their faces to the passing landscapes, like a collection of 19th pastoral paintings, in the huge window beside us.
I used my twenty-one crown, sixty minute ticket yesterday to visit someone in Holasice, a tiny village just ten minutes from Brno. After we got off at the station, we crossed the tracks and walked along a worn path framed on the sides with wildflowers, many of which reminded me of the blooming weeds I like back in America. Next to a Queen Anne’s Lace was growing a leggy plant with small papery, pale lilac blossoms somewhere between cosmos and a poppy. Its name in Czech means “the one who waits.”
#7 Next Time
My husband asked me if I thought there would ever have been a revolution if the Communists had allowed more color. Of course, he was partly joking, his comment being more about the increasing colorful improvements we’ve noticed this trip than about world politics.
Houses and buildings and streets and sidewalks are now steadily undergoing improvements which during the Communist regime would have been unthinkable. Concrete and asphalt streets and sidewalks are being torn up and replaced with paving bricks and cobblestones more like what had been in place before 1948. Many of the graying concrete-colored houses we used to walk by are now painted in yellows, greens and blues. When I asked my friend why so many people were choosing to paint their houses a color, she said, “Because they can now.” She explained that during the Communist regime colored house paint was simply not available.
I remembered her mother telling us about how she had been allowed to travel to Austria as a part of some trip for musicians, and how for her returning to Brno was like going from a color world back to one in black and white. It seemed to me a terribly sad observation for an artist to make.
I spent my last Saturday afternoon in Brno in the city center. I spent some time on a bench in Namesti Svobody (Freedom Square), the main plaza which is in the center of the old part of town. When we were here before, the entire square, except for some room to walk along in front of the buildings, was under construction.
Many residents complain that the newly renovated square hasn’t any trees or green areas, that the barrenness makes it look like a military parade ground. In spite of these shortcomings, I think the square is beautiful, and I like to sit on one of the seven or so benches there, look at the square, the buildings around it, the trams that go through it and to watch the people.
In warm weather children play in the fountain which is in one corner and walk the poetry in relief on the concentric circles around it. In the afternoons Gypsies offer a little free entertainment in the form of what I call “dispute theater.” The usual cast is rarely fewer than five and involves some apparent disagreement, which gets played out in ever increasing distance between and loudness of the players until the number decreases to two, then none. Or that is how it seems to me. But then, I’m likely to tire of the act or become distracted by some momentarily more interesting sight like the advertisements on the side of the green Number 5 tram which make the riders appear to be sitting on toilets, or the nun with the fashionable leather purse and high heels making her way across the square and past the lingerie shop.
I look at the 17th Century plague column rising some thirty feet and topped with a nearly life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary, magnificent in a shining gold full-body halo. Below her, on each of the four corners of the base, are golden haloed saints, and on three sides are carved the names of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century plagues that the people of Brno were saved from. Many of the larger cities and some of the smaller towns I’ve visited here have at least one such tower, which rises, predictably, in a central square, just like Confederate war memorials in the South. And sadly, like those monuments, its relevance also seems lost to those around it.
When the Petrov Bells tolled five, I thought about the time I climbed the bell tower of the Cathedral two days in a row, the second time on purpose to hear the tremendous bells ring again just a few feet above my head. I had hoped to go just once more to hear these same bells mark noon. Maybe next time.
Houses and buildings and streets and sidewalks are now steadily undergoing improvements which during the Communist regime would have been unthinkable. Concrete and asphalt streets and sidewalks are being torn up and replaced with paving bricks and cobblestones more like what had been in place before 1948. Many of the graying concrete-colored houses we used to walk by are now painted in yellows, greens and blues. When I asked my friend why so many people were choosing to paint their houses a color, she said, “Because they can now.” She explained that during the Communist regime colored house paint was simply not available.
I remembered her mother telling us about how she had been allowed to travel to Austria as a part of some trip for musicians, and how for her returning to Brno was like going from a color world back to one in black and white. It seemed to me a terribly sad observation for an artist to make.
I spent my last Saturday afternoon in Brno in the city center. I spent some time on a bench in Namesti Svobody (Freedom Square), the main plaza which is in the center of the old part of town. When we were here before, the entire square, except for some room to walk along in front of the buildings, was under construction.
Many residents complain that the newly renovated square hasn’t any trees or green areas, that the barrenness makes it look like a military parade ground. In spite of these shortcomings, I think the square is beautiful, and I like to sit on one of the seven or so benches there, look at the square, the buildings around it, the trams that go through it and to watch the people.
