Smetana's Glasses

Na shledanou

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:40:00 +0000

That's it. That was life in Prague as I knew it (and now miss it, as I still miss Israel).

But since I seem to start another one each time we move, here's the next chapter: The Accidental Immigrant. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Čau lidi...

Hell Is Other People

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:56:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, I met one of my former students for tea at Karavanseraj. We'd agreed to meet a few blocks north of the restaurant, at 7:00 pm, at the National Theater. After work, I went into town, bought a sandwich, and walked to Žofín Island to picnic. Žofín is just south of the National Theater and just north of the Manes gallery; it was named, in the mid-1830s, for Franz Josef's mother, Sofie (Žofie, in Czech). The Neo-Renaissance building (known as the "palace"), built in the 1880s, and the garden pavilion, built in the 1930s, are one of the prime spots for formal dances and Prague's winter balls; J.'s Aunt Liana tells stories of dancing at Žofín, as a teenager.

The evening I was there, the sun was slanting through the trees, and the island's park was a Hawaiian green of leafy shade as I sat on a wall above the river to eat my sandwich. People were out in paddleboats on the river, going lazily past, and the swan boat was out again, drifting toward Strelecky Island.

J. sent me a text message from London, where he was interviewing for what turned out to be the job in New York: "I'm in Hyde Park, soaking up the sun. Tough life." An oriole started up, overhead, and I had a hard time seeing how Hyde Park was better than Žofín, at the moment.

Another message followed; this time, from my student: "Big traffic delay in Malostranske namesti. We go by feet." I figured that gave me time to relax, so I finished my sandwich just as a girl in a long peasant skirt and a boy sat down on the wall, a few feet away. Each had a bottle of wine--one red, one white. Aside from their bags, they had only a corkscrew, and looked as though they planned to stay, as long as they could find a bug-free spot on the wall.

On the southern side of the island, where the playground and garden are, a string quartet was rehearsing in the pavilion. Although the garden was closed for whatever private event the band was preparing for, one or two people were sitting on the park benches behind the pavilion, listening. I sat down, as well.

Another message came from Karel: "We are stopping in front of the National Theater. Where are you?" Trying to explain that they were half an hour early would have been impossible to send by text message. I made my way back to the bridge, off the island, and toward the theater, with some small degree of apprehension.

Earlier that week, Karel had emailed me. "Do you mind if my friend and his French friend come to our meeting?" he had asked.

"Sure, no problem," I wrote back, although I knew that tea with a friend's former English teacher hardly promised to be the most exciting evening in the world--although, for me, it was always fun to see Karel, a former student of mine with a passion for tea, cooking, rock-climbing, and differential equations. His friends would no doubt wonder why on earth he was hanging out with his former English teacher, one of the ubiquitious pasty, mathless, and far-from-bilingual Americans in town.

Karel, his friend Honza, and Honza's friend, a thin French girl with black hair done up in bobby pins and chopsticks and who looked exactly like Leslie Caron, were sitting at the top of the National Theater steps. We introduced each other and began walking down the block to Karavanseraj. Honza and the French girl trailed behind.

"How are you?" I asked Karel.

"Oh, fine," he said in a nonchalant tone, loping along and ducking his head. "I have sat thirteen exams. I passed all of them." He beamed.

"Well done, you!" I said loyally. "Wait--thirteen? Good grief."

Karel told me sheepishly, "I have already forgotten the name of Honza's friend."

"Berta?" I guessed, and looked back. Berta (?) was fanning herself, with a Chinese paper fan, at great speed. The phrase "hothouse flower" popped into my head.

"Tomorrow, I go see my family," Karel announced as we approached the restaurant and went inside, down the cool steps. "I need a rest."

"No doubt," I replied.

The restaurant was empty except for one waiter, who was behind the bar, cleaning a glass with a dishtowel.

"There are four of us," I told him, pre-emptively, in Czech.

"Sit wherever you like," he said, and then said something which could have been "There's garden seating in the back," or "There's no garden seating."

We picked a table in the front room which quickly seemed to be too small for four people, half of whom did not know each other. The waiter brought over the menus, which, at Karavanseraj, are thankfully the size of a cruise catalogue, and we all hid behind them for a few minutes. It occurred to me that I was approximately eight to ten years older than everyone else at the table.

"I'm hungry," Honza grinned. "It's kebabs and chips, for me." With chin-length blond hair parted in the middle, he looked sort of like J. in his high-school days.

Honza's friend fanned herself and looked ready to wilt, after walking from Malostranské namesti.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think I heard your name correctly," I said, leaning toward her over the menu.

Berta-questionmark raised her eyebrows at me and said something ending in "tay."

"Sorry?"

"Liberté," she said.

I smiled stupidly. "It's a lovely name." Liberté opened her menu again and propped it up in front of her like a hymnal, but it was too late. My teachery self had taken over.

"And how do you know Honza?" I asked the menu.

"I am cache sur feeng," she said. Honza, who was sending a text message, was no help. Giving up on the menu, I tried hard to hear what Liberté was saying, but it had been a long time since I'd heard French-accented English.

"I'm sorry; you're what?"

"Cache sur feeng!" Aha! CouchSurfing! "I'm staying with Honza," she added.

Honza explained, "I'm a student of sociology. It's a great way to meet people, and my friends and I have had other CouchSurfing guests."

"Yes!" I exclaimed, delighted to have finally understood what Liberté was talking about, despite having learned of it only two weeks before that. "I've heard of that! And how did you pick Prague?"

Liberté's long fingers drew a halfhearted circle in the air. Her other hand propped up her head. "I just threw a dart at the map and this was where it landed." Honza looked at her with adoration. Karel stared at her as though she had turned into a complicated and elegant equation.

"Oh, dear," I thought.

After the waiter wandered over to take our order of kebabs, chips (fries), beer, mango lassi, and two cups of tea, I attempted to make conversation.

"So what are you studying? Where are you from in France?"

She glared at me. "I am just finishing the preparations for my baccalaureat. I like to sew, and I want to be a designer. I would like to study fashion. I'm from a small town in Bretagne that no one has ever heard of."

"Try me," I thought, remembering the trip with my dad around St. Malo in 1996, which had taken us through plenty of Brittany's landscape as we clattered from Rennes out to St. Malo on a regional train that had appeared to be made entirely of wood.

The guys weren't saying anything, and the waiter arrived, which spared me from more English-101-type questions until I couldn't stand it and decided to ask everyone how they were enjoying summer.

Honza looked thoughtfully at his beer. "I'm getting a lot of reading done. Mainly Kierkegaard. And there are lots of barbeques!"

"I am rock climbing, and studying the famous textbook on derivations, and then I will be working, painting walls," Karel said.

Liberté heaved a sigh. "I am taking this trip, and then I will be in a monastery, caring for trees."

Certainly, she did not look like the Lorax. But Liberté did, in some ways, seem like the embodiment of a wood sprite, as we gazed at her in a mixture of awe and intimidation. She looked like a SoHo fairy-tale princess, with her black hair, blue eyes, and longsleeved blouse dotted with tiny flowers.

We all poked at our food or drinks. What our conversation needed was someone who could be the life of the party, since all of us were either too tired from traveling (Liberté), too intimidated (two of us), or feeling way too old (yours truly) to be witty and charming.

"So! If you're interested in fashion," I babbled, "how do you feel about the death of Yves Saint Laurent? His funeral was this week in Paris, right? While you're here, you should definitely walk up Pařížská, which is Prague's Champs-Élysées. Many of the major haute couture houses are there, and it's a beautiful avenue."

Liberté did not take kindly to my insinuation that she was interested in the commercial, materialistic world of high fashion. She looked at me with disdain.

"I'm not interested in that kind of fashion," she said. "I'm more interested in art and design. I would like to go look at some trees. And there is an illustrator of--collages? He has an exhibit here." She stirred her tea and gave me a look of Really. Haute couture? No, thank you.

"Oh. Well, then, you should try the National Gallery," I mumbled. "I'm sure Honza knows where it is."

Honza, munching on French fries, nodded. Karel was watching the exchange from behind his cup of yerba maté.

"Do you know the famous French mathematician Pierre Fermat?" he finally asked.

Liberté pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at Karel.

"Pierre Fermat," he repeated calmly. "You know... The theorem that describes if an n is greater than 2, then

a n + b n = c n

has no solutions in non-zero integers

a

b

, and

c

."

"Well, of course..." Liberté hedged. But it was too late. Karel set his maté gourd aside and started drawing on the tabletop. Honza reached for the ketchup. Karel began to describe Fermat's Theorem in detail. And then I bailed, but not because of Fermat.

"Hey, Karel," I told him, when I could get a word in edgewise. "I'm really sorry, but I have some work to look at before tomorrow. Send me an email when you're next in Prague, ok?"

"Very nice to meet you," I told Honza; "Enjoy your time in Prague," I told Liberte. "Sorry to rush off!" And then I dashed to the bar, paid my bill, and fled.

Směr (Toward) New York

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:32:00 +0000

New York City represents the Big Break for one of us, and the Big Job Hunt, for the other. Sure, two weeks after we made the decision to leave Prague, I'm pleased that we'll be back in my home country...but it's a big country, and the last time I was in New York, seven years ago, it didn't feel like home, exactly. Now, poring over the strange and specialized lexicon of New Yorkers (with its entries like "Pinkberry" and "Flatbush") online, it feels absolutely foreign.

(Or maybe I'm foreign. My mom cautioned, as we started to look for apartments, "Don't pick neighborhoods that are too ethnic," which was completely baffling, since this is the fourth year of living somewhere where I was the foreigner.)

Everyone here seems to be of one mind about New York: Go! I knew it exerted a strong pull, but my friends, colleagues, and husband (who know way more about Manhattan than I do), regard it as the center of the universe in a wholly literal way: If you're not, in a short-term or long-term sense, either coming from, or on your way to, New York, then you must be insane. That explains why they give me stupefied looks if I look anything other than starstruck at the prospect of moving to New York. But, in some sense, Europe is my New York. Why would I want to leave?

