Did I mention I forgot my password?

I did. Also my log-in ID. Most embarrassing.

Especially the bit where I cursed, swore, frothed at the mouth and generally spent an unpleasant almost-hour wrestling with Google and Blogger in Czechish, since they seem to only communicate with users in the language of their IP address, only to discover the teeeny, tiny link marked "English" at the bottom of one of the screens.

Oh yes. I still can't speak Czech. Also embarrassing.

Still not ded yet...

...just continuing to be a little preoccupied with learning a long list of names of animals in Czech. And some other stuff

This is of course, very handy since I now get to have really good conversations with Mrs. Jana:

"This vikend I wented to the zooooological park-u."
(This account of my extra-curricular activities is in fact a tissue of lies, constructed purely for the express purposes of showing off my animal-naming skills. Alas. I feel that Mrs. Jana and I will never have a true meeting of souls until the day arrives when I can describe my real freetime activities in Czech lessons.)
"Good. Did you see any animals?"
"Yes. I saw a giirraffe."
"No."
"Excuse me?"
"No."
"I saw a giraf-?" Her head shakes slowly.
"Girraph-?" More shaking.
"It's not giraffe?"
"No. You did not see a giraffe."
"I didn't?" Hang on... wasn't this my fictitious account of my artistically-enhanced-for-language-lesson-purposes weekend?
"No. You saw another animal."
"I did?" But they have giraffes in Prague zoo. I have seen them on posters.
"Yes. Another animal."
"Ummm... I saw a tygre?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. You also did not see a tiger."
I am beginning to feel stalked.
"Really?"
"Yes. The tiger is too easy. The giraffe is also to easy. You saw another animal."
"Ohh..." My mental lightbulb goes "ding!". Giraffe in Czech is žirafa. The "ž" is pronounced like a French "j". Tiger is an even greater cop-out since it's tygr.
"I saw a rheeenouserousooos."
"Rhinocerous."
"Rhynouceros."
"Good. Talk about the rhinocerous."
"Um... it is big."
"More."
"It is more big."
"Bigger."
"Yes. The rhynouceroos is bigger."
"Bigger than?"
"Umm... the rhynouceroos is bigger than... than... a cat?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. Cat is too easy. What else?"
"Umm... the rhynouceroos is bigger than a moose. Mouse."
"Good. What else?"
"It is bigger..."
"No. Not bigger."
"It is not bigger..."
"No. It is something else. It is more dange..."

(The discerning reader might have noticed some time around the second "bigger" that we are also reviewing the comparative and superlative of adjectives. Sadly, I didn't catch on until about now. It's tricky. They get prefixed and suffixed. If those are words.)

"Dange... Dange... Oh! I know! It is more dangeroose... It is more dangerooose... thaaann... aaaa... pig!"
"Good."
"It is also more expensive than a pig."*
"Excellent. Now. Tell me about the pig."

ad infinitum, or at least ad fortyfiveminutum

*This is, in fact, a cunning linguistic joke based on a well-known, hardcore Czech saying about something being "as expensive as a pig". My colleagues who taught it to me find it hilarious when I say it. Especially when I preface it with the classic and extremely pervasive Czech expression of astonishment/shock/disgust, "ty vole!"**. Taxi drivers find it it less amusing at about 1 in the morning.

**"Ty vole!" is probably worth a whole post of its own. Learning it opens whole new worlds of expressiveness. Well, at some point. Maybe.

Under here?

I'm sure there's a subtle meaning here that escapes me...

Underwear. Genuinely a cause for astonishment. Particularly for wearers of the ladies' brand, "LovelyGirl", it would seem.

But perhaps some translation is in order. The debonair (you can tell by the scooter) gentleman to the left has doffed his mohair cardigan and matching driving gloves to casually enquire of his charming companion, "Ty nosíš lovelygirl?". This is Czech for "Are you wearing lovelygirl?"

To which insightful query, she shyly responds, "Ano!!!" or, "Yes!!!"


But I'm sure that the many dedicated followers of fashion who patronise this blog are anxious for a closer view of the tattoo on the gentleman's stomach, in order to more closely inspect such a tasteful and aesthetic example of body-art.

(Apologies for photo quality - I had to take the picture through a shop window)

Thought for the day

When scheduling rather pleasurable activities such as a trip to see the latest big, showy, blockbusting musical at the cinema and a visit to the hairdresser's for a much-needed trim, on the whole, it is perhaps preferable to ensure that these happen in the reverse order to that given above.

Particularly when the the film is Sweeney Todd and the stylist likes to talk about how much she "loves the cutting"...

Crrrracked.

So last weekend, still in the grip of my emotional maelstrom, and made reckless by a clutch of last month's unused food vouchers* I went a little wild and experimental in the bio-food emporium owned by the 7th Day Adventists (closed on Saturdays - it's very disconcerting. No trading on Sundays is still the norm here for smaller shops).

