Prague Castle, St. Vitus's Cathedral, Basilica of St. George

Several of the best things to see in Prague are in the Castle. I suggest going early, there are lots of people, even on a cold November day. If you need food, find someplace well away from the castle to eat, prices get ridiculous in that part of town. I also suggest going through the front section on the western face, and not through the back section, even though the eastern steps are closer to the river. A great spectacle is the changing of the guards at noon. A mini-version that happens on the hour, but this one is worth seeing.
Arrive early under the gruesome gate to get a spot in the courtyard. The guards are awesome to watch, but Americans and Brits will definitely notice a difference between the Czechs and their own Marines. Pant cuffs may bag a little at the ankle, there's some shuffling in ranks to evenly space the men, some movements aren't all that snappy, and it's obvious not everyone takes 'coming to attention' as seriously as others. Simply, the Czechs take their duty seriously, but they don't make it the religiously martial ritual that their Anglo brethren do.

They do however, have a really jazzy bunch of brass to do it to though. And they are a very engaging spectacle. Well worth the watch. I am reminded that at some point I must acquire a sword. For the inside I recommend buying a “Maly” ticket for 250 kc which grants you access to the Old Royal Palace, the Basilica of St. George, and the Golden Lane. The Cathedral is free entry. Order of operations should be something like this: get there at 11:30 to go in and buy ticket, go find spot for changing of the guard. Once done, bypass the Cathedral (everyone is going there), the Palace would be a good option. Then the Cathedral, the Basilica, and the Golden Lane, with a leisurely stroll down the stairs towards the river. This is enough to occupy you for three or four hours if you're a thorough tourist.

The Palace was looted by the Nazis and is fairly small. Don't go in expecting much. I enjoy the idea of a modest monarchy, though. However, it does contain what I'm told is the largest Gothic vaulted space in Europe (or the world, I suppose), and the stonework is quite beautiful. Go upstairs to see the old coal fired ceramic heaters and some documents about failed rebellions. At the far end of the Hall is a small throne room and a church.

St. Vitus's Cathedral is pretty impressive.
It was 800 years in the making has beautiful stained glass windows, one of them by Alfons Mucha. I'm not really into the religious stuff, but I dig cathedrals for the architecture and art. Vitus's is pretty cool on both counts.

Halfway down on the right side there is a tower that you can climb. It's something like 287 steps up a spiral staircase. This isn't terrible until you must share this staircase with the people coming down, as well, and you get squeezed to the inside where the steps are only four inches deep. Can be a bit aggravating. The top will be crowded, but it was far and a way the best view of Prague I had the whole time I was there.

The outside of St. George's Basilica is a lovely red and white, reminding me of an Orthodox church. The inside is very primitive and was severely neglected under Communism, but it still holds a certain majesty. I was quite impressed with the frescoes on the ceiling in the front.

I wasn't too impressed with the Golden Lane. It's a bunch of little cottages built up against/into the outer wall. Once the artisans lived there, especially the gold workers for the monarchy/cathedral (hence the name), and Kafka is supposed to have lived there for a short time. Now it's chockablock with tourist kitsch and the tourists themselves. I'm told I missed the actual historical display part: go left when you get through the gate? Also: don't buy any food here unless you're will to pay true tourist prices. Prague is usually double what things cost in Brno, hot wine or simple food in the Castle is triple.

Prague!

I present to you Prague (the first of several parts):

For travel in the Czech Republic (and maybe the rest of Europe, too) I highly recommend Student Agency buses. Comfortable seats, toilets, movies, free coffee or tea, and English speaking staff are included for less than 200 kc one way from Brno to Prague. They were also quite good when we went to Vienna.

[For geography please refer to the prior map.] Prague is eminently walkable and also quite touristified. There are no shortage of McDonald's, Marks & Spencer's, or any other truly international brand you'd care to name. We arrived in Florenc on the east side of the central city, coming in past Microsoft, HP, and Siemens signs by the highway. The first stretch of town you see walking in is not any more impressive. However, once you get past nam. Republiky things start to look better, older, more European. After a few minutes we arrived at the hostel, squirreled away on a side street just off Old Town Square (Staromestke nam.).

Tyn Hostel is pleasant enough, nightly rates about equal to Brno (which is something of a miracle), if a trifle frill-less. After depositing our belongings we set out in search of grub and a pub. From Old Town Square we stumbled about the tourist quarter to Wenceslas Square (Vaclavske namesti). This 10 minute walk was enough time for Garith to be offered three kinds of drugs by four different people. I dunno I guess he just has that vibe. That 10 minutes were enough to also convince one that a) it was rather cold, and b) that central Prague is for not naught but tourists. We guessed about 40% of the people we passed were speaking Czech and this figure declined throughout the weekend. Upon arrival to the square several of us made purchases from a fast food shack (despite those prices being double what we were used to) and we continued through the bustling mess towards the Charles Bridge. It's quiet at night and quite pretty, though you can't get a real idea of it in the dark. After a few half hearted snapshots we decided that we really didn't want to freeze for that much longer and went in search of beer.

Which proved harder than we thought. Not wanting to pay 50 kc for a small Pilsner (that's really highway robbery), we blundered back through the tourist section, past our hostel, and settled into a slightly strange place which was plastered with portraits of starlets from the Golden Age of cinema. However, they closed at 11, only enough time for one beer. Back into the night, past the sports pub playing Rolling Stones, around in circles, into the 'free entry' jazz club. Free entry to bar that is, and 60 kc beers. Definitively a chin-stroking “yazz” joint for expats with too much money. Back out to stand on the corner and debate options.

At which point I hear a bunch of people gabbling in the street and music, too. A couple of us wander over and hear a live band coming from a crowded cellar. The vibe is very much art gallery/hipster houseparty. Down six narrow and steep steps is a vintage clothing store about the size and shape of a small Quonset hut. Immediately to the left was a glass table with two girls in frilly '60's party dresses
pouring the last of a box of wine. Racks of clothing hung all the way down each side, but the middle was taken up with a milling mass of hip young people speaking in some British but mostly American accents. On the far side of the hip young thangs was a band, and such a band. We later learned they were called Duchess & the Kittens. The lead singer was a large girl with a real whiskey voice. Try to imagine Duffy Bishop and Dr. John having a lovechild. Then get that person seriously trashed and you might have an idea of what she sounded like. The band was an electric bass, a banjo, and a sax. They were doing tunes appropriate to the clothing. The name of the place turned out to be Laly, though I didn't really learn anymore than that.

Maria had decided she'd had enough and went to the hostel. I really wanted to stay, as did Cat. Joe, Garith, and Brian didn't see any fun in that, and Emma went with them to find a pub. As the vintage girls were out of wine Cat and I hurried to the non-stop (24 hour joint) next door and grabbed some liquid refreshment.

The feeling of the place was very comfortable, but deeply strange. I felt like I could have been at a house part in the U District. Most of the crowd looked young enough that they wouldn't be able to drink back home. As soon as I walked in I walked past a knot of fashionably coiffed guys, with attendant women, stridently trashing the band, while said band was playing. I was happy that they left quickly. There were also some oldsters in the crowd, grinning their heads off. And one couple who came dressed for a swing-revival. The band played lots of old standards, Motown kinda stuff, sometimes trading in an acoustic guitar and a steel lap guitar. The sax section magically multiplied. The highlight of the evening was Love Potion No. 9. Oddly enough the Duchess sounded a lot better after her third Jamieson. Go figure. Cat and I were digging it. About 1 am they called it quits, but just long enough to change up. It became Rev. Bob's Revival Hour. One of the sax players came to front and started a “Hallelujah!” schtick. Out of the crowd came a mutton-chopped ska-punk looking guy to take over on electric. Pretty soon there was lots of hollering and 'spiritual' music going. They were pretty good, but took themselves a little too seriously compared to how perverse the lyrics were. Cat and I called it a night here and went round the corner to the hostel.