In warm weather children play in the fountain which is in one corner and walk the poetry in relief on the concentric circles around it. In the afternoons Gypsies offer a little free entertainment in the form of what I call “dispute theater.” The usual cast is rarely fewer than five and involves some apparent disagreement, which gets played out in ever increasing distance between and loudness of the players until the number decreases to two, then none. Or that is how it seems to me. But then, I’m likely to tire of the act or become distracted by some momentarily more interesting sight like the advertisements on the side of the green Number 5 tram which make the riders appear to be sitting on toilets, or the nun with the fashionable leather purse and high heels making her way across the square and past the lingerie shop.
I look at the 17th Century plague column rising some thirty feet and topped with a nearly life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary, magnificent in a shining gold full-body halo. Below her, on each of the four corners of the base, are golden haloed saints, and on three sides are carved the names of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century plagues that the people of Brno were saved from. Many of the larger cities and some of the smaller towns I’ve visited here have at least one such tower, which rises, predictably, in a central square, just like Confederate war memorials in the South. And sadly, like those monuments, its relevance also seems lost to those around it.
When the Petrov Bells tolled five, I thought about the time I climbed the bell tower of the Cathedral two days in a row, the second time on purpose to hear the tremendous bells ring again just a few feet above my head. I had hoped to go just once more to hear these same bells mark noon. Maybe next time.
#8 Taking the Waters
Okay, so how cool is this? Czech state health insurance will pay for a stay at a spa if the doctor orders it. In the Czech Republic, there are more than thirty spa places, each with curative waters and treatments for a variety of ailments. Some of them, like Karlovy Vary and Marienbad, are large and quite famous, while a few are still frequented by mostly Czechs. Different spas tend to specialize in the treatment of specific disorders. Some offer help for digestive, respiratory, circulatory or nervous systems, while others are better for the treatment of arthritis, problems with the immune system, or oncological, or skin disorders.
We spent a restful, soothing weekend at Luhacovice, about two hours (about twenty dollars round trip for the three of us) from Brno. We went to this particular spa town because it is one which is largely unused by foreigners, and my friend’s parents have come here nearly every year since their honeymoon almost fifty years ago.
Luhacovice is also one of the oldest spa towns in Moravia where you can partake of the mineral water drinking cure, inhalation therapies, applications of various mineral salts and clays, mineral baths, as well as massage therapy.
Since this was our first trip, we took advantage of the mineral waters and the fresh air and soothing atmosphere. There are twelve to fifteen mineral springs at Luhacovice. We took the waters from five of them. All of the fountains are fairly simple, with the water running in a constant flow and at a constant temperature from a brass spigot-like pipe.
The first order of business, once you are checked into your room, is to buy the proper vessel for taking and drinking the mineral water. It is acceptable to use any kind of drinking vessel to take the waters at the springs, but since you can buy the proper sort for around one hundred Czech crowns (about six US dollars), and the cups come in such an interesting and beautiful variety of sizes, shapes, colors and china types, I recommend buying one.
The proper vessel looks a bit like a grease separator with a curved spout that functions as the handle. The cup appears slightly flattened, so that when you look down on the top of it, the rim is elliptical rather than round. It is possible to get a slightly potbellied version. The handle, which is also the drinking spout, extends along the bottom of the cup so that when you drink, you take the water from the bottom first.
I’m afraid that my friend laughed at the face I made at my first sips of these curative waters, though after trying five different springs, I soon found that I rather liked the taste. They aren’t sweet, like the artesian well water we drank as children in south Georgia, but these all taste vaguely salty and mildly metallic or sulphuric, depending on the mineral content.
You take the water, and well, you drink it as you stand around the fountain, sit on a bench nearby or while you walk along winding gravel-lined paths along the stream or through the green areas with trees and brightly painted early nineteenth century gingerbread hotels designed by Dusan Jurkovic.
We spent time sitting on benches in the colonnade, enjoying the cool, clean air, and after each day of a strict regimen of walking around and drinking spring water, I got some of the best sleep I have ever had. I can only imagine how it would well one could sleep after a day of mineral earth wraps and baths and massages and an evening of classical music concerts.
We spent a restful, soothing weekend at Luhacovice, about two hours (about twenty dollars round trip for the three of us) from Brno. We went to this particular spa town because it is one which is largely unused by foreigners, and my friend’s parents have come here nearly every year since their honeymoon almost fifty years ago.