I should probably add that as a tree-hugging, muesli-crunching, hemp-sandal-wearing herbivore I am a regular patron of this and other bio-shops. It's just that I normally confine my purchases to things I recognise and know how to cook. You know where you are with tofu - it's not usually going to do anything more vicious than wobble alarmingly and take on lurid hues when it's past the sell-by date. And green leafy stuff is pretty much universally manageable.

But all those little bags of dried things can be a little intimidating, and most of the powdered stuff comes hand-labelled with vocabulary that doesn't feature in my "Czech Step-by-Step". They frown on the sniff test in there, too.

However, novelty is a many-splendoured thing, and last Sunday the "novinky" section was filled to the bursting with little (recycled) plastic pots of crackery-biscuitty type things. So after much deliberation I picked up box of "orange-lemon-ginger flax rolls". Sounds yummy. Mmmmm…

Luckily, as a small child I used to eat paper, so the principal texture and flavour didn't come as a total shock. And then, the flax seeds added a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole chewing experience which can only be described as "mucilage". (Is that a word? I have done that thing with soaked flaxseeds as a substitute for egg whites but was never very convinced by it.)

But I did learn the Czech for "Slowly dehydrated at 48 degrees centigrade for several hours to preserve health and vitality." And this made me realise that rather than delighting in biscuitty-goodness itself, I was basically eating the mummified husks of biscuits. The only thing is that I'm not sure if they're meant to reincarnate of their own accord or if I need to stand under a pyramid holding a razor and a dead mouse first. Pass the natron.

*Is this a Czech thing? Because pretty much every company here seems to pay a small fraction of your salary in food vouchers. Just like luncheon vouchers, but they're far more widely accepted, and you can use them in most restaurants, cafés and even supermarkets… Rules and checkout ladies permitting

There's a theme here... if I can just put my finger on it...

Obviously, I would be the one with wings.

I suppose it's one of those millenial things, but like a lot of people I know, the title used to describe what I do to keep the weresturgeon from the door doesn't really convey the vivid actuality my day-to-day existence.


Luckily, I've found a photo.

Afterthought: Is it just me, or does horror seem more horrible when spelled "horor"?

Lazy list

Ten things you can see/do in Prague that aren't mentioned in my very extensive collection of guidebooks (even the one that has reviews of, erm, houses of ill-repute).

1. Eat dumplings filled with smoked meat and served from a small brass cannon onto a wooden cheeseboard piled high with sauerkraut. (I've mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again).

2. See six German ladies of a certain age touring Prague in a seventy-seven year old, bright yellow, open-topped car with six wheels.

3. Have an excellent Thai massage.

4. Visit a museum dedicated to the most famous Czech who never lived, Jara Cimrman, including replicas of his most famous inventions, such as the triple-headed hammer, ladies' mugger-defense glove with retractable claws, or the gentleman's travelling chamberpot.

5. Drink an excellent cappuccino accompanied by a carrot "sandwich" (a slice of loaf that tastes a lot like a nutty carrot cake).

6. Not admire the statue of Jan Hus in Old Town Square because it's completely surrounded by hoardings for Skoda cars which are paying for its repairs, and beds of seasonal flowers, which aren't but make it look nicer.

7. Cruise the Vltava in pedalos (tide permitting).

8. Go roller-blading in one of the big parks outside the centre and play spot-the-most-obscure-yet-obscene piece of graffiti.

9. Wonder at the seemingly unstoppable flood of "Herna Non-Stop", 24 hour gambling shops (places too small and croupier-free to be called casinos) filled with flashing, ringing slot machines, a perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke and free drinks and snacks to playing punters.

10. Go(-)karting in Radotín, Europe's largest indoor karting track and finally understand where all the airport taxi drivers get their training.

Moving stairway to nefilim

Somehow, while I have had enough time to stumble across ideas for blog posts and even managed to worry them around enough to find some of the rough edges, I haven't really had the time to bash them into shape. Consequently, when I do sit down at a keyboard for bloggish purposes, I don't even know where to start. It feels as if all these whirling fragments of posts have clogged up my back brain and it takes enormous concentration to get anything down - even a hopeful list of topics.

Personally, I blame the escalators. Escalator-based differences are one of those things that I noticed when I first arrived here, but which rapidly became part of the day-to-day pattern of my life. When I was first getting to know the glories of the Prague metro system, my thoughts when escalator-bound would go something like this:

"Ticket stamping machine… where's my ticket? Oh yes, here. No that's used, okay, yes, here it is."

Silent squishing noise (yes, it is possible) as ticket collapses in ticket stamping machine. Squish again. Squish again.

"Okay… not the ticket. Different machine."