J. confessed to being shown a long series of Woody Allan movies, as a kid, which explains why his New York is the velvety city of jazz and 1970s intellectuals--and why he's beside himself with delight to be going there.

The New York of my imagination swirls around nineteenth-century Ellis Island--through which Italian great-great grandparents, and several strata of their sisters, brothers, and cousins, passed on their way to the West--and around the polished brick and brownstone outlines of Manhattan, which the turn-of-the-century Irish side of the family called home. From both sides, I can hear them saying, "Yes, the whole point is to go to New York and be successful." The stakes are the same as they ever were.

Austria: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:22:00 +0000

We took off for Austria on Wednesday afternoon, two weeks ago. I left work around 1:00 p.m., weekend bag in tow, and had imagined leisurely having coffee in Slovansky dum, which is about a five-minute walk from Hlavní nádraží, before our train left at 4:15 p.m. After changing crowns to Euros, and buying a sandwich and snacks for the train, though, my visions of espresso on Kogo's patio vanished...and I ended up sitting on a bench watching impeccably dressed businessmen drink my espresso. The courtyard in Slovansky dum is one of my favorite places. Under its tall canopy of elm trees, you can sit on a bench and picnic in relative solitude and shade, and it's as quiet as a reading room, except for the comforting clink of glasses and plates at Kogo.

Around 3:00 p.m., I wandered over to the train station and stumbled into a bright, two-floor bookstore where there had been just a cavernous expanse of concrete for at least the last year (and God knows for how many years before that). On the second floor was a cafe, English-language books (Waterstone's remainders), a stack of our books, and, infuriatingly, right next to our 100 nejkrásnějších měst světa ("The 100 Most Beautiful Places in the World"), Slovart's 100 divů Česka ("100 Wonders of the Czech Republic")--with a cover design nearly identical to our book...but better, with silver ink and sexy font. I wanted to call my one of my colleagues and rant, but I figured no one would believe me if I called and said, "I'm sitting in a new bookstore cafe in the main train station." The contrast between the new bookstore and cafe and the old shell of the station (where most of Prague's down and out come to sleep or get out of the heat) is striking.

About half an hour before our train was scheduled to leave, J. turned up and looked equally shocked to see a bookstore in the middle of the entry hall. We met J.'s father, who gave us photos to take to Aunt D., and then ran to catch our train to Veselí nad Lužnicí, where we would change to a two-car train into the small town of České Velenice, on the Czech-Austrian border. Running down the corridor to platforms six through twelve, dodging all the construction, we stopped to buy water. As I looked up to the mezzanine, I could see the real cafe, the seventy-four-year-old Fantova kavarna (named for its Art Nouveau architect, Josef Fanta), hanging overhead, on the second floor of the station, in grime and clouds of smoke.

We managed to find seats among all the students going home for the weekend to study. (It's final-exams time, here.) Our compartment held the two of us and two university students, boys with backpacks and laptop cases who spent the trip comparing what each had paid for his plane ticket to the U.S., where each had studied (or was going to study--my Czech verbs are still a disaster).

The last time we'd gone to Austria by train was shortly after we'd moved to Prague from Israel, and Uncle V. was months into his diagnosis of liver cancer. Aunt D. had come to České Velenice to pick us up in V.'s car, and the car broke down, halfway to Mautern, in the Wachau Valley. D. called V. for advice and he sent friends of theirs in two cars, a couple who'd been having pizza with V. when D. had called. Before they met us, we'd had a harrowing stop-and-start ride on the dark hairpin roads out of Gmünd and through the Waldviertel woods toward the Wachau. It had been late May then, too. "Harrowing" meant nothing until we finally made it to Mautern and saw V., gaunt and quiet.

This time, when we walked out of the train station České Velenice , only Aunt D. was waiting for us. Even though it's been two years since V. died, it's still strange to see her without him, and we walked, not saying much, from the station to Aunt D.'s car.

České Velenice is the last village before the Austrian border. (In fact, up until 1918, České Velenice and Gmünd, the first town on the Austrian side, were one town.) It's always been strewn with the worst roads in the Czech Republic and has the most desperate-looking residents, it seems. Until the Czech Republic ratified the Schengen treaty (which abolished border checks with Schengen co-signers like Austria), the two blocks of České Velenice between the train station and the border comprised a commercial zone of Vietnamese shops doing a brisk business in cheap but well-fed and well-polished garden gnomes and garden baubles. These days, the border zone is boarded up and empty; the town, more deserted than ever.

Out of habit, I hunted for my passport as we swung toward the border, but Aunt D. waved it away and sped on through.

We wound through Gmünd and made the trip to Mautern in ninety minutes. J.'s aunt drives with the natural passion and fearlessness of a Formula 1 racer, and at times it feels like her black Mercedes (which is not much larger than a SmartCar), is a shiny black electron in a particle accelerator, hurtling toward a collision. It's best not to stick any part of your nuclei out of the car; you might lose it, at such speeds.

Safely in the short driveway of Uncle V. and Aunt D.'s home in Mautern, we carried our things inside and sat down at the dining room table for a glass of wine from the Mauritiushof vineyards. We sat there for a few minutes, tired from traveling and driving; the toast was in Czech but, beyond that, no one said anything else for a few minutes, listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen; J. was sitting turned away from the table, looking absently at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with V.'s books; I looked into my wine glass and at its wheat-colored wine, thinking of when V. had taken us to the towns along the Wachau and of how we all sat in the Mauritiushof vineyards, eating rolls and sampling wines; and Aunt D., who cradled the bowl of her wine glass with one palm, her chin in the other palm, was sitting at the head of the table, looking past us. She got up and went into the living room to turn on some music and came back with a smile that reminded us that she'd been without V. for two years and had learned to live with his negative space.

Summer, Part I: Austria

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Shop signs in Krems (in the Wachau Valley), Austria.

Lunch at a heuriger just east of Mautern, also in the Wachau Valley.

České Velenice, just across the now-defunct border between the Czech Republic and Austria, has got to be the saddest station in Central Europe.

I'm a Legal Alien

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:33:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to talk with two study-abroaders who needed to interview an expat for their term paper. We arranged to meet at Cafe Louvre, and I showed up early, looking for a girl with a silver purse, which is how one of them had told me I'd be able to spot her. (Never having carried a silver purse in my life or known anyone who has, I was intimidated and formed some snarky prejudices.) After scanning the Louvre for a few minutes, with no success and women narrowing their eyes at me as I eyed their purses, I went downstairs and bumped into two college students checking their watches at the entrance to the cafe. They were both blond, tanned, wearing jeans, and turned out to be Californian; with my pale self and bad haircut, I'd never felt less Californian.

"Hi!" One of the girls stuck out her hand. "I'm Kelly." She hoisted her bag further up onto her shoulder and gestured to her friend standing next to her. "This is my friend, Mackenzie; she's doing the same paper. Do you mind if she joins us?"

"No, it's fine," I replied.

We went upstairs and into the open-air part of the Louvre, just off the entrance to the main rooms of the cafe. "How neat!" Kelly exclaimed. "I've never been here!"

"How long have you been here?" I asked with some suspicion. If you've lived here for more than three weeks and you haven't been to Cafe Louvre, one of Prague's best historical cafes, something is deeply, seriously wrong, and your study-abroad director should be taken in for questioning.

"We have three weeks left," Kelly replied. Her friend added, "I'm really ready to leave."

All I could manage was "Hmm." We sat down at one of the wooden tables, and Mackenzie popped open her laptop, on top of the menus. I extracted the menus and passed them around. Maybe this had been a bad idea. The couple at the table across from us gave us a sideways glance and lowered their heads, whispering.

The girls glanced at the menus. "I'm totally going to have a milkshake," Kelly said, flipping through her notebook.

"I'm really old," I thought to myself, and nervously clicked my phone open and shut. Job interview and your average interview alike, people sometimes terrify me.

The waitress arrived, took the milkshake orders, and I automatically ordered espresso with milk, in Czech. I can't help it, I felt like explaining to them. On my study-abroad program, you HAD to speak the local language. Now that I have a study-abroad life, I can't shake the habit.

"So you speak Czech," Kelly said.

I was honest: "No, I speak Cafe Czech, In-Law Czech, and Consumer Czech." Come to think of it, the first two overlap frequently. And I know a few mild (and thus mildly useful) curse words, mainly learned while watching J. curse at WindowsXP. "If you study a Romance language in high school and college in the U.S., it's not terribly helpful when it comes to Czech," I told them, "...as you probably know."

Mackenzie glared at her laptop screen. "Tell us about it. Our Czech final is on Friday."

I wished them luck and felt extremely lucky to have avoided the mandatory Czech exams required of permanent residents, beginning this year.

"So!" Kelly said, clicking her pen. "Do you just love Prague?"

"I guess," I said. Well, probably not as much as someone who grew up here might love it, I thought. "I like it here, for the most part." Our voices echoed in the tiny courtyard. How do you love a place? I thought. What do you really mean by "love"? Calvino claims you can only understand a city after you leave it; I'd extend that to only being able to love a city. Some places are more easily loved through a nostalgic haze. You forget how hot it was, how steep the hills were, how every store had a bomb-checking guard, and you remember only that it was lush and green and people were laughing.

It's hard not being a teacher when you've been one, your whole life. So I sat on my open-ended discussion questions.

"Why are you here? What do you miss about the U.S.? What are the biggest cultural differences between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?" They threw these questions out, first, and as I was trying to think, I looked down at Kelly's notebook and at the assignment sheet for the paper, which had a staggeringly long list of questions.

"Come on, lady, we only have an hour," I could hear them thinking. The waitress returned with the milkshakes and espresso, sparing me from trying to be coherent.

"Deekay," Kelly said.