Prague, a map

Here is a somewhat annotated map of the events in following posts. Probably best to zoom in a little bit.

View Larger Map

On being ill....

...it sucks. Nuff said.

Apologies for the lack of posts in the last week, I've been pole-axed by a nasty strain of flu going round Brno. So nasty that I could neither sit up or see straight on Wednesday morning. Doing better now, but still recovering. I do, however, have time to do some blogging now.

Some Differences from There to Here

--I have probably mentioned all of these at some point already, but they give a better picture when you stack them on top of one another.--

Distance is both smaller and larger here here. At home a few hours drive would take you across a state, or to a different city, but here a few hours drive will take you to a different sovereign state. Different language, different customs, different money, different wins and loses, and often a different attitude. You man not be able to see the border, but I think they can feel it. Like birds and magnetic north. However, you can scarcely go a kilometer without running into buildings, structures, and accretions of history. Many of them even come with people.

There are not mechanical dryers here. Everything is hung outside in dry weather, and on wire racks indoors when its wet. The preponderance of radiators is good for drying socks or quickening a pair of jeans.

The toilet is always in a different room than the bath. If you're lucky there is a sink in the same room. These toilets tend to have a broad shelf where your offal lands and it is then sluiced down into the hole by water released from a separate tank roughly a meter above the throne. Or more modern toilets have two-part buttons on the top of the tank planted directly upon the throne. Unless you are visiting a building remodeled in the last ten years, the plumbing has a mildew and vinegar odor.

Most bathrooms have no shower curtains. The majority have a shower-head wand on a flexible tube that sticks straight form the top of the faucet. Even tubs that have the hanging rod for a curtain must be used carefully, because a standard shower curtain is not long enough to cover everything.

Water heaters are boxes stuck high on the wall, which ignite with a 'whooomph' when you require their contents.

There are no closets, but wardrobes and built-in shelving abounds. Beds are narrow firm affairs, low to the floor. Its normal not to have a sheet, but just a large fluffy duvet. Herringbone patterned wood panel floors are common. As are electric kettles and one section sinks.

Light switches are black rockers in square white panels. Electrical sockets are round and recessed. They have holes for two circular prongs of identical size.

Houses are not simple one family affairs. Most are row houses, set back a little bit from the street with giant open green spaces on the far side of them. There are at least two flats in every three story building, even if it's only one room in width. You may have a yard, but it could be shared with other people, if you're even allowed in there.

Most everything is made of brick and stone, with stucco type facades. Nice buildings have been painted and colored since the Communists fell, but many are flaking and peeling, dropping sections to reveal their lumpy skeletons. It feels much worse to me than any house with peeling paint. Its even more disconcerting when the building still has all the original carved stone flourishes and cherubs and gargoyles, which are dirty, because they emphasize how nice the building must once have looked.

My Daily Dose

I do, occasionally, take requests!

Webcomics are fun. Webcomics are easy to find. Webcomics can be terrible or wonderful mindcandy. However, they are rarely 'serious art.' I am somewhat addicted because of the variety and the sheer 'hit' you get when you discover one that's new to you. Several years of archives equal a whole afternoon and this afternoon feels like a combination of your favorite TV show, a fun book, and a slot machine. Somewhat dangerous. Many long-running comics require this, however, because of plots more layered than a Paleozoic lake bed in volcano territory and recurring in-jokes. Please note: many of the following works may not be 'work safe' or 'child safe.'

My two favorites are:
Schlock Mercenary, a pirate space opera with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Color, runs 7 days/wk without fail, strip with a Sunday super-size.
-and-
Questionable Content, a bunch of hipster kids with self esteem issues, lots of music references, and talking computer appliances. Color, runs M-F, full page in 3-4 panels.

Some really cool ones to watch:
Templar, Arizona, basically about a kid who ran away from home, but also a cyber-/steam-/crusty- punk in an alternate universe. Large format B&W, updates once or twice a week. It's pretty new, but substantial so far.

xkcd, is a reaaallly nerdy stick-figure strip but it's got a great sense of humor, which makes it very popular. B&W 3-panel, updates 2-3 times a week.

Gunnerkrigg Court is one I found the other day. Totally safe for kids of the Harry Potter set, which it seems to be targeting. Very whimsical and unpredictable, but pretty creative. A girl is sent to a magical schooling institution. Large format color, updates 2-3 times a week.

All these and other stuff I've made a point to remember is located here.

If you go to any of these comics, they normally have link sections which can lead to some really interesting neighbors. Only half of above list is well-known, but there are some really big names like Penny Arcade, PvP, Devil's Panties, and Sinfest on the far side of the link. There are also a lot of big name/popular works that I'm just not very interested in and haven't referenced, so if you see a name that keeps popping up in link sections, that would be something that the hordes have deemed worthy.

The Search for Society: A Quest for a Biosocial Science of Morality, by Robin Fox

Not much of a week for the Moore-Short blogoshere is it? I'm going to Prague tonight. Updates and such next week For now I stumbled across some old blog stuff I did more than a year ago. An abortive attempt to catalogue all the print and video I was consuming. There are a few interesting entries and I did like this thing:

It starts off with lots of discussion on about long dead European philosophers and the arguments between schools of thought in anthrop- and soci- ologies, but then it gets down to brass tacks with discussions of tribal ('pre-civilized') societies like:

There was never any question that violence was both necessary and useful, and in a very positive sense good - as good as eating, copulation, singing. Only obviously it created more difficulties, because, the possible outcome was the loss of an individual life - which is clearly a difficulty for the group. But when I say this was not a problem, I meant it was not an intellectual problem. I prefer simply to call it a difficulty. One tried to overcome practical difficulties; one did not try to solve intellectual problems.

Again I am not saying that early man never tried to solve intellectual problems. I am merely saying that, unquestionably, he did not create unnecessary intellectual problems where they did not exist. There was for him no intellectual problem of violence; there was for him no intellectual problem of sex. These are late inventions of human self-consciousness, not a necessary consequence of human self-consciousness.
Page 131.

What he's saying is that historically, the human propensity towards violence was a tangible benefit vis a vis our survival.

The problem for the species is not violence itself. The fascination of violence is as real and as profound as the fascination with sex, with food, with the supernatural, and with knowledge, exploration, and discovery. And its satisfactions are of much the same kind. The problem lies with the capacity of the human imagination to create its encompassing, consummatory systems with violence as their focus and purpose. We call these systems battles, wars, pogroms, feuds, conquests, revolutions, or whatever, and therefore what we must understand is that the problem is not violence, but war; the problem is not aggression, but genocide; the problem is not killing, but battle. And into the organization of war, of battle, of genocide, goes far more by way of imaginative energy than physical violence. Indeed, if one were to do an inventory of the energy expended in a war, the actual physical violence would probably amount to very little. And with modern war this is even more striking. Modern war is almost better understood as an aspect of complex bureaucracy on the one hand and artistic capacity on the other.
......
The problem here is not violence. The problem here is the use to which violence is put. The problem with Puritanism is not sex, but the uses to which sex is put in the control of people. The problem for Orthodox Jews is not eating, but the imaginative restructuring of the conditions of eating that the religion demands. The problem is not our violent nature, or even the nature of violence, but our violent imaginations, and our imaginative use of violence: an imaginative use that no longer bears any close relation to the evolved conditions of violence – the conditions in which violence is a contained, normal, explicable, and unproblematical aspect of our adaptational history as a species.
Pages 135-36.