Whirrrrr. Bzzpp. (electronic date-stamping noise). Walk to escalator. Stand. Stare at the back of people's heads, trapped by the lack of appropriate Czech verbiage. Stand some more. Brain flips into the same semi-meditative trance of resigned boredom that causes me to read the ingredients listing on cereal boxes at breakfast and starts looking for escalator equivalent of a nutrition label.

"Ohhhh. Strange-looking Czech words on posters. I recognise that brand. And that one too. But not that one. Hey, I know that word. I think that one is advertising a language school. Yes, "jazyky". I know that word. And "anglic-with-a-hacek-tina" too. Wow. I can read some Czech. So I wonder what that is? Oh "divadlo". That's theatre. So maybe a play? Or seasons? It's a black and white picture of two people with angst in their eyes. With an owl. Must be a play. What's the owl for? How far? What? I'm not even half-way down this thing yet. Bloody hell, this is taking for-ee-vaaahh. Borrreeed.

"What play has an owl? This is a long escalator. I wish that man would move to the right. I wonder what Czech for "please stand on the right is?" Hmmmm… trees of the year. The June one is nice. In London, there are signs and announcements. Very leafy, that May tree. Tree of May. Whatever. Why aren't there signs and announcements? Or is it moving very slowly? In London, heavy breathing makes people move. Don't Praguers understand the meaning of heavy-breathing-at-the-neck? Damn. I think that was my train.

"Yes, look, people are getting on the escalator from that side of the platform. Isn't this light a strange yellowy colour? And the ticket machines are yellow too. This is a really long escalator. I wish I could walk. Or speak enough Czech to ask them to move. Maybe they're tourists. Tourists in London don't always understand the heavy-breathing-at-the-neck thing. Even though they have pictures with big red "X"s. And announcements. But the announcements are only in English. Which is pretty idiotic.

"And there's that whole slow time thing too. Maybe they don't get the need to rush. That's nice. It probably means fewer heart attacks. I'm sure I read somewhere that the faster people walked in cities, the unhealthier they were. These people are probably keeping me healthy. Which is good. Really. But also annoying. Hey, so that's what Bourne Ultimatum is in Czech. Could I get a tree of the year? I would probably feel healthier about the not rushing if I wasn’t breathing in this incredibly unpleasant smell. Especially through warm air. How do people do things like that in ventilation?" Ad nauseam (ahem, big klew about smell there).

Three hours later (okay, actually 2 and a half minutes. E timed one once. But it's a veeerrryy sloooowwwww 2 and a half minutes), I am at last able to admire the unique platform architecture and dulcet tones of the (occasionally) trilingual announcements, where the Czech takes twice as long as the German or English versions, leaving me in a permanent state of anxiety about what important travel-related information I might be missing.

"Bing-bing. Dear passengers, for your safety, you are please asked to remain standing behind the white line." Well, it's white and black. And more grey than white, actually. "Bing-bing. Dear passengers. Already this Saturday Prague will become the venue of the Mattoni Night Grand Prix. The night run in the streets of Prague will affect the city transportation in the centre of Prague between nineteen thirty hours and twenty-two thirty hours. There will be tram service disruption in the section…"

But these days, everything just blurs into the getting-to-another-place zone of empty-headedness. It takes something spectacular along the lines of battling clowns to shake me out of auto-pilot. Familiarity breeds contemptplation (hurhur). So as my daily two to four escalators become the only point in the day where I can actually go into slow time, they give me just enough time to get irritated by a bit of mental grit, but no more. Actual coherent structures would require a bit more of, well, everything.

Fancy a brew?

There's plunder, and there's, well, I don't quite know what to call it now.

Naïve fool that I am, I had always assumed that the reason I was hauling back crates of Brand Y. Tea for myself and assorted other expats was one of those home-away-from-home things. Some adjustments are harder to make than others, especially bleary-eyed, early morning ones.

While good coffee is possible to achieve by dint of much banging of the supersonic coffee machine and the stealthy substitution of some Lavazza or other decent beans (kept under lock & key), the concept of a nice brew is light years away from the paper bags of fruit-flavoured wood shavings that usually appear under the the label here. Then there's the whole issue of preparation. The boiling of water first and the right sort of milk.

And I love tea. Proper tea I mean. Thick builder's tea that turns the milk a robust shade of mahogany. Tea you can stand spoon up in. Coffee just doesn't quite have the same effect in the mornings, it's too edgy, too acid. I need a big mug of tea that's almost a meal on its own to strip the flannel from my tastebuds. And then I need a few more to fuel me through the day. Somehow, I always thought that my fellow-drinkers out here needed their imports for the same sort of reason. It's what we're used to, and things don't feel quite the same without it.

Except I was wrong. It's not just that.