Mackenzie stirred her milkshake, frowned, and then took a sip.

"Chocolate milk," she said, and placed it next to her laptop. She looked at me. "Ha! Just one of the many different things about living here, right?"

"Sure," I said. We could go on for days, with this game. "Like the bread--pardon me, rolls--house slippers, the main meal of the day, formality... There's a lot that's different." Two years of living here began to scroll through my mind before I stopped and tried to focus.

The main differences are: the lack of violent crime, the lack of diversity, and the shift in cultural attitudes that you have when you're a small country surrounded by former aggressors. Economically, living in Central Europe, you are envious of Western Europe--all of whom seem to be richer than you--and crass about Eastern Europe--whom you feel very lucky not to be.

Other cultural differences include the Czech emphasis on education (but not critical thinking), literacy, and cultural literacy. Nearly everyone on public transport is reading something: people over thirty read novels or magazines, and kids are studying. The fine arts aren't seen as "sissy," and dance, theater, film, and the visual arts seem to be thriving and valued by most reasonable people (except the Prague city council, who cut arts funding and faced a two-day demonstration by citizens, this weekend, on the plaza between the National Theatre and Lanterna Magika).

On the other hand, since every list comparing both cultures ultimately winds up being a list of advantages and disadvantages of each, feminism doesn't get such a bad rap in the U.S., malignant extremism is not tolerated, and there's nothing there quite like the lingering social and cultural effects of Communism. One of the hardest things for me to understand, although I didn't tell them this, is how pervasive and deep-seated the effects of Communism were. Although it shouldn't, it astounds me when I bring something like pudding home and J. says, walking past, "Oh, my mom once stood in line for hours, to get that for me, when I was little." I look at the package of pudding and can't begin to understand what life was like here, before 1989.

"Do you feel less American, now that you live here?" Kelly asked.

I stared at her and laughed. "What? How could I be less American?" Then I understood. "Oh. You mean, have I assimilated? Do I wear socks with sandals and eat rolls for dinner? No. But I do try to fly under the radar--except for right now--because the U.S.'s position in the world is not as good as it used to be, to put it mildly. I don't feel like serving as any sort of confirmation for whatever people think about Americans."

They must have realized that everything they asked me was going to get a double-edged response: yes, I'm happy here, but of course I miss my family. Yes, there are things I'd change about Czech society (and it's probably what any reasonable Czech would change--the country's institutionalized racism), but, for better or for worse, I married into the culture. Do I miss American culture? No, not mainstream American culture, or what the rest of the world thinks of as American culture; I do miss the Southwest and not having people become suspicious when you say, "Hi, how are you doing?"

Of course, I miss my family, but I would miss Kazakhstan tremendously if they were in Kazakhstan.

Other questions on this strange tour of my subconscious expat self were

"What are the major differences between you and your husband?"
American grammar and usage versus British grammar and usage.

"Would you do the same things together if you were living in the U.S.?"
I guess, although they would be much more expensive, so we would probably do them less frequently. We walk a lot, here (although much less than in Israel), and it's not hard to imagine that we'd quickly adapt to living with cars, again.

"Ok, that's it!" Mackenzie snapped her laptop shut and grinned. "Check, please!" she called to the waitress.

I took out my wallet and counted out the money for my espresso, but the two girls pushed it away.

"Please, it's the least we can do," they said.

I tried again. "No, really; it's not fair... You're students." They settled the bill with the waitress.

"Wait, at least let me pay for tip," I said.

They packed up their things as though they hadn't heard me. "Oh, no, we never tip," Kelly said happily. "Our professors told us not to."

"What? You're kidding. You have to tip!" They looked at me with pity. "No, really, I'm sure your professors just meant that you shouldn't tip as though you were in the U.S. But you just round up to the nearest ten crowns, in a cafe." The waitress, who wasn't collecting anything as I was lecturing, glared at me and walked away. Kelly and Mackenzie got up and shoved their chairs in. I sat there with coins in my hand. Wait! I thought. I have to come back here! I have to tip! And also, Wait! At least tell me you learned something, during those three months. What was it?

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:44:00 +0000

A few weeks ago (ok, a month ago) the British Chamber of Commerce and the Czech-Irish Business Association held their annual day at the races at Velka Chuchle on Sunday. The car was in the shop, so J. coordinated bus schedules so that we would arrive fashionably late.

This was good, as I tore through my closet until about three minutes before we left, looking for something suitably warm and yet Derby-worthy. No dice. (As it was, most people were wrapped in winter coats.)

As we went to change buses near the concrete monstrosity of the Barrandov overpass, we got off the first bus, only to see our connecting bus head away in the opposite direction in a belch of smoke. By the time we arrived at the racetrack, it was 2:00 pm, post time, too late to place bets included with the price of admission. (No matter, since it took us four hours to understand the program's hieroglyphic and hierarchical horse data.)

I even had fun without a hat.

And they're off!

The presumptive winner of the hat competition.

Does it look cold? It was, very. It had rained the day before.

We discovered that when we looked in a direct line east from the middle of where we were seated, across the racetrack to the tower in the center of the photo, we could see where we live.

The tower in the middle is the apartment complex across the square from us.

The British brought their dogs, of course.

Since I'd never attended the races before, I was surprised to discover that there were, in fact, six races, with one every half hour or so. In between races, everyone at the British party, including us, ran back inside and dove into the buffet. The wine importer pouring glasses at one end of the table was English and exclaimed to his Czech business partner, "Everyone is only drinking white! Why?"

Toward the end of the afternoon, after the buffet began to look unloved, we went down to the paddock.

Down in the stands, there was the best mix of Czech cooking smells: sausages, mustard, and troubicky, cinnamon dough rolled and baked around a cylinder. And, of course, beer.

The poster for the hat competition. This seemed a bit stalker-ish to me, not to mention sexist. Men were instructed to wander around and ask the women whose hats they found most interesting for their names. Then the men were supposed to email this to the organizers. The prize was a "day of cosmetics," as if to say: You think you're stylish? Think again, sister!

Things were far more exciting (if less intriguing on a networking level) in the paddock. Owners slapped jockeys on the back or discussed race minutiae in low voices. About a third of the jockeys were women, and most of the paddock staff were girls who leaned affectionately into their horses, steering them around the circle.

For one of the last races of the day, we stood at the finish line, close enough to smell the turf and boxwood and to hear the horses pound past.

As there was no cotton candy being served at the British buffet, I felt robbed.

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Last weekend, we took the back roads to Hrad Karlštejn (Karlštejn Castle)--about half an hour away by highway but an hour away via other roads. Every time we try to head somewhere via Zbraslav (the first town to the south of Prague, on the other side of the river), we get lost and there's a lot of heated discussion about maps and missed detour signs until one of us slams the map book shut and says, "Dammit, look how scenic it is! Isn't it LOVELY?" Then it's truly enjoyable. The moral of the story is that mathematicians and poets (people who like exactitude) make lousy navigators but appreciate a good landscape or two.

But it really was scenic--one of those early spring days where everything is light green and the sun is still burning through the mist at noon. The towns we went through looked unlike anything inside metropolitan Prague, with their old signs, pocked plaster house facades, and backyards with dozens of fruit trees beginning to bloom.

Karlštejn dates to the fourteenth century, and was the repository for royal treasures and relics, particularly during the Hussite era, when the crown jewels were kept there.
View of one tower, way at the top...

View of same tower. Did I mention you have to climb ten minutes up a steep slope, to reach the main gates?

A town sprang up around the castle, down at the bottom of the valley. Today there are dozens of souvenir shops hawking very little to do with the castle or the Czech Republic, or castles and Europe in general... But there are a couple of good restaurants (in April, still not entirely overrun by Italian teenagers on Spring Break); we stopped at one and sat outside, for lunch. It was wonderfully quiet, with the wind in the pine trees on the slope below the castle. Quiet mountain air is hard to come by in the center of Prague.

Photo of Karlštejn Castle and a market analyst checking his Blackberry.

This weekend's big event, the horse races at Velká Chuchle, are tomorrow. It was gloomy, drizzling, and cold, all day, so I couldn't get into an inspired day-at-the-races excursion through the closet. More importantly, I HAVE NO HAT to wear to the very posh event hosted by the British Chamber of Commerce and will probably disgrace my country. I can't help it; I had a honking big beachy hat in Israel but left it there when we had to move, as there was no box big enough for it... Now that's a big hat.

Friday!

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:27:00 +0000

After work yesterday, we went for a walk along the river, stopping at Žofín in order to sit on the wall above the river, for a while.

That's the view looking back at the street.

From the wall, we could see across to the other side of the river; one couple had rented an enormous paddleboat shaped like a swan, and they disappeared behind Střelecký ostrov, another island. I couldn't convince J. that we should take out the swan boat, too.
(Evidently, all the real swans had taken one look at this thing and swum off for safer waters.)

Close-up of the swan boat.

Mezi everything

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:56:00 +0000

I love my job. I'm surrounded by books I would actually read (even if I weren't working on them) and colleagues with whom I get along well, and the company is small enough to feel like the work one does makes a difference. And yet, for all that, I still feel like I have a big gaping hole of naivete and the main tenets of the British Romantics where other people have pragmatism and the wherewithal to do their own taxes. Some part of me thought that this job was the big, gleaming gateway to the publishing world. It is not. It is merely the gateway (the D-1 highway) to Brno.

A bunch of new translations came in, this week, which means I can stop editing old cookbooks to be reprinted (Cold Smoked-Eel Lasagne, anyone?) and work on brand-new ones, along with a new batch of general-interest books, including one on farm animals (a book of photographs, mainly) that turns out to be generally interesting only if you are a French farmer. I'm not at all sure how we bought this book; all I remember is that the French were very persuasive and there was a lot of wine flowing when they turned up, at Frankfurt... The result is that I'll spend the next month hacking away in red ink at overly detailed prose about the Limousin and Charolais cattle breeds and Normandy sheep--to name only a very small portion of the whole book.