Let's review, yes? Duels with swords and even flintlocks are logical and even desirable from an evolutionary perspective. Nuclear weapons and trench warfare with machine guns is most absolutely fuckin' bad. Maybe we should allow bloodsports? Just saying....

--I never finished the book. In retrospect, this guy was pretty far out there by his colleagues' standards, but seems pretty cool. I think he does, however, make the idea of violence in the modern world (i.e. Iraq, Burma, Darfur) a little to abstract. Of course, he was writing during the Cold War, he might be forgiven a lack of wider perspective.

Another day dawns...

The whole town looked like this yesterday at noon.
But that didn't last too long. There are still flat spots with 4 or 5 inches of white stuff, but it's already all slushy and it's either melted or fallen off all the trees. It was terribly cold at 8 pm last night, with a knife-like wind when I....

Went out with Maria, Hana, Garith, Emma, and Hana's friend Marketa last night. We're all English teachers. Saw Michael Radford's Merchant of Venice. Really engrossing: Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino carry all the dramatic weight, so it's ok that Joseph Fiennes comes off as a simpering fop. The whole "bad Jews" thing is a little difficult to deal with, but they are honest about it and Shylock does deserve his fate. Not sure how I feel about what the story says, or even if I know what it truly says, but it's worth seeing for the visuals and performances alone. And the whole homoerotic thing between Irons and Fiennes is sure to get some people hot and bothered. It's also kinda cool to realize "Ohhhhh! Pound of flesh! and All that gitters is not gold! That's where those come from!"

Things are messy with the flat. Told Ahmed and Jiri (landlord) about me planning to leave. We took Jiri out drinking with the boys on Friday and confirmed a belief of mine. Mainly this, there is absolutely no correlation between a person that you'd want to have a beer with and a person you would choose to have authority over some portion of your life. We did have a nice time drinking. There's an email flame war going on, mostly between Jarek and Jiri. Jarek is trying to play fast and loose with things, slinging insults and trying to sublet plus end the contract early. By fiat mind you, not through actual negotiation. And everyone thought Ahmed was the offensive loose cannon. I haven't seen him since I told him on Saturday.

Randomish Babble

It snowed on Monday. Our first hard frost and first snow in one day. Covered everything in a blanket of white for an hour then melted off. Everything is wet like Seattle right now. It'll be slicker than snot if ever really gets down to freezing.

Some of us teachers are finally planning a Prague trip. Two or three weeks out it looks like. Some of us teachers are also departing. Seems owners/management are not all that supportive in the face of problem 'clients.' (Note: for the previous sentence I am not 'some.') Cat and Emma have been forced to live in the crappy place or they face a 30% pay cut AND having to pay for their own housing. Therefore Cat, Garith, and Nick as a house is out. Also out is Garith, Nick, and lout named Joe (sadly he's also from Seattle). New theory: Maria and I are going to live together. I've been threatened with Greek cooking and mothering. My defenses quail under teh twin assault. It doesn't hurt that we get along and enjoy making fun of each other. Thank you all for the support and advice on recent housing topics.

On other topics: I discovered igoogle this week and am kind of impressed. I'm not much for productivity enhancing gadgets and fooferaw. Most of you know that I can't even keep up with a day planner for more than a couple months, but this is pretty neat. There are tons of little gadgets and gizmos that you can actually customize and mix around, instead of just getting to pick three options out of box or some such. You can put calendar (schedule), email, and references on one page, then make another for all the blogs you follow (several of you are on that page), and a third for your burgeoning webcomic addiction (unfortunately this is more RSS oriented, so some of the larger ones don't exactly translate in). Devin can have his endorphins, I need me some sarcasm and brightly colored pictures to start my day. Gary Larson, why hast thou forsaken us!?

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air....

...to steal a title from Zach, that (I think) he took from Marx.

So, for those of you who haven't been following the roommate drama, let me catch you up: I'm sharing a flat with Cynthia, a Brazilian girl who isn't exactly conversational in English, and Ahmed, a Tunisian nutjob. Our landlord, Jiri is a Czech obstetrician who lives downstairs, but our rental contract is ACTUALLY with Cynthia's absent husband, Jarrik, who has the true contact with Jiři. Technically even Cynthia is subletting. Still with me? Even if you are, you may not be in a moment.

Due to some personality conflict BS, money problems, landlord not doing what he said he would, and a general desire not to be there on Cynthia's part, Jarrik told Jiři that he would be dissolving the contract. The governing clause in the contract states that notice must be given 2 months prior to departure, starting from the 1st of the month following the month in which the tenant gives notice. Therefore, Jarrik's Oct. 26th notice means that the count starts on Nov. 1st, which means that the contract officially dissolves on the 31st of December.

I found out about this the same day, thanks to a chance encounter with Jiři. I texted Jarrik, simply saying I needed to talk and what would be a good time to call. No response. Ahmed didn't know thing one. Jiři was rather surprised that we didn't know. Sunday morning, after several attempts to contact Jarrik, some of which Cynthia answered, we got an email from him. Very simple text stating that the contract would soon be ending, that everything would proceed as normal until then, and then Ahmed and I could renegotiate with Jiři if we so desired. No explanation, no reasoning, nada. Ahmed and I both were more than a little upset with his communication techniques, regardless of the fucking outcome.

Several factors are running through my mind at this point: I don't enjoy living with Ahmed, he's a pain and he tires me out. He pulls lots of shenanigans of the unfunny variety. I don't like Jiři, he's congenial but lazy and doesn't do what he says he will. I don't like the apartment enough to deal with either of those factors for much longer. Ahmed has made noises about solidarity and loyalty. (Does not hold water, despite the occasional twinge of guilt my thoughts are inspiring.)

I get to work on Monday and find out several more relevant factors: Maria & Gray have had lots of problems and Gray is moving out to find a place of her own. (Gray is just as crazy as Ahmed, albeit in a different manner. Not even thinking of moving in with her.) Emma is moving in with Maria because the landlord has told the school that he wants Emma & Kat out of the flat that had been rented for them. The school's plan was to move Emma & Kat into a crappy apartment on the edge of town that, rightfully, neither of them wants. Kat is attempting to move in with a guy we all know named Garith. There is much social twittering and upheaval, as well. I confided some qualms about ditching Ahmed to Brian, who quickly put the matter to rest by counter-confiding that he'd been really creeped out by Ahmed after a five minute conversation in a crowded bar.

Current thinking: I have already paid November's rent and I'll have to pay December's by the 15th of the month. My deposit on the apartment is one month's share of rent plus 1000 crowns (the plus equals several hours wages and odds are good that it will be eaten by misc. fees like Internet and adjusted utility payments). If I can get a place with Kat and Garith I'm contemplating pulling a disappearing act with all my possessions and just moving in with them, provided I can do it prior to paying December rent. Peace of mind and lesser level of bullshit seem worth the potential hit to karma points. I don't feel any particular loyalty to anyone involved in my living situation.

Authenticity

It's been a pretty good week. Several quickly prepared lessons went off rather well, as did some planned ones that I wasn't so sure about. It's still tiring and time-consuming and frustrating, but it's getting easier and I'm starting to really like some of my students. Plus I'm getting to the point where sometimes they recharge me and I actually leave a lesson feeling happier and more energetic than when I went in. This feels good.