The other day, the undercover musician (80 bags, hard water blend) revealed that his particular brand is more than just a pick-me-up. It's a pick-them-up too. "Them" being his series of outstandingly attractive girlfriends. Nothing to do with the jazz cool, the sunglasses, the ability to riff for 2 hours solid and jam with gypsy punk trumpeters from the former Yugoslavia until his fingers bleed. Apparently it's all in the tea. Drop-dead gorgeous supermodel-types from the Czech Rep., Serbia and points east love it. Having never encountered a good cuppa (strong, milky and a good slug of sugar) they think it tastes amazing. And more importantly, because he drinks tea rather than beer, wine or slivovice for refreshment during the day, he's considered more stable and less likely to be plagued by an over-fondness for adult beverages, instantly moving him several points above his peers in the dating stakes.

Plus ça change

The real trick here will be avoiding use of any of those words that attract the wrong kind of attention...

Now where was I? Oh yes, gyms. Well, one gym at a time - I'm not raving, after all - but more than one in total, if you see what I mean. So yes, gyms. Or more precisely, gym changing rooms and cultural differences thereof.

Because the people of that “island nation” that Coast was going on about? Well, they are rather on the shy side. So back in Londinium, every visit to the changing room was a complex exercise in advanced towel technique. Even the nature-loving, people-embracing, sandal-wearing patrons of the yoga place with open shower stalls would immediately wrap themselves in yards of cloth to cover the ten feet to the lockers once out of the magic circle of water. And unless they were examining the floor tiles, no one ever, ever looked below shoulder level.

So there were days when the sheer effort of managing to achieve the socially correct degree of coverage with the regulation two smallish terry rectangles while putting on a dry-clean only wool suit and insta-crease cotton shirt would all become too much. I would long to fling all coverings aside and prance about the place in my altogether, or at least not descend into hideous spasms of embarrassment if the bottom towel dropped at an awkward moment.

Of course, this means that I have turned into a prude. And here, in glorious Prahahaha, women (in keeping with my ingrained prudishness, my gym behaviour is strictly orthodox, so I know nothing about the habits of the other gender(s)) have a more, shall we say, “European” approach. Which is much more sensible, of course, but it is taking me time to get used to it. In my case it seems that personal prudishness, once acquired, is quite hard to drop, much like my bottom towel.

Unlike the hirsute, rather burly gentleman who checked in behind me the other day. When offered his allocated two towels, he loudly advised all and sundry that he only needed “the small one”.

Still rainin...

...albeit with the odd break of sunniness. The staircase at home smells very peculiar, but the lights at work have stopped fizzing and flickering.

But I have to wonder if the friends of the Židovské muzeum v Praze, aka the Jewish Museum in Prague know something I don't. They appear to be building what looks like either an ark or a greenhouse around the back of the Pinkas Synagogue.

Going, going, gong.

Last week, I went to several concerts as part of the tail end of the Prague Spring music festival As is the case with most things, there are many people out there far more qualified to review such events than yours truly, including the Visiting Music Teacher On A Half-Term Holiday (VMTOAHT - 'tis catchy, n'est ce pas?) who went with me. So what follows is definitely not a review of the concerts. Critics who have a better grip on their contrabassoon fingering technique than me can wrestle with the tricky nuances of mezzo-soprano soloist's coloratura passages.

An important thing to consider when arranging any concert is the whole ugly business of spectacle. After all, if there isn't something to look at, the more cynical members of the audience may wander off at the interval, grumbling about the price of tickets and beer before they can buy any of those commemorative T-shirts and limited edition socket sets. More performers in the world of pop/rock than you can chuck a scale model of Stonehenge and malfunctioning wardrobe at(,) know this to be true.

In the world of classical music, things are a tad more muted, spectacle-wise. That's how any fule know it's posh. Kinda like the way tastefully abstract visual metaphors rather than flowing tresses, lasers, pouffy gowns, muscular definition and elves with blue skin indicate respectable literature. (Note to self: Is it possible for a scantily-shirted humanoid with a well-defined chest, blue or not, to be an acceptable visual metaphor for a Great Narrative Theme, or does cleavage immediately sound the death knell of Great Art? Unless you're Richardson, of course, exploiting said bounteaous cleavage for your own nefarious purposes. Pamela Shmamela, apparently.)

Anyhow, a dearth of revolving stages and sparkly replica helicopters (although oddly enough, not necessarily straining bosoms) is usually a giveaway for the sort of concert where the audience is expected to assume either an earnest expression of restrained rapture (eyes-gently-shut-with-periodic-appreciative-inhalations-through-the-nose-during-emotional-passages) or intense concentration (eyes-gently-shut-with-a-slight-frown-and-periodic-small-yet-vigorous-nods-of-approval-of-that-rather-eloquent-rubato-leading-into-the-andante-passage). Tapping along is optional and should always be discreet. No one is allowed to wave their arms vigorously but the person with the stick at the front of the orchestra, or the occasional trombonist with sinus troubles. If there is no one with a stick, the person who most looks like they ought to have one usually wins the conducting free-for-all. Iron-grey hair and a dark suit help in this case.