Actually, the most stimulating thing I've done all month was to write up notes for the director, this morning, about the book's French bias--in the faint hopes that the French would have to rewrite it or offer another title. But we're stuck with it. And so...back to my sheep.

I got lost in Vinohrady, this afternoon, trying to get from I.P. Pavlova to the Olšanská post office. In truth, it's refreshing to get lost in a city where you've started to trace the same steps, day after day, and where you begin to feel like you spend all of your time at the end of one of the metro lines, waiting for the bus.

I stayed on the tram as it detoured about a block from the I.P. Pavlova station and stopped to let everyone off. (Then I walked back up the block, waited for it to turn around, and rode about ten minutes more to Olšanská, past the Olšanská cemetery on one side of the street and the Jewish cemetery (where Franz Kafka is buried) on the other; that stop is called Mezi hhřbitovy--"Between the cemeteries." I had never thought about it until today, when I heard the stop announced on the tram loudspeaker and looked out of both sides of the tram.) Riding the tram from Vinohrady over to Žižkov laid down in my mind a part of the Prague map that I always forget--the parts between neighborhoods and the streets you don't see, riding from one underground Metro stop to another.

Vinohrady is nice. The building facades aren't peeling off, the stores appear to be thriving, and it's the high-rent district. It looks a lot better than Žižkov and anywhere else outside Old Town. (Do I sound cynical? It looks like the run-down parts of Vienna. How's that?)

There are a whole slew of places I want to go explore, all over town. Moreover, I bought a copy of a magazine with a delightfully disastrous special section for anyone who just picked up, from the post office, a box containing new jeans--Reportáž: 10 nej cukráreň, or "Report: The 10 Best Bakeries."

Víkend

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:55:00 +0000

On Friday night, we drove to see friends on the other side of town, in Střešovice, for dinner. I spent most of the evening playing with four-year-old, L., who was my Czech immersion course, two years ago, when we babysat her for a few weeks in the summer, just after moving to Prague from Israel. Earlier this year, though, as L.'s Czech skills outstripped mine, I agreed with L.'s mother that I would only speak English with L., from now on. L. doesn't speak English, but I understand enough Czech now to be (I think) a fairly decent playmate. For three hours, we somehow managed to communicate in one language each and have a good time with one teddy bear, one stuffed fish, and a toy car.

Since four-year-olds aren't interested in what movies you've seen or what books you've read, it's easier for me to have a conversation with L. (at least about toys) than it is with adults. When you're four, imagination takes care of everything. And when you're nearly thirty-two, it's a nice escape.

On Saturday, J . and I met J.'s father in Cafe Louvre for coffee, and then J.'s father and I went to the PragueFoto exhibit in the Mánes gallery, a functionalist building built right on the river in 1930. It was more of a photo fair, with photographers manning their own stands, some with massive color prints tagged at over 20,000 crowns and some with modest stands (but still with things like hand-printed silver gelatin prints). About a dozen Czech photographers who had fled the country under Communism and returned after the revolution in '89 had fairly extravagant stands.

J.'s father (a photographer) was his usual curious, optimistic, and judicious self, pointing out portraits of famous Czech writers and actors and naming the photographers who were milling around with their chests puffed out. Some non-expat-Czech photographers could be seen standing in front of a series of documentary photos, whispering, "Those are just people--everyday people! Nothing interesting about it!"

Rudolf was having none of that and kept his judgments to himself, although he did murmur "Ježiš Maria," at a lavish stand for the Česky Pes (Czech Dog) photos, which were just that--enormous photos of Czech dogs.

Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:58:00 +0000

I've been hibernating for the last month, while it snowed and rained and was a soupy gray all day long, day after day. (Mentally hibernating, that is. I kept going to work.) There's still something baffling about having moved here from the eastern side of the Mediterranean, where we could go outside on the thick lawn in front of Beit Europa in February and toss a frisbee in bare feet. At least now I know that this is as far north as I can go in winter without going irretrievably nuts.

Aunt D. came from Austria for Easter; it was the first time we'd seen her since before Christmas. When we went to Žižkov on the Saturday of Easter weekend and opened the door to the apartment, the pile of baked goods stacked on the cabinet just inside the entrance, with Easter candy (a chocolate-covered beranek ("lamb"); a larger, non-chocolate beranek, chocolate-covered almond candies, and miniature croissants), reached higher than we did.

One of Aunt D.'s friends from school showed up after lunch and unzipped a backpack stuffed with chocolate rabbits and hens. Aunt D.'s friend, S., a tall, sinewy woman with dark-brown eyes, is an unabashed advocate of esoterica. Whenever we see her in Žižkov, she's usually in town for a conference on meditation or auras, and she gets gently teased by Aunt D. for her earnestness about crystals. She seems to shrug it off like most people here do who are a little bit nonconformist. In any case, S. is generous, kind, and came to visit J.'s parents, last year, when few people dropped by, at all.

Aside from Aunt D. and S., Aunt L. turned up for lunch on Easter Monday. We had just finished putting chicken in cheese sauce on the plates when the buzzer rang.

"That's L.!" Aunt D. said. "We'll have to add another place--quickly." She whisked the plates off the table and redistributed the chicken, while I scattered more salad into another bowl. As Aunt L. could be heard taking off her shoes in the hallway, Aunt D. and I slid the last plate and bowl into place...so it didn't look as though we hadn't expected her (which we hadn't).

Aunt L. greeted everyone briskly (with no explanation of why she hadn't responded to text messages inviting her to coffee at our place), sat down, and began to brag about someone on her side of the family having just sold an apartment on Pařížská for 20.5 million crowns (about $1.2 million). J. (who had seen Aunt L. on Friday night and came back reporting that she was antagonistic as ever) became quiet, as did his father. Something about this conversation took the wind out of everyone's sails, and everyone ate more slowly and more quietly for a few minutes.

Aunt L. announced that she was going to Croatia (her adopted homeland where "everything is better"), any day now, for a month or more. We all wished her a very happy journey, indeed.

# # #

On Thursday, J. and I met his father downtown for a vernisáž, the opening night of an exhibit. In this case, it was an exhibit of Prague photography held in a gallery just off Jungmannova Square. We arrived at 6:00 pm and wandered briefly through the crowds, looking for J.'s father's photos, and trailing behind Rudolf as he met fellow photographers and friends of his. At 6:15, Rudolf herded us into a room off the gallery where there were tables of wine, beer, and snacks. We took a seat at one of the long, heavy wooden tables that had been pushed aside to make room in the center of the room, which had vaulted ceilings and a clock in the center of the ceiling. At 6:30, a student a capella group started to sing (since you cannot have an opening night of any cultural event here without singing or performance art), and a few minutes later, the head of the film academy (FAMU) began to announce the prizes.

Rudolf popped up twice to receive awards for his photographs, and he won a digital camera. J. and I applauded, dazed. I was so surprised that I knocked over my beer and didn't do anything about it. A ten-year-old girl sitting next to me gave me a dirty look, whispered to her mother, and produced a wad of Kleenex to clean up the spill.

"Děkuji! Thank you!" I said, still clapping, and gave my best Harmless-Crazy-Foreigner-Lady smile.

"Did you know your father was nominated for something?" I asked J., since I had no idea of how to ask Rudolf in Czech.

"No," he said.

Rudolf came back to the table, beaming, with his prize certificates and his camera. We sat through twenty more minutes of prizes and the (actually very entertaining) a capella group before we could crowd around him and congratulate him.

"Ted'ka budeš pracovat s pixelem: J, pixel, Rudolf D." I hazarded later to Rudolf at dinner, when we'd gone around the corner to the Kyvadlo restaurant. "Now you'll be working with pixels: J (pixel) Rudolf D." J.'s father's artistic name is the initial J, followed by the rest of his name. (This is the extent of my ability to joke in Czech. It's creaky. God help me when they institute the Czech-language requirement for permanent-residence holders, in a few years.)

J's father nodded with a smile. He and J. rifled through the camera box and bubble wrap, opening the manual (which J. promptly tossed aside), the bag with cables and cords, in a race to the camera. J. won, and began a rapid-fire tutorial on digital photography for his dad, who, after a few minutes, politely wrested the camera away and examined it for himself. Since Rudolf had won a digital-photography course last fall, and looked wistfully at digital cameras whenever the three of us were out, it was a particularly nice prize.

Inspector Gadget

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:06:00 +0000

Now that I have a phone with a camera, I've been running around town, taking pictures of everything. The resolution isn't too great, but it works in a pinch. To test-drive my phone's camera capabilities, I chose an object of national adoration: the dumpling.

That's one side of the dumpling aisle: houskove knedliky (dumplings made from rolls, housky). These, you boil, slice, and serve with svičkova or goulash. I tried to make these, once, in Israel, and it was like Strega Nonna and the house full of spaghetti. The dumpling tends to balloon beyond the cook's ability to keep it confined to a stock pot. As I observed today at lunch, the trick is to slice and then steam the dumplings.

Here's the other side--sweet dumplings. In order, I think these are apricot-, plum-, blueberry-, and apple-filled ones. To be honest, we've never sampled the mass-produced version, although, in summer, J's aunt makes the apricot-filled ones, called marillenknodel in German and merunkovy knedliky in Czech.

The Easter stand outside the Kačerov metro station. (At Christmastime, there's a Christmas one.) It's piled with chocolates: rabbits with enormous ears, hens, chicks, and eggs. Most stands also have small fuzzy chicks no bigger than a quarter. This was by far the most colorful aspect of my commute, this week.

The pomlázky part of a supermarket Easter stand. The ones in the foreground are about 2 1/2 feet tall. Men run around and whack women with these, on Easter. I've already made it clear that there will be No Whacking of the American Feminist, this year or any other year.