It's been quite the international fun fest of activities lately. Last Saturday I watched the Ukraine-Scotland qualifying match for the championships with a bunch of the other teachers and Scots and Irish in a pub called Henry VIII. Wednesday it was the Czech Republic vs. Germany with a Dutch guy, Andre from Louisiana, Lilly-Anne, and a couple Czechs. CR scored a total coup with a final tally of 3-0. The crowd went nuts. Lilly-Anne moaned and nursed her beer 'cuz Scotland had just been knocked out, 2-0, by GEORGIA. That's like the Cubs trouncing the Yankees.

Friday I hung out with a bunch of teachers from school and a bunch of IBMers in a Greek place. Nationality roll call: 2 Bulgarians, 1 Tunisian (roommate), 1 Welshman, 1 Russo-Amer-Israeli, 2 standard Czechs, moi, 1 Greek-aligned Czech, and 1 Greek-aligned English girl. Was fun, lots of laughter, eventually a couple of Greek dancing lessons.

Last night I had a very Authentic Experience. Ahmed, Chris, and I had been out for coffee and dinner when we wound up at Desert. It's literally a hole in the ground, walking down into a basement bar, which you go further down into to sit at a table. Very cool, college bar atmosphere. It was 10ish and there was a Scot/Irish birthday party going on, but they'd sequestered themselves in the back and were already pretty cross-eyed. Wound up with Anthony from Australia and his friend Phil. They went to high school together, but Phil is Czech and his family left when he was a kid. Upshot is that he has a Czech birth certificate and has to get a visa to teach English 80 kilometers from where he was born. Was cool, there aren't too many people I can hang with who feel like people I would know back home. Anthony and Phil do. We played foosball, Anthony and I kicked tail three games in a row. (A first for me.) Went back to where we were, wedged into a large corner table sort of overlapping this group of Czechs who'd spread out from a 2 seater next door. Not very communicative types either. At about 1:30 Anthony & Phil caught the bus, leaving Chris, me, and Ahmed. Some Viking proportioned Czech hipster girl showed a few minutes later, started talking to Chris and I mentally titled her “The World's Most Stoned Human Being.” Was amusing for about 5 minutes and it took her another 5 minutes to muddle through a conversation and decide she needed a pipe.

An aside here: I really like Chris (real name: Krzysztof). He's about 28, very quiet and thinks before he speaks. He's a project manager for IBM, a couple rungs higher than Ahmed and most of the others I know. Goes out sometimes, stays in others, is often the only sober one b/c he has to drive home (another anomalous quality). He's got a very good vibe, which it took me a while to catch onto. I mean he's obviously a very good boy in some ways and disapproves of some things his friends do, but he's very non-judgmental and can be really funny and intense when you finally get him speaking. Plus he was a long-haired stoner about 10 years ago, while he's a somewhat suave clean-looking office type now. This deviation will be slightly important in a few moments.

About this point someone decided to start talking to the Czechs who'd been there all night and who finally seemed enthused about talking back. However, they understood only a little English and our Czech was, collectively, even smaller. So we pidgined for a couple minutes and were laughing at each other whenever someone tried a whole sentence. Then this blond-dreaded kefiyah wearing Czech girl named Hana showed up and her English was pretty good. So an actual conversation started where we all introduced ourselves and learned what people did. There was English speaking Hana, who's some sort of flunking education major. Alishka, who's a ?travel agent? A couple who we'd been referring to as Hollywood and Longhair all night. Hana the other teaching major, who the boys had collectively admired from across the way. A guy who worked at the bar.

The great thing about being an English speaker is that most everyone knows some, even if they think they don't, especially young people. Once someone who can translate shows up, everyone starts to gabble back and forth, sometimes speaking directly, sometimes using the intermediary, sometimes just checking and referencing to find the right language. You get to hear everything at least twice. And everyone is saying silly things, so nobody else cares about looking stupid, which they did 5 minutes ago. Add some normal hormones plus a few beers and you have yourselves a party. Which we did. We shut down Desert and wandered over to a place sort of called 'Blue' below my school.

It was great, we were all pretty toasted or getting there fast and everyone was in that happy-fun place. So there was much discussion of differences between Czech life and American life and lots of how-what-who talk that meandered between actual discussion and explanation needed for something that was just said. Hana 2 was very cutely tipsy and obviously eying Chris. A nice bartender and one of the barbacks from Desert joined after a little. Eventually we decided we had to go, but not before getting invited to Hana1's birthday next week and Hana2's phone number for Chris. I'm occasionally embarrassed to be seen in public with Ahmed, but he does make me look good by comparison. Chris, however, has a very good people vibe and I was glad that he'd decided to stick around rather than go home and study like he'd threatened to earlier.

In all it was probably the most satisfying, unstructured, random, and 'real' feeling experience I've had with the people who actually live here. Despite not waking up 'til early afternoon, having thunderous beer farts, and smelling like cigarettes mixed with mold, I'm rather cheery this afternoon.

This is picture heavy.

St. Stephan's is very impressive. There's awesome stained glass and two giant organs. (the kind with keyboards even!)


This palace was once home to the Austro-Hungarian Emperors.


The streets all look like this. Very clean and quite historic.


We all wanted to live in one of these places.


Imagine five acres of food vendors from all over the world. Piles of mushrooms bigger than your fist, Middle Eastern delicacies, fresh spices, local wines. It's awesome.



Next door there's a flea market of comparable size. Even gramma's gramophone is for sale here. There were people who specialized in furs, photos, small steel instruments, and all the normal who knows what they'll have types.


Cat-Brian-me-Emma. Tim took the picture.


Cat takes nice pictures provided you sneak up on her. In other words, 'Park!'


This is a church. It has a giant reflecting pool on the other side of those palms.


This is the Reisenrad. Those boxes are about 20 feet long.


Vienna looking east.


And we finish with Vienna to the west.

While life yet remains in these fingers.....

...... I will drink beer and occasionally type. Huzzah! Another school week down. This makes nearly three full weeks and I guess about that long since I've updated ye olde blog.

Short synopsis (pun intended): Teaching classes is both remarkably easy and freakishly difficult. I can spend hours staring at a set of two or three pages asking myself how to teach it, throw something together in less than an hour, hoping and praying that it doesn't blow up in my face, and have my heart pounding the whole way through. On the other hand I have different classes where I basically show up, chat, help them with some grammar and vocabulary, then make them do a worksheet and call it a day. Mind you I often do both of these styles in one day. The difference is often dependent, somewhat surprisingly, on which textbook I'm using. A well crafted, or at least highly modular, text can make a lesson breezy, while a tightly intertwined piece of garbage means that I have to recreate everything in the lesson in a different form that actually encourages student learning as opposed to “slot A into tab B” grammarianism.

The other teachers are great. The Directors of Studies are Pamela (in-school courses, Chicagoan) and Pavla (companies, Czech). There's a “loud, short, crazy Scottish woman” named Lily-Anne who's teaching a Business English Teachers' course and constitutes the majority of the smokers' klatch. Cynthia, of serendipitous Seattle connection, Joe (cool), and Chris (quiet, Czech wife who speaks like a Minnesotan) are the only other Americans. There's old Nick from England, also Tim, Emma, Maria, and Charles repping the Isles. Cat is from Ireland but has spent something like the length of time I've been alive teaching in China, Portugal, and who knows where. Brian is, likewise, English, but spent a fair amount of time in Japan. Anthony is from Australia. Gray is from Israel. Except for Cynthia, Nick, and Charles everyone is younger or acts it well enough that I had to think about it. Pretty fun, varied from nerdy to partying, everyone down to have a good time. With a few notable exceptions the Czech teachers are cool, but tend to keep more to themselves, I think partly because of language.