Luckily for me, all the venues that featured as part of last week's whirl of concert attendance were equipped with bling in spades. Even at the gig where my view of the performers from the cheap seats was entirely blocked by a pillar, the obstructive column was liberally bedecked with ecclesiastical roccoco-a-go-go and a big picture of the Pope. Better yet was the view from the back of the rather stupendous bobbing combover we had when sitting underneath a big flag in the organ balcony at another gig.

But the most memorable was the music-from-the-kitchen-sink concert, which featured most of the instruments and orthodox novelty techniques from the western canon (but no canons or other light artillery, although there were some fugal passages). Audience members could happily debate the Hammond organ and flute duet during the interval, as well as thorny issues such as, "Was that a vibraphone in the last bit, or were they just happy to see us?"

Me? I was just waiting for someone to take advantage of the enormous gong propped up at the back of the percussion section. Something so large, brass and circular clearly was crying out for loud crash at a moment of high drama. Except it didn't. I don't know if it was a cunning ruse to maintain a thread of suspense through the event, or if I failed to appreciate the way some composer had counter-intuitively written a passage of extreme suspense where the instrument was stroked lightly with a paintbrush. But as the final note of the concert sounded, there was still nary a big bong to show for the whole two-hour musical extravaganza. And somehow, I still feel the lack.

Dancing on the head of a pun

Besides being owning one of those surnames that just cries out for an application of the finest punmanship, which I will resist, weakly, ardent 19th-century pan-Slavist Vaclav Hanka, occasional translator of Serbian poetry and professor of Slavonic languages was something of an artful forger. Allegedly.

Back in 1817, while rooting among big piles of Very Old Stuff in the church tower of Dvůr Králové nad Labem, Mr. Hanka (aka. pan Hanka. Not Hanka panka. Oh no. Because "-ka" is the diminuative suffix in Czech. That would make him "little Mr." If this particular noun-tweaking is even allowed because I'm pretty sure Czech only uses this as a casual feminine form. Or a declension of the name "Pánek", which is a completely different kettle of carp. And besides, even though Czechs take a more relaxed approach to word order, they still tend to put the titles before the name. Just like they don't capitalise them either. So pan Hanka he is and shall remain.) discovered some dusty old manuscripts. Big woo. After all, a manuscript is better any day than a tin of bell-polisher and a dead spider.

Pan Hanka (allowed to capitalise on his title, since I'm starting the sentence) was even happier with his discovery since he was one of the pan-Slavists (this time not one of those Mr. Slavists, but using the Greek-derived prefix that comes in handy in English when you want to talk about people sticking to an idea) who littered the early nineteenth century Central and Eastern European intellectual scene and didn't much care for the Austro-Hungarian Empire's assumptions of Teutonic cultural and political superiority.

Pan-Slavists also didn't favour the Ottomans much either, but the House of Osman were doing their wobbly imperial thing a little further east and so loomed less immediately on the particular corner of Europe where pan Hanka and his cronies hung out wandering along ancient folkways. I'll also leave the sticky Russian/pan-Slavic issue well alone.

Being something of a poetry buff (he'd published Hankowy Pjsne a couple of years previously) after Vacky Vaclav dusted off the papers and squinted a bit at the faded and Very Old Czechish Writing he doubtless did a traditional Slavic dance that hearkened back to his primordial Bohemian ancestors and just like his own language, stressed the first beat of every bar. It seemed he had discovered fragments of medieval Czech poetry, which would later be immortalised as the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové, or Rukopis královédvorský.

Only a year later Josef Kovář was doing some similar rummaging in the attics of Chateau Green Mountain when he came across some manuscripts of a similar ilk and age. These became known as the Manuscript of Zelená Hora, aka Rukopis zelenohorský, aka the rather swingingly-titled The Judgement of Libuše. Eventually these two sets of medieval manuscripts dropped the extra "R" and became the conjoined literary twin and snappily-named, "RKZ". Along the way, they inspired a welter of nationalist feeling, as well as yet more poetry, and all sorts of other cultural and literary homage along the way.

The tricky bit for the Slavic medievalists, Czech nationalists and general admirers of very old fragments of poetry that feature battles, birds of prey and very dark and stormy woods is that they probably weren't exactly really genuine actual medieval poems. Allegedly. But no less a person than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, first president of Czechoslovakia and ardent nationalist did some of this alleging.

Meanwhile although the consensus in most of the published material I've come across similarly alleges, others continue to fight the good, albeit ink-splattered fight.

More thoughts later, promise. This was in the nature of scene-setting.