Friday's Easter crafts table at the supermarket, with a man and a woman in traditional rural Easter dress, happily decorating eggs in the housewares aisle. Or at least as happy as one can be, downwind of the meat counter.

More pomlázky and the fuzzy-chick table at the supermarket.

Easter eggs and more fuzzy things. It's been snowing all week, here, and seems to have made everyone only crave spring-ish things more.

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:29:00 +0000

I love Prague, but I'm itching to go somewhere. Anywhere. At least we went to the other side of the river, this weekend.

An urn and tulip-tree buds on Strelecky Ostrov (Shooters' Island).

An advertisement for an art exhibit near Pizzeria Kmotra, where we had lunch, today.

The National Museum (Wenceslas Square).

The hat shop in the passageway from Wenceslas Square to the Frantiskanska Gardens.

Boats in the locks near the Jiraskuv bridge.

Cafe Savoy, up in the smokers' section; the place was packed, and that was our only refuge. But the view is unbeatable.

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:55:00 +0000

As of yesterday, I'm on vacation--one of those two-day vacations where you sleep in late and sit around in pajamas for a while, and then catch a tram around 11:00 am to wander around nowhere in particular. It's good for the soul, especially when coupled with a weekend.

Here's where I wandered around, today:

Church across from the Švandovo theater, near Arbesovo Namesti.

Antiquarian bookshop in Újezd, across from the funicular.

The U Zavoje passageway, home to a restaurant, wine bar, and cheese shop. "Rychle občerstvení" is "fast food."

The Havelska Koruna restaurant, next to U Zavoje.

The U Zavoje restaurant-cafe-wine bar trifecta.

The Vltava and the Legíi bridge.

Chlebičky (little sandwiches) in the Světozor passageway.
Special-occasion snack food par excellence!

Řehoře Samsy cafe, in the Lucerna passageway.

My feet hurt.

Nic moc, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:16:00 +0000

Saturday morning, promptly at 6:00 am, Orkán (rhymes with "hurricane") Emma arrived from the west and smacked full-force into the side of our concrete building with lashing rain, winds of 144 km/hour, and--for good measure--thunder and lightning. As the window vents screeched, I leaped out of bed, half-conscious, and unplugged my computer. Not for nothing did I grow up on the edge of the prairie. For the next half hour, it rained so hard that I couldn't see across the street to the other building. Then it quieted down enough to go back to sleep--the fitful kind where you dream you're teaching twelfth-graders, again, and are supposed to be leading a discussion of 1984. After that, it was a relief to wake up.

The storm continued all morning, while I made minestrone and while J. slept off the effects of Friday night's work-related party. I don't pretend that the recipe below is authentic--it's an amalgamation of dozens of bowls, over the years, of Pagliacci's minestrone, and of what I remember of the two minestrone recipes from my mom's cookbook. I'm sure the white wine isn't authentic, but you might as well deglaze with something other than water.

Incidentally, tweaking the wording of recipes is what I do, all week long. The weekends are for tweaking the recipes themselves.

Minestrone
olive oil
butter
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped
1 leek, white part only, halved and sliced
1/4 head cabbage, shredded
white wine
6 tomatoes, peeled, seeded, diced
4-5 cups vegetable stock
1 can chickpeas
1 zucchini, diced
1 1/2 cups (250 grams) small pasta, such as ditalini or anelli

Warm the olive oil and butter. Saute the onion and garlic in them. Don't let the garlic burn. Add the leek and shredded cabbage and stir until translucent. Add some white wine to deglaze. Add the tomatoes, stock, and chickpeas. Let simmer, covered, for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the zucchini and pasta, and cook until the pasta is al dente. Add more stock, if necessary, to cover the pasta.

Ladle into bowls and serve with grated Parmesan.

After lunch, the storm had broken up, and we went downtown, stopping at the Dum Knihy cafe for coffee. J. read the MFDnes newspaper and I read what I could of it. I did manage the weekend and "Scene" sections, and I laughed at this headline (translated) from the front page:

"Who Will Win the Russian Vote? Guess!"

Nic moc

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:46:00 +0000

Nothing much...

After work on Friday, I found myself doing what we normally did, every Thursday night, in Israel: stocking up for the weekend. In this case, though, it was in preparation for two forecasted days of lousy weather, rather than for Shabbat. Feeling lazy, I took the metro via Můstek to Anděl. Outside the Anděl station, it was already windy and dark, and everyone seemed to be rushing home from work as quickly as possible. I rushed into the mall.

In Anděl/Nový Smíchov, I walked around for what seemed like long enough for the Friday-night crowd at Tesco to dissipate, but my estimate was too short and Tesco was packed. It's a sad place, the closest we have to Wal-Mart, here, and I loathe it--but they do have (forgive me) really good, spicy, quesadilla cheese.

But there was nothing to be had in Tesco, because that's the kind of week it was. First, you nearly die on a bus; then, your job sort of goes away; then, your Friday night consists of going to Tesco, where they've run out of every basic foodstuff. Really--there weren't even any potatoes. People were standing around the empty plastic potato bins in shock.

I got what I could and left, expecting to climb on a tram and head home, but the trams were stopped in the middle of the street, in every direction, and police lights and sirens were blazing on Lidická. All the trams were dark and empty. There was no way to tell what had happened, and I realized that sticking around to overhear what might have happened was a waste of time if I had to walk back across the river to Palackého náměsti. A stream of people who, like me, had given up on tram service, was winding out of the neighborhood toward the Palackého bridge. Others were standing in the doorways of restaurants and shops, wondering what had happened, watching the trams all lined up and at a standstill.

The part of Nový Smíchov closest to the river looks older and slightly more faded than other parts of Prague, sort of like what I imagine the other parts looked like about ten years ago. It's perfectly safe--and pleasantly empty of the souvenir shops and plasticized, trendy cafes in the center.

I walked across the bridge and caught a tram home, just as my two bags from Tesco threatened to split and spill into the river. The tram driver was clearly on his last shift of the week, overjoyed, and the tram bounced all the way to Modřany like a deranged carp.

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:06:00 +0000

I need to find a job that does not require commuting down the D1, every morning, risking death (along with my colleagues) at the hands of stoned bus drivers. There are a few things I usually don't do on Monday mornings:

1) I don't walk 20 minutes to work, knees knocking together.
2) I don't spend much time thanking God for my survival.

But I did both, this morning. Then I called J. and yelped at him to please find me the contact information for reporting dangerous driving by public-transport drivers.

"And I need to get a Czech license by tomorrow, preferably," I added.

Mondays are always a letdown, especially after a sunny weekend partly spent outdoors.

Thursday is the new Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:03:00 +0000

I bumped into my colleague M. after work at the Chodov Hypernova, where there is never any hope of getting in and out with groceries in under thirty minutes, and especially not on Valentine's Day, when the Czechs--a people who supposedly regard Valentine's Day as a tacky American, commercialized holiday--are lined up twenty deep to buy roses, romantic-dinner makings, and gallons of alcohol.

M. and I rolled our eyes at each other. "Happy Valentine's Day!" we said with as much ironic enthusiasm as possible.

In fact, I really like Valentine's Day, and I even like it here, where the older generation may shrug it off, but younger people throw themselves into it; two college kids in front of me at the cashier's shelled out for wine and champagne, respectively, and then zipped the bottles into their backpacks. Outside, in the corridor running from the mall entrance to the metro, the usually small flower stand had swelled to three times its normal size, with a dozen colors of roses. People there were also lined up twenty deep. Even on the bus home, most of the men were gingerly holding out their paper-wrapped bouquets upside down in front of them as they edged out of the crowd and on or off the bus. Guys who weren't holding bouquets looked away.

Even in our apartment building, it seems like people have embraced Valentine's Day, as there are a whole mix of aromas that you normally only smell on the weekends, at lunchtime: onions frying, duck and cabbage simmering, and something with oregano sprinkled into it. Maybe it's my imagination, but I think the entire building is having romantic Valentine's-Day dinners.

Well, except for our apartment, which was dark. J. is away in Paris at a conference; he wrote today that he'd had the best chocolate dessert in his life for lunch and the chef had delivered a signed menu. I think he's at an energy conference, but now I'm not so sure.

Tomorrow is my day off; hurray for the osobní volno! I have to charge my camera batteries, because I hope to go visit the newly reopened Erhartova Cukrárna near Letná. I want that little plate of cookies pictured in the link, although I haven't done anything to warrant it. Does having to take the stairs in the in the Kačerov metro station all week as a result of escalator repairs count?

Since tomorrow is Friday and since Friday is sobotka ("little Saturday"), I've already started planning the weekend, which involves lots of DIY stuff around the apartment, a run along the river, the "Občan Havel" documentary at the cinema with my father-in-law, and drinks with another colleague. The Aero cinema is showing "Plan 9 From Outer Space" on Sunday...and even if I'm dusty and covered in torn Ikea-shelving instructions, I'd like to go.

Hezky vikend!

Sausage and politics

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Not bad for a Friday evening...

The very kind colleague who puts up with my comma fetish and lack of understanding of what ozalids really are gave me bona fide homemade Hungarian sausage (klobasz)--made by her father. It's unbelievably tasty, rocket-flame red, and hot! You should eat it with onion and dark bread, she recommended. I would add beer to the list, but I'm afraid we'll eat it all before we can run out to buy beer.

I met J. at Au Gourmand for dinner. Well, I met him on the sidewalk in front of Palac Knih, as all the commuters were parting around him like very focused salmon going the other way. "The American with green shoes," he remarked as I walked up to him.

"My shoes would fit in just fine, in Boulder," I replied. Lately, I have a bad habit of wearing Boulder-chic (jeans, a sweater, and trekking shoes) to the office in the suburbs and then looking like a backpacker if I go straight from work to somewhere downtown, where every single woman between the ages of 16 and 75 is wearing a carefully assembled outfit of winter coat, stylish boots, hat, scarf, bag, and gloves--all of which match.