Luhacovice is also one of the oldest spa towns in Moravia where you can partake of the mineral water drinking cure, inhalation therapies, applications of various mineral salts and clays, mineral baths, as well as massage therapy.
Since this was our first trip, we took advantage of the mineral waters and the fresh air and soothing atmosphere. There are twelve to fifteen mineral springs at Luhacovice. We took the waters from five of them. All of the fountains are fairly simple, with the water running in a constant flow and at a constant temperature from a brass spigot-like pipe.
The first order of business, once you are checked into your room, is to buy the proper vessel for taking and drinking the mineral water. It is acceptable to use any kind of drinking vessel to take the waters at the springs, but since you can buy the proper sort for around one hundred Czech crowns (about six US dollars), and the cups come in such an interesting and beautiful variety of sizes, shapes, colors and china types, I recommend buying one.
The proper vessel looks a bit like a grease separator with a curved spout that functions as the handle. The cup appears slightly flattened, so that when you look down on the top of it, the rim is elliptical rather than round. It is possible to get a slightly potbellied version. The handle, which is also the drinking spout, extends along the bottom of the cup so that when you drink, you take the water from the bottom first.
I’m afraid that my friend laughed at the face I made at my first sips of these curative waters, though after trying five different springs, I soon found that I rather liked the taste. They aren’t sweet, like the artesian well water we drank as children in south Georgia, but these all taste vaguely salty and mildly metallic or sulphuric, depending on the mineral content.
You take the water, and well, you drink it as you stand around the fountain, sit on a bench nearby or while you walk along winding gravel-lined paths along the stream or through the green areas with trees and brightly painted early nineteenth century gingerbread hotels designed by Dusan Jurkovic.
We spent time sitting on benches in the colonnade, enjoying the cool, clean air, and after each day of a strict regimen of walking around and drinking spring water, I got some of the best sleep I have ever had. I can only imagine how it would well one could sleep after a day of mineral earth wraps and baths and massages and an evening of classical music concerts.
#9 Tuition
A Valuable Souvenir: Tuition
Sometimes I wish I listened better. My friend Lenka told me all about her friend Ivana getting caught by the tram inspector without a ticket but I didn’t really pay attention. Since my first visit to the Czech Republic, living there while my husband was on a Fulbright, I’ve wondered what would happen if I got caught without a ticket and without money for the fine, and without identification which everyone says you must travel with. I always had a tram pass then and I almost never carry identification when I’m in Brno because
I’m afraid of losing my passport. My imagination of the process of getting to the embassy in Prague for a new one would be a textbook example of extreme neurosis. I’d spend too much time deciding what to wear, vacillating between dressing well, so as not to draw suspicion at the embassy, or dressing down, so I wouldn’t attract too much attention on the street. I’m unreasonably afraid my ticket would be examined by the only official on the train who truly despised Americans for some grievance I couldn’t possibly apologize for in Czech, or in English. And he’d demand my passport, for sure.
Haunted by scenes from movies about the KGB, I would shrink from every man in a dark suit all the way to the embassy doors. And once there, I would be as nervous as I was sitting in the hall at school, waiting for the principal to come get me. But it wouldn’t be as bad as I felt the day I got caught without a valid tram ticket.
The inspector wordlessly thrust his palmed badge at me, then moved towards the back of the tram. I pulled my unvalidated ticket out of my pocket, and looked across the aisle at the yellow validation machine about a yard away. “I’ll just pop across there and stamp this thing,” I thought, but before I could move, the inspector was back, standing between me and the school bus yellow box which advertised my lost salvation in the form of a tiny slot below a cheerfully blinking arrow. Why didn’t I validate it when I had the chance?
The inspector, the very vision of Ordinary Czech Guy in his T-shirt, shorts, and new running shoes (inspectors seem to all wear running shoes, new ones, the better to chase you in, my dear) stood scowling over me. I handed him my ticket, my crisp, fifteen-crown, sixty- minute ticket that would have gotten me a nice ride on the train, across greened valleys and the graceful bridges arched liked Roman aquaducts. My unvalidated, useless piece of paper.
“It’s not validated,” he growled in Czech. Suddenly, I was seven years old and in the hall again, my scissors and paperdolls tucked under my dress, waiting for Ms Boykin, the meanest principal who ever lived, and wondering if she would believe I had been sent out of the classroom for no reason.