References:

LookSmart's FindArticles - The language of nationality and the nationality of language: Prague 1780-1920 - Czech Republic history

Past & Present, Nov, 1996, by Derek Sayer

Brief with pictures

Ahhhh… spring. In the immortal words of the bookseller who flogged me a less-than-fragrant bouquet of second-hand paperbacks last weekend, "Now that the weather's nice, there's lots of beautiful, sunny places in this town to hang out for a few hours reading a good book."

Of course, that loud-voiced and defiant tweaker-of-the-noses-of-the-stern-and-unyielding-lords-of-literary-irony thereby trigged the immediate execution of sod's law. The git. Probably worked out that it's an easy way to bump up sales.

But at least the weather's still hanging in there. *touchwood*

No, we are not being served.

Resist the urge...

Something I always struggle with is the whole loggorhea thing. It's my dream to write the perfect, pithy sentence, full of wisdom and meaning. Something zen, like a single, perfectly-placed stone in an expanse of purest white sand. Or the total emptiness of the space where a possibility once existed... ...like the one between your ears. You know, there is a reason we hide those vanished possiblities in the cupboard.


So while I don my nifty grasshopper costume (after wrestling to get the zip over the wings) and continue to study the art of saying a great deal with very few words at the hairy-toed feet of my masters, let us take a moment of quiet inspiration and contemplate what might be my very favorite JD Robb cover* translated into Czechish. If you don't know the author, she's written a series of cracking thrillers set in the near future which feature a fully-clothed female detective.

The cover artist in this case seems to have taken less-is-more to hitherto unimagined levels. For us, it's a lesson in worthy restraint. Be noble, be strong. Snicker ye not. I dare you.

*ting* of meditation bell

Just goes to show what a misunderstood genius can do with an old magazine and a pair those safety scissors with the rounded ends.


Disclaimer: SBTB did have first dibs on this, (For all your cover snark needs - visit SmartBitchesTrashyBooks. Professional, reliable service with a snarl. No back-combed mullet too big or small. Bonus mantitty with your tenth visit. Now with added fibre and leather-trousered vitamins.) but it's been a while. Candy or Sarah may apply a delicate boot to my posterior if they feel I've breached netiquette.

Like Frankenstein, I did it my way

In some circles, they call me Typhoid Marika

Late last week, I decided to beat this head cold into submission. Well, either that or at the least assuage my fears that the strange goings-on in an auricular direction weren't signs of some incipient horrible secondary infection that would leave me defeated; a broken woman in neon wraparound visors, weakly humming stadium rock riffs. So off I hied myself, my Czech Health Insurance Card and my fug of rhinoviruses to the clinic with the English-speaking doctors recommended by a friend (it seems illness withers up my Czech language gland).

Two stops across and four stops down on Prague's rather crowded metro, I arrived and battled with the very complicated entry system to greet the doctor himself.

For 'twas indeed a male doctor and one quite attractive in a grey-blond sort of way. Things began to appear rosier. The tiny part of my mind not wholly occupied on working out precisely when I have felt more miserably ill before in my entire life perked up and started to take an interest. It glowed with approval as I explained my symptoms, deftly skirting around the whole Pink Floyd issue.

"Hmmmm…" he frowned, just like every other doctor in the universe. "Do you have fever?"
"Umm… no. I don't think so."
For a brief moment, I wondered if now would be a good time to bring up overstated twin reverb and dry ice. The tiny non-illness-obsessed part of my brain moved with the speed of (laser) light to stifle this urge with a barrage of sneezing. There was a pause while I mopped up with a scrap of tissue. Bit of an own goal for the mucus-brained one.

After a brief hand movement reminiscent of an amateur (pre-bunny) magician's, the still-attractive but more elusive he-doctor lunged forward and grabbed my forehead. Paralysed by shock and a strong Czech accent from a man in a white coat, visions of brain-sucking machines danced through my head.

"No. You don't have fever."
"Oh, well, that's good." Did brain-sucking really require complete cranial rigidity? "But it's really my ears that I'm worried about." I pointed at my ears. They stick out a bit, but are not unattractive.

His hands shifted and his thumbs pressed down very hard on the bumpy bit of skull behind my ears. "Does this hurt?"

Strong hands or not, torn by the brain-sucking issue, it was something of a relief to find him less attractive from this perspective. "Well, you are pressing quite hard."

"No. But do you have pain here?" More pressing.
"Not really. It's more sort of here." I did my own pressing, this time on the squishy bit behind my jaw where the crackling noises seemed to originate.

"Then you do not have ear infection."
"Well, that's a relief."
"You have a cold."
"Yes, I knew that. It's just my ears…"
"There is no medicine for a cold. You must rest. You must drink water."
"Okay."
"And if you still have the hearing problems after the cold is gone, you must see an otologist to clean your ears."
"Okay."
"Now, goodbye."
"Goodbye."