Au Gourmand is just north of Old Town Square, on Dlouhá. They have a couple of other branches in town, but this is the original location, and the one that feels most like a French cafe, with bright colors and small tables. One side of the cafe houses the case for salads and quiches, while the one on the opposite side of the room contains the tarts. We had pissaladiere and salmon lasagne, and took a big slice of Tarte Tatin to J.'s father Žižkov, where we were going to pick up the package my parents had sent.

In Žižkov, J.'s father welcomed us and made us tea, and then sliced the Tarte Tatin piece. The Jelly Bellys we brought from the U.S. after Christmas were still in a bowl on the kitchen table, and I think J.'s father is not entirely sure what to do with them. In any case, they seem to be purely decorative, at this point. ("Maybe that's because you ate all the good red ones before we brought them to him," J. suggested. Pathetic but true.)

"What about the vote?" J. asked his dad, who looked up at the clock over the door to the kitchen. His dad leaped up and ran into the living room.

"There'll be the news," he called.

Both houses of the Czech parliament have been in session since Friday, trying to vote for the president (whose power is mainly symbolic). The incumbent, Klaus, is regarded as a clown by many Czechs, but his opponent, Švejnar, a Czech emigre and American economics professor, is viewed with equal suspicion in some camps as a carpetbagger from Michigan. As J.'s father turned on the TV and we settled down on the couch, both candidates appeared on the screen, sitting at separate tables in the Spanish Hall, in the castle, and looking in bad need of a drink.

The Spanish Hall, which dates to the sixteenth century and housed Rudolf II's art collections, is an enormous, elegant stateroom; the walls are done in stucco relief and the room is hung with chandeliers and mirrors. Everything was gleaming, from the parquet floors to the tables hung in the state colors.

For the presidential vote, the room was divided into two tiers of seats and long tables, and (on the opposite side) blocks of red-velvet chairs. In front of the tables and tiers (draped in red and white) were the separate tables (draped in blue) for the two presidential candidates and a podium. For the first few minutes we watched, the action consisted solely of senators and members of parliament striding to the podium, lodging or withdrawing proposals, and striding back to their chairs. The chair of the proceedings, who was sitting in the top tier, moderated everything from his microphone and position with an increasing look of exasperation. Keeping over two hundred parliamentarians in order and following procedure was no enviable task.

"You're not making my job any easier," he told a senator who registered an objection, as the senator left the podium. "Wait, now we'll--what? Oh. Well, yes, let's continue."

(Later, another senator took the floor to chastise both houses on taking three votes to accomplish things, only to have the room roar back at her that it was only the second vote. She fled from the podium.)

CT2, which had turned into something like CZ-Span for the evening, broadcast the vote even before voting started, complete with an in-studio team of analysts and a gleeful reporting duo outside the Spanish Hall, each of whom had one finger continually pressed to an ear and the other hand around a microphone, sounding exactly like American commentators.

"Yes, are we going live now, inside the room?"
"Yes, I believe we are; no, let's return to the studio!"

"So if the voting hasn't even started yet, what have they been doing all day?" I asked J.

"Deciding how to vote," he said. "The Communists want an open, public vote, but other parties want a secret ballot."

(Unlike the prime minister of the country, the president is elected only by the houses of parliament, which is why Švejnar was criticized for leading an "American-style" campaign, including stops in small towns and a televised debate, in which the incumbent, Klaus, initially refused to participate.)

We watched for a while longer while nothing terribly significant seemed to happen. The boarder, a university student from Wallachia who is renting J.'s room for the semester, came home and J.'s father (who is also from Wallachia) invited her to sit down and watch.

"In Wallachia, we have a queen!" J.'s father said, beaming from the chair where he sat cross-legged, watching the proceedings with bemusement.

The student ducked her head, grinned, and took a seat on the edge of the other sofa. (J.'s father had earlier characterized her studies as "counting flowers in a field.")

There was a break in the electoral proceedings, and while the senators and members of parliament ran for the restrooms, J.'s father made a hot toddy.

After the break, the vote on the secret or public ballot took place.

"Those for..." intoned the chair, as senators raised their hands. Women standing with binders at the ends of the aisles counted their sections and then tallied the votes.

Once it was established (thirty minutes later) that the vote would be public, they got down to business.

"Those for Klaus..." called the chair. Hands went up, and the women counting votes peered closely at their sections. Various senators, with their hands still raised, squirmed around in their seats and gave dirty looks to certain other senators.
"Those against..."

"Those for Švejnar..." What looked like an equal number of hands went up.
"Those against..."

"So they vote two times, not just once?" I asked J. "You vote against a candidate?"
"Sure," he said.

Fascinating! J. found it less so, and fell asleep for the second round.

"Wake up!" I told him. "My team is winning! Go U.S.A.! If he loses, maybe we could have an Obama-Švejnar ticket."

The results of the first and second rounds of the first vote, and then both rounds of the second vote, were inconclusive. Švejnar sat calmly and perfectly still at his table, looking a little bit like a professor who is proctoring a final exam and has just discovered that someone turned in a blank exam. Klaus sat behind his table, fidgeting and shooting furtive glances to his right, at Švejnar, and looking extremely peeved. It must be annoying to have spent the week buying all the votes one thought one needed, only to have to go three rounds without winning.

At 9:00, when the parliament stopped voting on the president and began voting on whether to continue into the night or meet the next morning, I stood up and began getting ready to go. It was all terribly interesting, but it would take us an hour to make it back to Modřany.

"This is slapstick," was J.'s comment as he got up and went out to the hallway to collect his coat. As we waited for a tram out of Žižkov, it seemed as thought everyone had given up and was spilling out of pubs and cafes.

On the way home, as the tram turned south at Palackého Náměstí, I looked north toward the castle, where one long floor of windows (about twenty small windows in a line) was still ablaze with light from the Spanish Hall.

Tuesday-night lights

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:20:00 +0000

A former student of mine who's now a friend sent me an SMS yesterday asking if I had time for tea and a walk, that evening. It had been sunny yesterday and I had been home all day proofreading an encyclopedia of submarines (insert "Dive!" sound, here), so I was happy to go out and stop reading about the crazy Soviet concrete-sub concept (the panelak of submarines). We arranged to meet in front of the Palac Knih bookstore.

K. turned up at the appointed time, and we went through the bookstore to the back exit, out to the Pasaž Grossman, past two men in turbans strolling around the passageway, and onto the street. It looked completely different than what I remembered from the summer.

"There's a great tearoom around here, but it sure looks different at night," I said, looking down the street. "Where is Ružova?"

K. looked at me in astonishment. "I don't know; I'm not from Prague," he replied.

"I think we took a wrong turn in the passageway." I inched toward a kiosk selling newspapers and gum. "Maybe I'll just ask this guy where Ružova, the street with the tearoom, is."

K.'s eyebrows rose even further up his forehead.

I looked around one corner, and and realized how to get to the tearoom. "Great! It's this way; I'm really certain." K. trailed after me. Teachers inspire a great deal more confidence in front of a blackboard than they do on a dark streetcorner, I guess.

The basement of the tearoom was closed for repairs, and there weren't any seats upstairs; moreover, people looked down at us curiously. K., a gangly Mat-Fyz student with hair in his eyes and no coat, backed toward the door.

"Wait; I just remembered I've been looking for some tea! Would you mind waiting just a second?" I turned back toward the counter, where the tea was lined up in glass jars and black-and-red tins.

"Ok," K. said, and inspected the teas at the end of the row.

A woman appeared behind the counter and smiled at me. "Máte vybráno?" she asked. "Have you chosen?"

"Prosím vás, ne máte nějaky yogi čaj?" Ever since I came back from the U.S. with a box of Celestial Seasonings honey-vanilla chai, I've been rationing it out over weeks, to savor it...and I had never seen it in Prague until I read that it's known as yogi čaj. I was determined to find it.

The woman turned to a tin marked "Dáta Masala" on a shelf behind her and opened it for me, setting it on the counter so I could smell the pepper and cardamom.

"No, přesně," I said happily. "Exactly!" I asked for fifty grams, and she scooped them into a bag.

"Máte černy čaj za vařit s čajem?" the shopkeeper asked me unexpectedly. My brain whirled and clanked around as I translated this, thought about it, answered the question, and then tried to translate a response. "Do you have black tea to steep with this tea?"

"Yes" was all I could come up with, after a long pause.

Outside, K. giggled into his collar.

"What's so funny?" I asked him, knowing exactly what he was laughing at.

"I have never heard you speak Czech before!" he exclaimed as we walked down Ružova toward Na Přikopě.

"Well, I know," I grumbled, "it's lousy. I only know the basics."

"You speak very good," he said loyally.

I resisted the urge to correct his English. "I speak badly, and I have no excuse. I even have a book, which I should study."

K. veered to another subject. "Maybe we could take a walk on the Charles Bridge." He began telling me about the worst tearoom in Prague. "They only have one kind of tea! And it's in bags!"

Terrible, I agreed.

We walked past the Havelska market and toward Old Town Square, past shop after shop of jewelry, souvenirs, and garishly colored crystal. The streets became very narrow.

"Do you know where we are?" K. asked, dodging a group of Japanese tourists who looked up at him with curiosity.

"Yes. Do you?"

"Not really," he admitted. We emerged on Old Town Square slightly to the left of the Astronomical Clock, which was floodlit and gleamed against the gray-blue stones and night sky around it. There were only a few small groups huddled in front of the clock.

"I know this part of town," I said, pointing to the carved, arched wooden doors to the left of the clock. "That's Old Town Hall, where my husband and I were married."

But K. was captivated by the clock, and walked toward a spot directly in front of it. "We are too early!" he called to me. I felt like smacking my forehead. Two scruffily dressed men kicking stones around the fairly deserted plaza in front of the clock looked up and took an interest in K.'s English. Even though he's over six feet tall and can have a fierce expression (when talking about math), he looked tiny, in front of the clock and the thugs, who began to move toward him.