“Nemluvim Czesky,” I lied. “I don’t speak Czech.” But the inspector spoke English, and I had to hand over all of the cash I had with me, seven hundred crowns, money I had planned to spend on a nice souvenir—maybe some handmade pottery, a pretty garnet pendant, or etched Bohemian wineglasses. I grimly pondered my luck in having had just enough money for the fine.
When my son asked what kind of souvenir I got, I told him I had gotten a kind of diploma. “Diploma?!” He made a face. I explained my mistake, showed him the ticket, thinking, maybe at least it will be a good lesson for him. He could tell I felt bad, not just about the money, but about being so foolish. He patted my arm, rubbed my back, and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. Just think of it as tuition.” Tuition. Some souvenir.
Sometimes I wish I listened better. My friend Lenka told me all about her friend Ivana getting caught by the tram inspector without a ticket but I didn’t really pay attention. Since my first visit to the Czech Republic, living there while my husband was on a Fulbright, I’ve wondered what would happen if I got caught without a ticket and without money for the fine, and without identification which everyone says you must travel with. I always had a tram pass then and I almost never carry identification when I’m in Brno because
I’m afraid of losing my passport. My imagination of the process of getting to the embassy in Prague for a new one would be a textbook example of extreme neurosis. I’d spend too much time deciding what to wear, vacillating between dressing well, so as not to draw suspicion at the embassy, or dressing down, so I wouldn’t attract too much attention on the street. I’m unreasonably afraid my ticket would be examined by the only official on the train who truly despised Americans for some grievance I couldn’t possibly apologize for in Czech, or in English. And he’d demand my passport, for sure.
Haunted by scenes from movies about the KGB, I would shrink from every man in a dark suit all the way to the embassy doors. And once there, I would be as nervous as I was sitting in the hall at school, waiting for the principal to come get me. But it wouldn’t be as bad as I felt the day I got caught without a valid tram ticket.
The inspector wordlessly thrust his palmed badge at me, then moved towards the back of the tram. I pulled my unvalidated ticket out of my pocket, and looked across the aisle at the yellow validation machine about a yard away. “I’ll just pop across there and stamp this thing,” I thought, but before I could move, the inspector was back, standing between me and the school bus yellow box which advertised my lost salvation in the form of a tiny slot below a cheerfully blinking arrow. Why didn’t I validate it when I had the chance?
The inspector, the very vision of Ordinary Czech Guy in his T-shirt, shorts, and new running shoes (inspectors seem to all wear running shoes, new ones, the better to chase you in, my dear) stood scowling over me. I handed him my ticket, my crisp, fifteen-crown, sixty- minute ticket that would have gotten me a nice ride on the train, across greened valleys and the graceful bridges arched liked Roman aquaducts. My unvalidated, useless piece of paper.
“It’s not validated,” he growled in Czech. Suddenly, I was seven years old and in the hall again, my scissors and paperdolls tucked under my dress, waiting for Ms Boykin, the meanest principal who ever lived, and wondering if she would believe I had been sent out of the classroom for no reason.
“Nemluvim Czesky,” I lied. “I don’t speak Czech.” But the inspector spoke English, and I had to hand over all of the cash I had with me, seven hundred crowns, money I had planned to spend on a nice souvenir—maybe some handmade pottery, a pretty garnet pendant, or etched Bohemian wineglasses. I grimly pondered my luck in having had just enough money for the fine.
When my son asked what kind of souvenir I got, I told him I had gotten a kind of diploma. “Diploma?!” He made a face. I explained my mistake, showed him the ticket, thinking, maybe at least it will be a good lesson for him. He could tell I felt bad, not just about the money, but about being so foolish. He patted my arm, rubbed my back, and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. Just think of it as tuition.” Tuition. Some souvenir.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Bloggiing Lesson
Okay, so now I have to play catch-up with the blog posts. I apologize for the delay, and for the poor quality of the writing that the next several posts are likely to be. I’ve learned a few things about writing this summer. I need to carry my own computer so I won’t have the lame excuse of difficulty in using someone else’s, and I have to be less committed to my first ideas about how writing and posting should go. The most important lesson I have learned from writing regularly(or in the case of this summer, not writing)about what I’m doing and seeing is this: Having to write intelligently about the experience improves it immensely. Seeing and thinking and recording, when it’s done for someone else, forces me to find some meaning in what I’m doing so that the experience amounts to something more than wasting an evening in front of a television—for me and for my readers. Writing that simply records what I saw and did is of little use to me except as a list of what I did with my time. And that is something that belongs in my day planner, not on my blog.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Naměsti Svobody
The nun has pierced ears, is carrying a fashionable handbag, and is wearing quite nice shoes. The lingerie shop is right next door, so I couldn't help but wonder... .