I went to Vienna the other weekend with Tim, Cat, Brian, and Emma. We had a three day weekend for St. Wencelas day so we decided to take a quickie down south. Got up far too early in the morning, 5:00, to catch a 7:00 bus that took a little over two hours in the craziest downpour that I've seen since I got here. Very cushy, I recommend Student Agency to anyone. Arrival in Vienna required Euro bank withdrawals (we got to look at all the pretty money) and some planning as the rain let up. We toured St. Stephan's cathedral, which is totally awe inspiring. Wandered round the outside of the Imperial Palace, former Austro-Hungarian Empire dontcha know. Saw the Leopold Museum, mostly Egon Schiele and Klimt with many of their Austrian contemporaries, I recommend Kolomon Moser. Very cool stuff, some of them were smoking opium or drinking absinthe or something. There were some definite psychedelic paintings after 1910. Went to the hostel, round the corner for goulash, napped some. Went out to see old town and get coffee. Ended the night at funky little 'jazz' cafe (no performers, just classics and bohemian music on the stereo) with dark Pollack stuff on the walls and aging hippies working bar. Tumbled into bed, had splendid breakfast in hostel. Went to the food market, which was like a football field sized Pikes Place, where everyone has a permanent structure to sell from. Very exotic and worldly. Right next door was the Vienna flea market, bigger than the food. Had brunch and coffee at a chill place with a big deck. Laid in the sun for an hour in a park on the river. Walked up to a giant ferris wheel that predates WWII, got an awesome view of the city, then hoped a bus back to Brno. Photos and details coming soon.

Note: I'd always wanted to smack those people who prattle about “X City” in Europe, but there is an incredible vibe to Vienna that I can't really describe. It definitely has a lot going for it. I like it better than Paris, I think. So yeah, no inspired prattling, but I dig, man. I dig.

The Flat

I like the word 'flat' for a dwelling. It's much simpler than 'apartment' and allows a lot more leeway for what it covers, at least in my mind. My flat is most of the top half of a house in a nice neighborhood not far from the city center. It's off tram 4, near a park with a planetarium. Not sure if this is the place where they display pictures of the heavens or do the actual observation of same. The former seems more likely given the amount of light around here.

There's a wall along the street and a big green metal gate, and you go up two flights of steps to get to the front door, which is narrow and has deep brown wood. The key often sticks in the lock so you have to jiggle it up and down. There's a second door a few feet after the first and you're in a small room that stretches about ten feet in front of you with a child's toys, coats, and a few home improvement supplies. Immediately to your right is a 6ft set of shelves where you leave your shoes, and maybe collect your house slippers, as you come in. The stairs which start there are old dry wood with black rubber matting tacked to them. They make an angle after a few feet, stretch up, across the house, and angle again at the far side for the last few feet. There's a door there on the right, a small room that is supposed to house two students of German who I still haven't met, on the left there's an alcove with a ladder to the attic. The door in front of you is mine and opens with a antique Ben Franklin style key.

The hall is white and runs twenty feet to the rooms Ahmed and I sleep in. It's tiled with large white hexagons. Just in front of the door at the far end there is a folding door on the right, which leads into to the shower room, which has a metal tub ensconced with square blue tiles. There's a tall skinny radiator next to the door and a sink with a mirror further to the right. The hot water heater is a two foot box that hangs in the upper corner of that wall. You can hear the gas and the flame thumping to life every time you turn on the hot water. While we do have a shower curtain rod, this bath isn't designed as for standing in, as the shower is a wand on a hose and the bracket is on a vertical rod. At the fullest possible extension it comes up to my ear. It's always chilly in there when you're wet, I worry how cold it will be come winter.

Across from the bath door there is a doorway through the very thick wall, which is faced with raised panels like you'd find on a front door. The main room is about 25 feet by 20. The floor is a herringbone pattern of foot long wooden strips which sometimes shift as you put your weight on them. There are two windows on the far side, both of the one set on the inside of the wall/one on the outside style common to old Czech buildings. We have some white lace curtains that Jarek's mom gave us. The walls are a burnt orange squash color and there's a bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. We have a coffee table to the left of the door and a small dining table in the far corner, which is normally covered in cords and laptops. Next to the table is the door to the kitchen.

It's the newest part of the flat, with laminated wood cabinets and lousy laminate plank flooring that sinks where you walk on it. In the left corner there's an old gas stove/oven, with a shallow countertop that stretches to the single sink, about 8 feet to the right. The cabinets hanging above and the ones below have blue fronts and feel new. The whole set has the feeling of a kit or that they were salvaged from a house that was remodeled too cheaply. The fridge in in the corner and stands about 3 ft tall plus the microwave on top. I've had dorm fridges bigger than that. Just past the sink and the end of the counter is the door to the toilet. It's a tiny room with a sink right in front of you and the john just to the right. The tank is about five feet off the floor and has a pull cord flush. There wall is one foot in front of you as you sit down. At the top there's a one foot plexiglass window for light and by your right knee there's a 3 foot slit that allows the air from the radiator on the other side to circulate through. The kitchen window is above the radiator.

Across the main room from the kitchen is Cynthia's room, about half the size of the main room, where she's got the double bed and a wardrobe. Her husband, Jarek (he's Czech, she's Brazilian) visits from his job in a different town for a couple days every week or two, so Ahmed and I decided that we'd rather they have enough privacy that we aren't bothered with their marital activities.

To get to my room you have to walk through Ahmed's. His is about 15 ft square with blue carpet, a single bed, and a desk. To to the right there's a wooden divider painted white with lots of frosted glass and a set of sliding doors in the middle. My room is a mirror image, except the far wall is taken up with two large windows over looking the back garden and the radiator below them. In addition to the long skinny bed I have a set of shelves and my stuff strewn all over. There's a door in the wall that leads to a tiled room that's full of shelves and old cabinets, it's always cold in there because large windows and a lack of insulation. Our landlord tells me that that it was water damaged and won't be fixed anytime soon.

I realize I've made it sound like kind of a dump, but it's kinda homey and not too different from many other Czech dwellings of similar vintage (early 1900's I think). It's slightly shabby and lived in a way that testifies to its longevity and functionality. There's a comforting lack of plastic and everything has a little texture.

A post for Joe....

Hey all. Been a little distracted with my last days of freedom this week. I have been productive tho, I got a Czech bank account (thank you, Cynthia's husband for translating!) and I've been doing some cooking.

But here's something really cool to see. It's Rorscharch from The Watchmen. What's so special you may ask? The Watchmen is a graphic novel, aka comic book, that is arguably one of the great works of literature of the 20th century. It's unlikely to the extreme that there will ever be action figures licensed from this comic. So, someone decided to do this instead.


And, no, Joe this doesn't help me find world-weary European women, but sometimes you just have to let your geek light shine, neh?

Second Trip to Drahonin

Returned to Drahonin this weekend with Sam and Marketa. It was Vlasta's birthday, cool old guy in the village. He'd gotten a piglet in a contest of some sort towards the beginning of the year and decided to slaughter is for the party. I'm told it was something like 200 kilos when they weighed it.