I went over to him and tried to look tough, which is hard to do in heels. "This is not really a good place to stand around. It's a pickpocket's paradise."

He didn't budge. "Have you ever seen the figures move when the hour rings?" he asked, without taking his eyes off the clock and the blue-and-gold painted doors above and on either side of the clock face, where the apostles file past, every hour on the hour.

The two guys casually kicked a stone past us and sauntered by.

"Once, I think," I muttered.

"Ok, we have half an hour!" K. declared. "Can we go walk on the Bridge? It's that way." He pointed up Pařižská.

"Um, sure," I said, feeling like a jerk. "But it's that way." I pointed ninety degrees west, toward the river.

As a compromise, we walked toward Pařižská until a Russian tour group threatened to trample us, at which point we cut across them and walked west, out of the square.

"I learned a lot about Czech legends last week at a lecture," I told K., as we walked toward the Charles Bridge. "All about Libuše, and Komenius, and Šarka. One woman at the lecture raised her hand and asked if there was any evidence that Libuše actually lived; if there was any grave, for example, or bones. Can you believe it?" (This drove me nuts at the lecture; to my mind, it was like inviting a Japanese professor to talk about the tea ceremony and then proclaiming, "Well, they're really just grass clippings, aren't they?")

K. shrugged diplomatically. "It's folklore. But do you know of Bruncvik and the lion?"

This rang a bell, but I couldn't remember the details.

"I like walking on the bridge when you can actually see it, without all the tourists," K. remarked.

We walked toward the end, and K. showed me a statue below, which J.'s father had often pointed out.

"Right! I remember!" The statue is thin and green with age, but in his hand is a new-looking coppery sword. K. looked down at it with his hands in his pockets.

"Bruncvik had a magic sword...and a lion as a pet. The lion is the Czech symbol." K. looked at me a bit anxiously. Surely I would know at least this bit of Czech lore?

"Yes, of course," I said.

"People say that the sword is buried in the bridge."

"Do you think so?"

K. rolled his eyes. "Maybe." He looked at his watch. "Oh! In ten minutes, the clock will ring! We must go quickly!"

We made it back to Old Town Square just as the clock began to chime. Sure enough, the apostles filed past, casting sideways glances down at the small crowd. Finally, the blue and gold doors banged shut and the bell began to ring, although the tourists stayed through the nine rings just in case something else was supposed to happen.

K. looked like a kid at a carnival. "That was great!"

"Shall we go have tea at the Literary Cafe?" I suggested, since I was freezing and it was beginning to rain. We hurried across the square to Týnská and wound around the small streets beside it toward the cafe, where I wrestled with the iron-ring door handle until it opened.

We sat down at a table in the first room, where two groups were gathered, with some people chattering in American English, and K. looked around cautiously.

The waitress came by without any menus. "Máte vybrano?"

I ordered grog, which is essentially rum and hot water, served with two packets of sugar.

K. ordered mint tea. He looked shocked at my order.

"Do you know what grog is?" he asked me.

"Yes; it's good on a cold winter night," I said defensively.

"But the liquor is of such bad quality!" He nearly shook his head at me.

Man, kids today are so critical. "Well, I know, but it reminds me of a hot toddy. You know, the drink with good rum, honey, lemon, and a bit of butter on top." Or something like that.

K. told me about a climbing group he'd joined, and then about how he sleeps out in the woods.

"Oh, yes, camping," I pronounced in best teacher form. "I also used to camp a lot," I declared. "Then I got the hell out of the Midwest."

K. looked positively insulted. "I do not camp. I just go and sleep in the forest!" He relented a bit. "Well, I take a sleeping bag."

"Well, I hate to break it to you, but that's camping. And if you take a can opener, that's serious camping."

The table with the Americans turned to look at this exchange. I lowered my voice.

K. hopscotched from camping to TV shows he had watched (and we both agreed that Red Dwarf was a fantastic show), to movies each of us had seen (K. recommended American Gangster; I, The Darjeeling Limited) and books we were reading (K., a book on Taoism; I (sheepishly), the last Harry Potter volume). It was more or less the kind of conversation I had dozens of times while getting to know friends in college.

Sometimes, you just need someone to shoot the breeze (lelkovat) with.

Tea and sympathy

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:06:00 +0000

After logging four hours of editing a massive submarines encyclopedia last weekend, I had enough overtime (combined with a leftover half of a monthly paid free day) to take last Tuesday off. Every other morning, when I'm on the metro or bus, I dream about taking the tram along the river, late in the morning, towards town. As the tram turns north, you can see the stretch of the river from Zbraslav up towards where it turns slightly east, near the Česky Yacht Klub, right under the Vyšehrad fortifications. The river is variably slate-colored and still, or slightly wrinkled by the wind, or folded back where crewing teams have pulled through it.

Tram Number 3 stops on Vodičkova, right near Školska and a tea shop I love. This tea shop has what J. would say is a minimalist look; everything is extremely organized, from the Japanese teapots and cups lined up for sale on the shelves to the metal tins of tea that line the back wall of the shop. I bought two kinds of tea (Granny's Garden and Indian Summer) for the former colleague I was going to visit, later that morning. The tea comes in sleek silver bags, closed with a heat press and bearing a label with a bamboo leaf. I'm gradually understanding that the Czech love of hundreds of kinds of tea is as strong a cultural trait as the British love of one well-brewed pot.

I used to teach English with Marie at Mat-Fyz; now, she heads the Charles University Philosophical Faculty's English-language department for hard-of-hearing and deaf students. At Mat-Fyz, Marie would brew fragrant cups of fruit tea, with chunks of dried apples and cherries, and frequently brought me fresh Bulgarian garlic that looked nothing like ordinary supermarket garlic; this garlic had enormous, juicy cloves and the papery skin was streaked with red, like tea-rose petals. When we met for tea with another Mat-Fyz veteran a few weeks ago, she brought me some of this garlic and a bag of chocolates. I, like an idiot, hadn't brought anything in return...but vowed to bring fruit tea and have a tour of the Philosophical Faculty when I visited Marie at her new office.

The Faculty dates from the fourteenth century, and sits in a building across from the Rudolfinum, near the river and about three minutes' walk from Staromestské Namesti. Jan Palach, who immolated himself as a protest against the Soviet occupation in 1968, was a student here, and the student energy of 1989 had its locus at the Philosophical Faculty as well. Like many other humanities departments, this one has students in dreadlocks and crazily matched sweaters and tights spilling out of the front doors, clutching sheaves of notes and thermoses. On the wall of the abandoned building across from the tram stop, a few steps away from the Philosophical Faculty, is a Czech quotation in chalk from Alfred de Musset. As I walked in the door, two students were racing out, affectionately cursing at each other in English.

Marie's office is at the very top of the building, next to a well-equipped AV room with computers, AV equipment, a library of CDs and DVDs, and walls of photographs highlighting the department's connection with Gaulladet University, in the U.S. The AV room has an excellent view of the Jewish Cemetery, behind the Museum of Decorative Arts. In the adjacent room, Marie's desk is squeezed in between a copier, a small table stacked with boxes of tea, and another desk with a computer. Large boxes of all kinds are stacked to the rafters--much like our apartment, I told Marie. I looked at the bars of the metal security doors on the inside of the office doors.

"It's more to keep the teachers in than the thieves out," Marie said.

After getting the tour of the top floor and sheepishly handing Marie two bags of tea and a small pot of acacia honey, I thanked her and headed south toward the French Institute, where I was going to meet Hanka (the French-speaking Czech secret weapon as the country prepares for the EU presidency, next year). That is, I cut through Staromestske Namesti as the clock in Týn Cathedral was ringing, at eleven, and stopped to listen from across the square; then I went through Můstek and up Vaclavske Namesti toward the street I thought the French Institute was on (but wasn't). When I got to Ječna and realized I'd done two sides of a triangle, and was red in the face from hurrying, I felt fairly embarrassed. I'd lived here for a year and a half and couldn't find my way around New Town. Štěpánska had to be around here somewhere, but I didn't recall the French Institute being on the same street as a cabaret. Fortunately, the next street was the right one: the Cubist lines of the building housing the French Institute leaned into view even as I stood at the end of the street.

Inside, I was a few minutes early, and wandered past the bookstore to a wall where a tv was broadcasting the France24 channel and a report on the violence in Kenya. Across the courtyard, a class let out and people began to come through the door. Hanka appeared, and we decided to go to the Kyvadlo restaurant for lunch. The restaurant's name ("kyvadlo" is "pendulum" in Czech) is a play on the name of the street it sits on, Jama, or "pit"--and thus, as the menu points out in great detail, is a pun on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." (That's really why I have a soft spot for this place.) The place is quite normal, though, in a good way, and not at all overrun with clocks--although there is a pendulum behind the bar. Additionally, it's one of a number of good places to eat in New Town without breaking your budget.

As usual in Prague, the waitress looked like a supermodel. Even Hanka, who always looks like she came from Paris Fashion Week and has the complexion of a girl the Pre-Raphaelites would stab each other to paint, was surprised and complimented the waitress on her makeup. The waitress, a girl with large brown eyes with her hair pulled back in a bun, smiled modestly. She looked like a Lenore.

Poe would have liked Prague.

Adventures in Vinohrady

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:27:00 +0000

We arrived at the Kralovske Vinohrady hospital this morning in driving rain. The hospital is built on the slope of a hill, so I imagine that they have plenty of business (like twisted ankles) simply rolling in their doors when it's icy.

At the beginning of the year, the country initiated new health-care regulations requiring patients to pay thirty crowns for doctor's visits, and for prescriptions. Last week, when we went to the hospital to register the surgery, instead of paying, J. had to buy a token (for 30 crowns) and pay with that. I was disappointed because I didn't get to see the token; perhaps it was like the flattened pennies you can get at the Sears Tower and the Space Needle. The idea of buying a token instead of just paying thirty crowns was no less ridiculous--and I would have liked to have a souvenir.