And so, suitably chastened, I took my dirty ears home to tune the air guitar.

Sometimes, it's just like the Sound of Music

This is what guys living in Czech-land chat about 'round the supersonic coffee machine on the Tuesday after Easter Monday.

"Hey, so did you beat your wife on the legs with ribbon covered twigs yesterday?"
"Yep. Well, she was quite insistent. What about yours?"
"Yeah. Our family is pretty traditional. I sang the carols and everything while I was doing it. Did you make the whip yourself?"
"Nah. Her father made it for me - I've never been able to braid the pussywillows properly. Guess you need to be born here to get the knack."
"Nice of him. This year, I forgot to buy one and ended up using a wooden spoon. Didn't get a whiff of slivovice* afterwards, let alone a proper egg. She just hung them all on the tree for the kids. I'll never hear the end of it now. She reckons a wooden spoon wasn't enough to get rid of the really bad spirits - let alone the fertility thing. She thought it was a total cop-out, without the ribbons.""Yeah… I know what you mean. My wife never lets me forget the Easter I doused her in water instead of flogging her legs. It ruined her favorite shoes. I didn't get any of the gingerbread lamb that year."
"Your wife makes gingerbread lambs?"
"Uh-huh. Hearts and rabbits too, but I like the lambs best."

"I think lambs are supposed to be just as good for fertility as the water thing."
"Probably. They're pretty tasty anyhow."

*plum brandy

Mysterious Dimensionless Points

Polyps update: mysterious brooding.

Mysterious cause of camera refusal to download photos to laptop: assumed mysterious battery.

Imagine some pictures of snow here - I was in the mountains when I wasn't stuck in the portakabin or the smallest hotel room in the world (very clean, but mysteriously kettle-, drawer- night-table- and electric-socket-less).

The most mysterious thing, however, about the recent jaunts abroad is what has happened to my default foreign leungwidge. The DFL is the massacred version of an otherwise innocent and inoffensive foreign-to-the-speaker language that pops out in the absence of any decent command of whatever local language might be. It often bears absolutely no resemblence to the actual language you should be speaking, unless by doing so it can cause insult to the local person with whom you are attempting to converse (badly).

The DFL may be accentuated by the atrocious and yet irresistable urge to mime if doing so will cause acute humiliation. These days, however, it is only rarely the speaker's own native language spoken Clearly. And. Distinctly. In. A. Loud. Voice. With. Odd. Em.Pha.Sis. Or. A. Funny. Accent. Normally, it's whatever language you studied least and worst or most recently quite badly. It should not be confused with those foreign languages which a person speaks with any degree of fluency. Oh no. Far be it that you should be confused with a reasonably articulate speaker of anything apart from helpless grunting noises that never quite sound the same no matter how hard you try.

Nor, however should the DFL should be confused with those bits of language you pick up while abroad ("Do not flush/use the toilet while the train is standing in the station", "Do not feed the monkeys children - they bite"), watching films in smoky arts cinemas, or reading those books where the mysterious, foreign, tycoon hero peppers his speech with exotic endearments, curses and the odd (ungrammatical/mispelled/or both) sentence in his mother tongue. ("Efharisto!", "Querida!", "Avec les roberts comme ça, ta rhumba est exceptionnelle" and, "Non credevo che 'impotente' volesse dire 'non può divertirsi'", my darling.)

Anyhow, over the last few months, my default foreign longwidge has now become Czech. Heaven and Mrs. Jana both know I can barely manage a word or two in Czechland, but it seems that distance has an effect rather like that of half-a-bottle of Becherovka. My Czech actually gets more fluent the further away I am from the country where my mangled efforts would be most useful.

Those poor Italians hardly knew what hit them, what with my volley of "Prosím"s and "Promiňte"s as I hurdled through the Milan metro and fervently embraced the whole of the south-Tyrolean train network with a deathless passion.

Of course, now that I'm back in Czechland, 3 whole days of being indoctrinated into the vagaries of Italian (can't speak it, can follow some, thanks to french, music and a whiff of distant latin) by Our Mutual Friend and boyfriend, means that I'm now apologising and thanking people in dreadful Italian. Probably just long enough to annoy the bilingual flatmate of Sicilian extraction.

It's like the ceti eel. But worse.

There's what you might either consider a really gross or really cool looking scrape on my knee where I bumped it against some coral last week. The offending coral was the type that resembles a brain, (and after a spot of quick googling, I have just discovered I'm not the only one to have this genius idea, because - surprise, surprise - it's actually called brain coral. Who'd a thunk it?). Consequently last week my right kneecap sported a raised red pattern that looked a bit like a clutch of alien worms doing a bit of synchronised twisting around on their way to resemble some kind of mystic celtic knot pattern.