We arrived just as the sun was setting and went straight to the Boofy's house (Rudo, Ivana, and the kids from last time). Mickey was there, too. Beer was immediately produced for each of us. Current music in the Czech Republic, at least for the thirty and forty somethings sounds like Metallica or AC/DC, in Czech. Pretty good, but a little surreal. There was a little flurry as Ivana and Marketa debated what to use to wrap Vlasta's new shot-glass roulette wheel, eventually settling on a plastic Zara bag. Sam went out to get more beer from the car. I got to look at the stove built into one side of the kitchen. Blue and white tile, of the old fire-box variety, with a stove top at waist level and two ovens that stretch up to head height. Just like Grandma woulda used. This is what Ivana cooks on. Meanwhile, they were trying to set-up a new cellphone for Dominic, the twelve year old. It's one of those 2^nd gen. Razrs that don't actually have any buttons, but just a keypad printed on the plastic that senses when you touch it. It's also uber-simple, black and white display, intended for old people and kids. So simple in fact that the adults can barely figure out how to use it. By now we've asked where Sam is a couple times, so I go out and check on him. Can't find him, so I walk down the driveway and look down the road. There's a faint little blur in the dark, which soon turns out to be Sam carrying the Boofy's dog. He looked a little bushed, saying that the dog had led him all the way up out of the village, onto the fields, before he said “Enough!” and turned around. At which point the dog decided that he'd had his fun and ran past Sam back toward the village. We drink a little more, while Rudo chain smokes, and Rudli (the 8 year old) vies for the attentions of the foreigners with his Lego creations.

Soon we head to the community hall, think an Eagles or church basement set-up, where there are a couple dozen gray hairs interspersed with a number of the younger generations, mostly children and cousins. We're greeted heartily and happily, even Sam and I, and as soon as we sit down Mickey finds us some beer and a woman brings us each a plate of food. The schnitzel is breaded and fried pig-slab. The potato salad is a little mustardy and very creamy, probably the first piece of food I've had in months that tastes like something I'd get at home. I eat it very quickly. There's a couple of greasy guys in red hawaiian shirts on stage playing all sorts of music. They look like the cheesiest, my-cousin-has-a-band kind of outfit, but they play some awesome tunes. One's a keyboardist, the other switches between sax, clarinet, and guitar, he also does a mean Louis Armstrong impression. They even played some Dire Straits later in the evening. It made me very happy.

Sam and I wind up hanging around outside. It's a little quieter and the kids have fled the adults out there, too. We talk with a couple guys who grew up in Drahonin, one drives a tram now, I didn't really get the other one's CV. It was fairly difficult to talk with them, the tram driver knew just a little English, his buddy almost none. Eventually a couple girls (high-schoolers, I think) showed up and one of them spoke very functional English, which is all I can really hope for in most of those situations. So we pressed her into the conversation and made her be translator for an hour or two. She's studying to be nurse in Brno and works in a pub near Drahonin in the summer. She told us a little about town life and the people, it felt like home in a lot of respects. After awhile all the kids decided at once that it was time to leave and they did. Oddly enough a couple of twelve year old girls showed up a few minutes before that and decided that they needed to be the official keg minders. One of them spoke a little English, but found the older kids and the toasted Americans a little intimidating.

Other pig parts, ham and bacon, were being trotted out as hors d'oeuvres, with cheese spread on bread with onions and peppers on top. Some Czech food is really good, but lots of it will prevent you from kissing anyone until you've brushed your teeth twice. I was pressed into a game of shot-glass roulette at this point, using a nearly neon peppermint liquor that was not quite schnapps. After a round or so of this I decided I needed some more air and went back out into the cold, clear night.

There I met Jacob, who turned out to be Vlasta's nephew, and his cousin, whose name I don't remember but was wearing a denim vest with “Minotauru Fight Club” across the back. Jacob was pretty cool, just about my age, and he works in a CD pressing plant near Prague. He decided that we needed to have some slivovice to cement our acquaintance. Slivovice, which I can hear you trying to sound out, is plum brandy of serious fire-water caliber. It's clear and has a slight turpentine and sugar odor, generally coming in 60 and 70 proof varieties. Think high quality plum moonshine. Jacob led me to the bar near the stage, which Vlasta himself was tending. Perhaps he hadn't seen me well when I walked in, or he was trying to warn me off the slivovice, but he said something along the lines of 'I remember you! You were here earlier.' I wasn't sure that he should remember me, but he quickly produced a phone with pictures of me on it. Pictures of me from the last time I was in Drahonin. Sleeping on the table next to the town drunk. We laughed, him heartily, me a little embarrassed. But he clapped me on the back and produced a bottle. Jacob had hunted up some shot glasses, which looked tiny, maybe half an ounce each. Vlasta poured us our shots, we toasted, “Nazdravie!” and downed them. It burns all the way down, not terribly, but enough that your eyebrows go up and you let out a breath that could melt paint.

After another half an hour or so, things had been visibly winding down for a bit, Sam and I were both fading. He at least had the excuse of being somewhat ill for most of the week and having a serious case of the sniffles. I despair of ever keeping up with him on a long night. This was about 3am and Mickey was still intent on plying us with beer, which I had the good sense to refuse. We made it to the cabin, walked down the path in the dark because there was no moon, and tumbled into bed.

Thus ends the Second Trip to Drahonin, Pt. I. Look forward to Part II and, finally, a Description of The Flat, in the next couple days.

You'll never guess what happened to me....

Soooooo....

I'm not dead! (Point in my favor.)

In the last week I have been actively recruited for a full-time position by not one but two different schools here in Brno. After weeks of running around here and Krakow just trying to get people to talk with me, coupled with the perma-temping feel of the schools I've hooked up with down here, this is freaking awesome.

The options basically boiled down to this: A) work for an indie school run by very nice Czech woman, who actually impressed me with her attitude and knowledge of her clients (as opposed to some of the 'we think they're about intermediate, and they're probably just working from magazine articles'), which would have paid me more per hour for fewer hours per week with an easier class load. Or B) work for a giant, globe-spanning, very respected school, which was only talking to me through a fluke of networking. (They normally don't even bother giving an interview to people who were certified through my program.) Which demands about 50% more time on the clock for about $1500 less per year, not even counting all the extra homework and lesson planning I have to deal with. Bigger classes, too.

I kinda freaked out. The decision felt like a very serious Robert Frost “Path Less Traveled By” kinda moment. For one thing 10 months contract (for either of these places) is pretty intimidating. I haven't actually planned my future that far ahead since I was in college. (This adventure doesn't count, I had originally planned to be out of the country in 9 months.) Another is that I really wasn't planning to work really hard while I was over here, but then again I also wanted to do this to rehab the ol' college application image. I mean I had to bust my keister for six months to just hop the Atlantic, do I really wanna keep that schedule? Option A is easy and puts plenty of money in my pocket. Option B requires a ton of work, think 'English teacher boot camp' mixed in with 25 hours/week of actual classes, and looks really good on a resume. Did you know they call those things CVs out here?

Mom and Dad seemed to think it was a no brainer. I wasn't so sure, but after running some numbers and doing the comparison, which wasn't as far apart as I had feared, I had a better picture. Even though an extra $100 dollars/month would allow me to live very comfortably and put some money away, it wasn't enough to outweigh the benefits the other school would offer, the skills I'd pick up, and the possibility of going anywhere in the world, both with the school and on my own.

So I went with Option B: International House – Brno.

The training starts next Thursday. I'm still pretty scared about all this. Filled with trepidation I guess you could say. See I have no problem punching above my weight in a corporate environment, where the worst I could do would be break the copier, wipe an important hard drive, or inadvertently commit some sort of malfeasance. This worries me for two reasons. I'm on stage all the time I'm in class, sort of me vs. a bunch of funny talking foreigners, only I'm actually the funny talking foreigner. The other is that I'm really worried about screwing up because the students will either ask for a different teacher or come away not really able to speak English. I don't any problem failing for a corporate boss, or even for the school; I would feel really lousy failing students who'd paid a large chunk of cash to learn from me.