Today, for however many hundreds of crowns I've paid (or maybe my company has paid) into the health-care system, I got what amounted to a forty-minute long Czech lesson and two holes in my head. (Now I get to make that crack with authority: "I need more chocolate like I need a hole in my head!")

A short-haired and high-cheekboned woman in jeans and clutching a Chanel bag was sitting next to us as we waited on a row of seats, in a hallway off the ER. Finally, a door opened and she went inside. She came out thirty minutes later, touching the top of her head gingerly.

"Ohh, that hurts a lot," she whispered, although I couldn't see what they had done to her. She collected her things, bade us goodbye, and teetered off in stilettos. She looked a lot better than most of the people streaming into the ER, however, including one man in a business suit who stood and swayed, occasionally, next to a gurney. He had the look of someone who had vowed never, ever again to order whatever he had eaten, the night before.

The door to the operating room opened again and a young doctor stepped out. "Mr. Slattery?" he said. I stood up, and the doctor looked closely at the admission papers he was holding.

For a country settled long ago in part by the Celts, Irish names don't get much recognition in the Czech Republic, these days. The doctor looked taken aback at me.

I went to drag J. into the operating room with me, but the doctor prevented that.

"It's fine," he said. "I speak English, and we will take care of you."

"Ok," I replied, in an ungrateful sort of way. Inside the OR was an older doctor in all white (white Crocs, white coat, white hair), seated near one of the operating tables; an intern in short sleeves, with her hair pulled back in a cap; a nurse in a blue smock and support stockings; and the young doctor, who I eventually deduced was a resident. The older doctor sat casually while the resident and the nurse ran around and prepared things.

As I stood in the doorway, the nurse asked me something, and when I nervously said that I didn't speak Czech, she gently prodded me towards the operating table. Everyone else in the room began a steady stream of hospital banter. I realized with a shock that I understood a lot of what was being said.

"Did you see that woman who was in here last night?"
"Yes, the older patient. She was absolutely crazy."

The older physician came around and poked at me. "Ježiš Maria! That's lovely. What a bump! It's big!"

Everyone else agreed heartily. My ego fell off the operating table and crawled to the door. The older physician looked at me and was sympathetic.

"Ne boite se! Don't worry!" he proclaimed. "We are just like the Mayo Clinic!" he said proudly. "MAYO!" He poked at me some more and absentmindedly puzzled over the name. "Mayo... The May Clinic? The Mayonnaise Clinic?"

As they got down to work, they sounded like people on the morning commute.

"So, who will be the new head of the department?"
"Sverak?"
"No, impossible."
"Did you hear what happened with him and Doctor Myslikova?"
"No! You're kidding!"
"Really?"

And so on...for forty minutes.

When they were finished, the resident sat me up and rattled off a list of instructions. As he saw me blink in an anaesthetic haze a few times, he said, "I'll go inform your boyfriend of what to do."
I held out my hand with the wedding ring. "Husband."

Finally, the nurse cleaned me up and tucked my hair under a bandage. She pointed to the mirror.

"No, thanks," I said, my head throbbing. "I feel like Frankenstein."

The nurse looked highly insulted at this, so I went to the mirror and tried to look pleased, although I really did look like Frankenstein, with hair sticking out in every direction from underneath the bandages. Not wanting to appear rude, I said, "Dekuji, nashledanou," before leaving. Then I staggered out to J. and took a lot of Ibuprofen.

Graffito

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:54:00 +0000

There's a fairly old phrase graffitied on one of the concrete walls on the main highway, across from the Pobřežní cesta tram stop which reads, in faded ice-blue lettering outlined in black, "Jsme s čas a ohreň [new graffiti and illegible] v casem," and which translates to (roughly) "We are from time and ignite [something lost here] in time." I'm not sure if it's depressing or just inscrutable. On most days I go by this wall on the tram, it seems faintly reassuring. Something about the old-school style of the phrase's dignified Times New Roman letters (surrounded by newer and more brash graffiti) makes me breathe a little more easily. The puzzling message could be worse, too; being from time is better than being from, say, Leavenworth...although the igniting thing could go both ways.

It's the middle of January, and the city shifts in and out of a blue fog. Sometimes, it snows; sometimes, it's just cloudy for days on end. You could do worse than seek out affirming things written (maybe twenty years ago) on concrete. Some people go to church; I commute. A two-hour-long daily commute adds up, over a week. Many mornings, when I get up at 6:15, I think, "Why on earth did I trade one day of early rising, as a teacher, for this?!"

Work is ok. The plotter's proofs are coming back for titles I finished before Christmas, including a book on Russia's cultural treasures, one on the world's best movies, one on the best places in Europe, and one on the best cities in North America. I dread plotter's proofs because there are inevitably a few small but blatantly obvious corrections to make (which I missed in earlier proofs), and these are usually expensive to correct. It makes me especially nervous when I read plotter's proofs and think, "Wow, that's interesting! Nizhny Novgorod is the birthplace of Maxim Gorky!" because it means I totally failed to register this in the previous six readings I'd done of the proofs.

This week at work was fairly entertaining, though. On Tuesday afternoon, the receptionist came in and (I thought) asked everyone if we wanted coffee at two o'clock. Most people nodded politely and said yes. A few minutes before two, there was a huge clatter of glasses and chairs being moved downstairs to the big conference table in the company showroom, and then followed a mass exodus of the upstairs offices. The Czech team also hustled out of the office I share with them. I waited a few minutes and called my colleagues downstairs in production, but they were also oblivious to whatever was happening. When I could no longer stand the suspense, I went downstairs, where the heads of the Czech sales team were arranging bottles of champagne on the table. Gradually, people trailed out of the warehouse and out of the offices downstairs, and were handed a glass of champagne.

"This isn't the meeting where we get fired, is it?" I asked a colleague.

"No," she said. "It's the meeting where the CEO announces that he's stepping down."

"You're sure this is not the same thing?" I mumbled. "In my country, that kind of thing is usually followed by a round of pink slips."

"Have some more to drink," she said.

The CEO, looking--as one of the HR people from upstairs said fondly of him--like a European Bill Gates, explained why he was stepping down and how he had built the company, over thirty years. He spoke in Dutch-accented English, which was translated into Czech by one of the two sales heads. Both of them, along with employees at the table who had been in the company for years, became teary near the end. The newer ones of us tried to look sympathetic and stood there at the back, awkwardly swirling champagne around in our glasses, primarily concerned with whether we would have jobs to come to, tomorrow.

As everyone was drinking a toast to the CEO, his wife (who directs the Czech branch of the company) stepped in and reassured us that the company was thriving and that there was no cause for alarm...which we all interpreted as, "No, you're not fired." People drank a lot more happily after that, and crowded around the CEO to wish him well. Then we dragged our chairs back to our offices and beamed at all the books and proofs through a champagne haze for another three hours.

On Friday morning, the good mood vanished with an email from our printers in Shanghai, who informed us that the government office in charge of content compelled them to alert us of unacceptable content that had to be removed or revised. The list of unacceptable things included references in our titles to Tibet, maps rendering Taiwain as politically separate from mainland China, and a pile of references that were blithely critical of the Communist Chinese government. The leader of the Czech team in my office was outraged and swished back and forth from the office to the kitchen several times to prove it. The rest of her team, who are all under twenty-five, petite, and stylish, clucked in sympathy.

"Have you seen the email from China?" the senior colleague asked me through her blazing moral indignation.

All I said was "Yes, and what a pity it is for their business," which did not appease her much. But I remembered hearing the accounts director of this printing company explain to us at Frankfurt that they were stuck when it came to government censorship. As far as I remember, the conversation didn't go much further than that (and I remember that the Shanghai group looked momentarily glum over their pasta and white wine, as if forseeing an end to it, at some point), but it was clear, in this case, that we were not going to be doing any censoring and would just print the title elsewhere. End of story. Save the moral indignation for things you can change...

(It was with a bruised sense of irony that I went downstairs a few minutes later, to the production office, and told them that the rather explicit, giant photo from "Last Tango in Paris" would probably offend many American readers...and that it might be better to substitute a milder picture. They laughed themselves silly.

Yeah, yeah, I told them, You have the Chinese censor and the American censor. I get it. Very funny.)

I do like my job, but I often miss teaching and students, and I constantly tally up the pros and cons of each job in two columns in my head, in the fear that I overlooked something and could magically have some of my mornings and afternoons back and keep the six-thousand-crown bubble from this non-teaching job in my paycheck. But I haven't overlooked anything: teaching is a luxury, here, in the sense that you must be crazy (or be a trust-funder) to actually do it instead of a nine-to-five job. And any time you have free in the mornings and afternoons is offset by grading in the evenings. Right? Right, says my snarky critical self, if you're lousy at time-management.

I do not invite my critical self for a drink after work. I do get on the bus with two colleagues who confess, separately, that their idea of happiness, this weekend, is to lounge around in pajamas, at home. It's a relief to know that this is also my vision of an ideal weekend. J. is off to a Japanese film fest, but I go home, put on pajamas, make pasta, and read--really read, not proofread--for six hours until I fall asleep on the couch. I'm an expert at wasting time, but I'm beginning to realize that time has an end and I'm not doing much igniting.

noreply@blogger.com (Erin) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:51:00 +0000

J's father arrived at Cafe Louvre to meet us for lunch, and he handed us a bag I thought would be full of Christmas cards; it was the mail that had piled up while we were in the U.S. and he was in Austria. ("I said 'Gruss Gott' four hundred times in fourteen days,' J's father told me ruefully. Then he brightened: "We drank fourteen bottles of wine!" I could feel my liver shudder.

The bag revealed that we received a grand total of three Christmas cards. Three for the whole season! That's the last time I wait until January to send out cards.