Masarykova Ulice heading towards the train station.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Technical difficulties.
I'm sorry for the lack of photos. I promise I will try to get the problem fixed soon, soon.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Shhh! Not so Loud
I am happy to be home again, among Czechs. When we arrived, I was struck again by how quiet these people are. Unlike we Americans, who seem to never stop talking, Czechs don’t seem to carry on a lot of personal conversations in public. At the baggage carousel, everyone stood silently to wait for their belongings; a few couples spoke quietly to each other. On the trams, only the Gypsies and foreigners talk loudly. Like many other cultural differences, I suspect that this is a habit leftover from when the Communists were in power here. And although most of those who were old enough to remember the dire consequences of having some opinion overheard during the German occupation are gone now, I’m guessing that such a hard-learned habit is one which got passed along.
Children make about the same amount of noise as American children (of course), though Czech children retain that soft high pitch which we lose by the time we’re five. Even boys as old as eight speak to each other in tones like that mothers use with their small children. It’s very sweet. I am also pleasantly surprised at the maturity level of things marketed for children. Sweet cuddly bears and cute baby animals adorn items which in the States would sport unromanticised super heroes, skulls and zombies, or scantily clad TV stars in makeup for children of nine or ten.
Crying babies are taken from their prams and held, soothed or fed and not left to cry. Mothers and their grown daughters walk close, arm in arm together down the street, and speak to each other with heads inclined, one listening and watching the path ahead while the other one speaks, visions of a childhood intimacy that didn’t vanish sometime after puberty. These are both things which I appreciate and love about this country.
It is a bit shocking, however, to see that just as in big American cities, men don’t routinely offer their seats the elderly on trams and trains, or step back from doors to allow ladies to pass, a habit which we work very hard to ingrain in Bram. Yet, in spite of this particular lapse of what a Southerner would consider good breeding, I can’t help but be enamoured of the way the very young and the very old are allowed their weaknesses, and those of us in between are expected to the be the ones to be accommodating. Babies are not left to cry pitifully and aged parents aren’t left to the care of strangers or to fend for themselves.
Children make about the same amount of noise as American children (of course), though Czech children retain that soft high pitch which we lose by the time we’re five. Even boys as old as eight speak to each other in tones like that mothers use with their small children. It’s very sweet. I am also pleasantly surprised at the maturity level of things marketed for children. Sweet cuddly bears and cute baby animals adorn items which in the States would sport unromanticised super heroes, skulls and zombies, or scantily clad TV stars in makeup for children of nine or ten.Crying babies are taken from their prams and held, soothed or fed and not left to cry. Mothers and their grown daughters walk close, arm in arm together down the street, and speak to each other with heads inclined, one listening and watching the path ahead while the other one speaks, visions of a childhood intimacy that didn’t vanish sometime after puberty. These are both things which I appreciate and love about this country.
It is a bit shocking, however, to see that just as in big American cities, men don’t routinely offer their seats the elderly on trams and trains, or step back from doors to allow ladies to pass, a habit which we work very hard to ingrain in Bram. Yet, in spite of this particular lapse of what a Southerner would consider good breeding, I can’t help but be enamoured of the way the very young and the very old are allowed their weaknesses, and those of us in between are expected to the be the ones to be accommodating. Babies are not left to cry pitifully and aged parents aren’t left to the care of strangers or to fend for themselves.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
I'm not Bored, Just Sleepy
See this napping buzzard in the Prague Zoo? This is how Bram and I felt for the first three days here, at least during the day. At night, we’re up having little parties—reading, snacking, drawing and silly whispering. I haven’t been this jet-lagged since my first trans-Atlantic flight more than 17 years ago, which proves my theory that the key to avoiding it is to sleep on the flight over, even if you have to drug yourself to do so. It’s either that, or spend four or five days adjusting your internal clock to your destination time before you leave home. Here are a few photos of the main drag, Vaclavske Namesti for you to see until I have time and internet connection to write more and post appropriate photos.
Monday, February 11, 2008
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