Sooooo, into the fray, eh?

New House!

Spent all day running around and negotiating, and renegotiating, the terms of our move in, but I am now one third of a flat. We're in northwest Brno, about 10 minutes out from the center on the number 4 tram line. I'm living with Ahmed and another IBM'er Cynthia, she's from Brazil. Will talk more later, but for now: Wooohooo!

The Circus is in town.....

There's some sort of hoopla going on in nam. Svobody this week. There's a stage set-up and a dealership has parked Fords -- FORDS!!, not even Skodas -- next to it. I was waiting around after the lesson last night and a smaller group was setting up, some sort of camper-sized velvet big top. I almost left, but then they started playing Tom Waites and obscenely macabre British polkas through the loudspeakers. Spanish folk guitar followed and beautiful young women danced with old men who cast aside their canes. I waited.

There was a shadow play with children zooming around and houses and abstract geometry. Then a pair of scissors appeared, cutting a literal window where there had only been a shadow of one the moment before and the Trio peered out from inside. In a moment they burst through the paper: sad scabby clowns whose looks had been inspired by The Dark Crystal, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Six String Samurai. They were squawking and cawing like crows and pranced around with great vigor. They danced and threw sawdust into the crowd. Soon a very Hensonian ringmaster appeared in red velvet with glasses and a whip, delighting in lording it over the clowns. There were occasional appearances by ballerina figures who wore masks that looked like little Gray Men, straight out of the X-Files. There was a yellow figure in plain costume that bore a leonine mask and a Coyote cum Loki aspect, snidely taking the piss out of the Ringmaster by turning him around and depriving him of his whip. The littlest ballerina was constantly at odds with the Ringmaster, unable to perform on her unicycle or with the spinning hoops.

The Trio eventually picked a teenage girl out of the crowd and taped her feet to the unicycle. (It's like Devin's new track bike, the pedals are connected directly to the wheel.) They delighted in dragging her around in front of the crowd in a ridiculous waltz. They made a great show of trying to give her purse and headphones to various members of the crowd. I thought she must have been a plant and in on the deal. However, I shouted "Twenty!" in Czech at the clown when he was in front of me (twenty crowns for a prop and a good memory is good, yeah?) and wound up with the purse in my hands. Then I saw the very embarrassed girl fighting her way back through the crowd to get to me and the clown heckled & cawed until she took it from me.

The Ringmaster eventually brought out an ogre of gigantic Norse looks, chained on either side by one of the clowns. Of course it was sad and terrible and the beast rebelled against his captors. The Ringmaster made a good show of it, throwing down his whip and doing battle with his bare hands, but he was hopelessly out classed. When the monster had him in a death grip, the alien headed little ballerina scurried out and snapped up the whip. She wielded it fearsomely and set the ogre cowering, once he'd dropped the Ringmaster. Even the Ringmaster was made to back away by the little girl cracking the whip. But once she'd scared them both, she carefully set the lash down and took the ogre by the hand, leading him off.

The leonine trickster made one final Faustian appearance. A figure in leotard, with a faceless blue orb for a head, was dragged out and man handled by two of the clowns. They poked and prodded it with poles, making it dance and dodge. Eventually she too rebelled and the Trickster entered the scene, sending the two louts away. He began to dance with her in earnest, and clothed her in a flouncy gauze skirt and red boa. There was fierce passion and tenderness in their movements. Eventually he left her standing, bewildered on stage. But she heedlessly ran to him when a lone arm beckoned from backstage.

Truly some of the most fun I've had in a long while.

Not dead yet, I swear.

Been running around this week, actually doing some things. Unfortunately that takes time away from the glowing screen and I'm feeling a little stupid for spending as much money as I have (since I'm still technically unemployed).

Update: One company, Slůně, doesn't have their fall schedule, yet , but is asking me to do some substitutions for them. Yes at the moment (plus they're paying me my asking price!). I've got my demo lesson with MKM tonite. FINALLY. The general lack of normal classes has put a crimp in get official approval from those guys, but I've already done some individual lessons for them. There's some sort of fest/music thing going on in nam. Svobody all week. Last night there was a circus from Russia, a little one, quite good. Costumes inspired by Jim Henson and Tim Burton. More later.

Conspiracies!

The lesson went very well, she was roughly my age and had been studying English for 15 years by her count. Basically just wanted someone to speak with and to teach her new vocabulary. I had no proper idea going in (the previous teacher had left no notes), we started with some getting to know you questions, which I only had a handful of corrections for, and moved onto some entertainment articles I'd printed off the BBC and AP wire. I actually had way more material than I needed. This was a relief.

So what do Americans hear when people get drunk? 9-11 conspiracy theories. In Krakow I got tag teamed by a couple of Brits, Amed actually did this sober (he and I had the most coherent and lengthy discussion of this topic), and Zlatan decided that we really, really needed to discuss the possibility that Osama bin Laden does not exist the other morning at the gyro shack. (Both of my boys are Muslim, I think this makes a bit of a difference, but then again the Brits were citing chapter and verse from the 9-11 Commission Report.)

The general thrust of things is that United States government did the deed. In some theories the government was explicitly involved, in others Osama bin Laden is a complete fiction, and sometimes the act was perpetrated by something like the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission. I will be the first to admit that there are things we do not know and may never know about 9-11 and that the government was covering its ass and pulling weird maneuvers from five minutes after the first plane hit. However, I don't see a compelling argument for an organized conspiracy in this. I know nothing about the physics of the Towers coming down or why Tower #7 came down, too. I have given up hope of finding an authoritative source on either. It seems that everyone with a theory has an agenda. I do know that lots and lots of mistakes were made by the intelligence community. I do know that what has happened since has benefited the Neo-Cons (former advocates of the New World Order) and the new military industrial complex (Halliburton, KBR, Blackwell, and hundreds of other 'contractors' that are doing for the military what we no longer believe is cost-effective for the DoD to do for itself). What I think basically comes down to this: if you apply Occam's Razor, then you find very little that cannot be explained by normal levels of American incompetence/laziness and real-politik avariciousness. Is it simpler to say that a vast, vast conspiracy was carried out by our government that killed 3000 Americans and remained secret in spite of it being investigate by a congressional committee whose report became a BEST SELLER, or that fewer than two dozen men were able to use a great deal of cunning and money to exploit the holes in a broken system and carry out a horrendous act? I'm in favor of the later. I suppose it's possible, maybe even plausible, to say that some agency or group 'ran' bin Laden or the group of terrorists, but the ideas that the government purposely did not scramble fighter jets that morning in September or actually planted explosives at strategic points within the World Trade Center is fairly ludicrous to me.

I think there are a number of things that go into the prevalence of these theories. For one thing it's far easier to say that the people 'in control' let this happen than to acknowledge that there are terrible and chaotic forces at work in the world, which defy the control of anyone but themselves. I think this is similar to the Vietnam era theory that 'we would have won if the government had let us.' Another thing is that Osama bin Laden was once a CIA financed 'freedom fighter.' Al-Qaeda may have been the invention of some intelligence officer in need of good memo material, does anybody know who is supposed to be in charge of this 'Network' or who remembers hearing about it before 9-11? Even if it was I'm quite willing to believe in the existence of a number of Islamic terrorists who were linked by common beliefs that found connections through old Afghanistan buddies and leveraged this through modern telecommunications technology. It doesn't help that we've been playing political games with people's lives in the Middle East for a century and that Arabs see themselves as a being continually shat upon by the U.S. A final note: the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc, etc, have something of a vested interest in the myth of their near magical prowess. This is fed by ridiculous action movies, which are often the only knowledge of America that foreigners, even some educated ones, receive. To counter this impression I have three things: MK-Ultra (failed mind-war program), Castro is still alive (we can't assassinate the dictator next door?), and Iran-Contra (even successful conspiracies are brought down by there being too many loose ends).