I accepted this as my punishment for being stupidly careless, and watched it slowly fade away over the following few days (although I did take a picture, just to check that it wasn't progressing up my leg in a really creepy parasitic way). But yesterday morning, it spookily reappeared, bigger and redder than ever.

I panicked, convinced that billions of tiny coral polyps had been aggravated by my wool trousers and staged a revolt. Having marshalled their forces, I could see this but leading swiftly to virulant septicimea and the doomed march of my leg to the guillotine to liberate my patella from the rest of my body, while the little bastards knitted away, chuckling with glee. Of course, it was possible that they would have instead promoted agrarian land reform and the collectivisation of industry, but I was convinced these polyps had nefarious intent.

So off I limped last night (and scratched when it could be managed with discretion) to the nearest chemist's (pharmacy) for a bottle of industrial-strength disinfectant, armed only with a couple of scribbled phrases from one of my colleagues. Except that I got there too late. The chemist's/pharmacy/lekarna was closed. The polyps snickered. The cold wind sucked away my extremely unpoetic wails. The sleet fell in a particularly miserable way.

And then… then... a ray of hope shone through the circular series of holes in the front door. A ray of light too, which from a practical point of view was even better. A flap opened, and a woman in a white coat appeared. Before she could tell me to go away, I rattled out my new Czech phrase: "Yeeuurgh haff some dizinfektant fur skeen?"

"What?"

"Furr skeeen. Skiin. Skan." I rubbed the skin of arm, and contemplated pulling up my trouser leg to show her the disgusting wormy scar on knee.

"Oh. Like Hydrogen Peroxide?" (actually, it sounded more like "Peroxided Watery" to me, but I got the drift)

"Yes. Yes." Frantic bobbing of head.

The slide shut and I strained frantically to hear any noise from the inside. Preferably fizzing.

Two minutes later, the slide opened, and the woman's head appeared, along with a hand brandishing a small brown bottle.

More nodding and frantic "Yes. Yes's", as I did my best to impersonate an adorable stray puppy begging for shelter and scraps.

The woman was unimpressed by my pathetic attempt to tug at her heartstrings. "Twenty-four fifty. There is no change."

"Oh. Okay. Wahn minutee."

I rummaged through purse and pockets frantically, scattering metro tickets, pens and old bits of paper into the puddle at my feet. Arrrghh... Arrgghhh… Panicked… Made sobbing noises…

But reader, I gave her the exact change.

Da books! Da books!

In order to improve my general quality of life and the fatness of my bank balance, I set out last weekend to register for not one, but two libraries. The kind folks at the City Library puzzled their way through my non-existent Czech to confirm that I actually need a real, live Czech person to act as a referee. And pay a substantial deposit. So will be back next weekend after the blackmail kicks in.

To be fair, for the privilage I get to borrow from their extensive English-language selection, kindly donated by the British Council some years back. Although perhaps not all 8000 books at once. They also have a giant sculpture in their entrance hall in which thousands of books are bricked up to make a giant hollow tube. Through a split in the side, you can look in and get mild headrush from the mirrors placed at the top and bottom. I panicked, checked to see most of the books were in Czech and breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I popped across the square to sign on at the National Library. After a fairly extensive inquisition and some complicated manoeuvres with a black felt-tip pen and the coat-check lady I managed to acquire not one, but two identical cards. I think one must be a spare. Sadly, neither of them can be used to borrow books, but I do get to use the reading room and flit through the stacks like a giant-stack-flitting animal in a coat and glasses.

To make the place even better, the whole library has that wonderful shabbiness caused by endless rows of handwritten card catalogues, large potted plants with big dusty leaves and antiquated computers and those huge microfilm readers bought in a fit of wide-eyed technological enthusiasm back when a very different bunch were exporting technology to this corner of the world. Haha! Yes, meeztress perille... Ve haff ze mikrofeelm! And a way to read it... Now crank zat hendle harder! Harder I tell you! haha!

But the reading room is the best of all. Huge and high-ceilinged, with desks that creak and snap as the unwary brush past, brass-shaded lamps connected by electric flex covered in brown cloth, floorboards that groan under hard wooden chairs, and strange chilly drafts of undetectable origin.

At the far end, the wall above the main entrance is covered by an enormous mural in shades of grey. Doubtless its subject matter is meant to elevate and improve the moral and intellectual fibre of the hundreds of thousands of students who use it to practise critical eye-focussing exercises in those all-important and infrequent mental breaks.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy to be distracted by the 30-foot, black iron, eighteenth-century roccoco stove that looms up against this same wall blocking half the mural, and thereby reducing the edification factor by as much again. Enormous, big enough in the belly to cook thirty skinny students and presumably once used to heat the vast room during the sort of freezing winter that passed us by this year. It is my new favorite thing.