Sorry, didn't exactly mean to rant there, but I had a little to get off my chest. One does occasionally run into nutty things that you can't exactly argue through in one sitting, especially through a language barrier.

It's like last Friday again. At noon it was 80 degrees in the apartment. At four thirty there were cool winds and thunder rolling steady across the sky. At four thirty five it began to rain. When I left the lesson at 6:30 it was a real gutter washer. The kind where your umbrella, despite the general lack of winds, will only keep you dry down to your elbows. It feels really good. The air is cleaner, washed and ionized. And warm rain is still something of a novelty to me.

Found two new net cafes and a couple other interesting spots when I was wandering around looking for the lesson. It was right between nam. Svobody and Moravske nam., places that I've walked through a dozen times already. Amazing how your feet can move you from spot to spot so often, but you don't really know a place until you search for something in it.

In reference to an older post: 25000 crowns is about $1250 dollars (20 to 1 conversion) and about what one could/should earn per month to live comfortably here. (That's pre-tax, assuming legal employment.) Comfortably being rent, food, transportation, phone, professional attire/supplies, enough to live it up once or twice a month, and some to put away against the weeks and months of skinny pickin's. 25000 is about 109 hours/month at 230 crowns/hour (the starting pay MKM quoted me). Sam and Denis both seem to think that I'm worth about 300 crwn/hr in the current market.

Brewery, Yugoslavians, and Races

Have a paid lesson at a place called MKM today, and a demo lesson with them tomorrow. Also had a call back from Slůně, looks like that interview will be Wednesday. Sam's told me that he's not going to be working past the end of the month and that he'd be happy to hook me up with English Studio, who he's been going through, and that he'd probably be able to tell them “this guy could take over my classes.” Opportunities, eh?

Went out with Ahmed the other day and met a bunch of, how shall we say...., former Yugoslavians. Zlatan and two others are from Sarajevo and a few from other points, but I didn't get exactly where, French and Serbian (or whatever it was) seemed to be a little more popular, being as how I was the only native English speaker in the group. However, they were a good bunch a guys. Czechs are a very rule abiding people, they generally don't jaywalk, things are done by the book for the most part, people stand in lines, and they wait their turn. Much like Germans, I'm told. Which is why it was greatly amusing to watch Zlatan and friends pull out a small baggie and Zig Zags and roll a joint in the middle of nám. Svobody, which translates to Freedom Square. Met them again early on Saturday morning when they had a couple Frenchmen in tow. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

After running around in all sorts of heat last (in long clothes) week I was happy to throw on a pair of shorts and go hang out. However, in the space of five hours on Friday it went from 34 degrees to about 17 with cold wind and serious looking clouds that just started to drop their water as I met Alissa at the train station at 6. We went to the Starobrno brewery which is almost directly south of the castle Špilburk and hung out with Sam and Marketa. I had the first dark draft beer since I've been in county and it was gooooood. Don't get me wrong, even the blond stuff is great around here, but I do like my beer at least on the redder side of things. It was crowded inside and a little crazy outside. There's been some sort of motorcycle Grande Prix going on, I think somebody told me it was the “500cc world championships.” So there have been loads of drunken fans wandering the streets. Many of them have a predilection for lighting off blasting caps or quarter sticks of dynamite in the street. Many of them, in the brewery at least, are British and also loud yobs to boot. Turns out that in nicer restaurants in the Czech Republic, which the indoor part of Starobrno is, won't let you order side dishes without ordering a main dish and that you only get one side per entree, plus some entrees are ineligible for certain sorts of sides. I just wanted some french fries, and got told no (Marketa had to translate), so Alissa tried to order my fries, her side, and a soup. We got told no again (that one per rule). Finally Allissa decided that she'd get pasta and order my fries. The waiter just decided to take that order. Marketa said that normally wouldn't fly, however Sam chimed in here that if Marketa hadn't been with us we probably all could have ordered whatever we wanted because the rest of us spoke no Czech. Anyway we had a good time hanging out. Talked about the glories of Skype and using it to call American tech support for things instead of trying to deal with Czech call centers. It seems they get very confused when you give them a phone number with more than ten digits.

It was Chris's birthday (the Polish guy from IBM), so I went to meet that crowd next. Caught up with them at restaurant. Turns out that there's some Polish honor thing that you're supposed to pay on your birthday, so Chris immediately took half the bill for himself. I just don't get it. We wound up at some tropical themed club where I got to pay the American fee at the door (2.5 times the normal cover). Have to say that clubs aren't too much better here in Brno than they are at home. Too loud, too crowded, too much attitude. I'll take the bar scene any day. People drifted off as the night wore on. Ahmed and I were the only ones left and we went in search of another place to be, wound up meeting Zlatan and the French guys as we were getting gyros across from Charlie's Hat. (A note here: if you have even a little cabbage every day or every other day it begins to make you smell. It's really lousy to wake up with the smell of smoke in your hair and the sour tang of cabbage leaking from your every pore.) At this point all the clubs we went to weren't letting people in or were asking for lots of money. I suppose it didn't help that we didn't have any native Czech speakers in the group.

We wound up at another gyro joint, Ahmed and I being the only ones who had eaten. Longs talks about politics, in French, ensued. I couldn't follow most of it. One of the guys, Michael, was flabbergasted that I could even try and teach people my language without knowing theirs. I tried to explain the building block theory, that you start with really basic things like concrete nouns and easily modeled verbs, but he was pretty dubious. On a completely different note: if you see a black person here, odds are good that they speak English. There are very few non-white people here, hell hardly any non-Slavs. Like Coupeville I can count the number of black people on my fingers and toes. I've seen people from French-speaking Africa and from the Caribbean. English seems to be the common tongue.

Next time I'll tell you guys what theories you get to hear when drunken people learn that you're an American.

Job search Brno

The Brno job search is on a much smaller scale than the Krakov one, just 8 schools on my list, and 6 of them within walking distance of the main square. Also, bearing much more fruit. Several have already said they're looking for teachers and I've got a paid individual lesson and a demonstration lesson on set-up for early next week. One place is willing to pay me about 25000 crowns a month, but several other schools have been low-balling me with rates of less than 200 crowns an hour. Still waiting on responses from a couple others.

Oh, question for the masses: it's standard to do a demonstration lesson for your potential employers, especially with a lack of employment history. I've had one person who's done this for many years advise me to demand a fee for the demo lesson, even if it's a low rate. The reasoning being that you put effort and time into your appearance there, sometimes passing up or rearranging other job search duties, thus deserving compensation, as well as establishing the idea you're negotiating from a position of strength (discouraging them from trying to pull a fast one farther down the line). What do you guys think of that idea?

A couple schools are just outside the touristy part of town in the southwest, just off Vlhka Street. I got kinda lost looking for them, so I saw a part of town that I didn't know about before. It's a little bit isolated from the central part of the city because of the way the trams run and the placement of a couple high traffic streets. There's still some light industrial kinda stuff going on, car shops, factory buildings, building material wholesalers. Cheaper, shoddier looking versions of businesses you see elsewhere, too. When things get old and neglected at home they get overgrown, green, a little grungy. When things get old and neglected here they get gritty. Chunks of facade fall off, exposing old masonry. There's more dust and dirt around the buildings, there's actually garbage to be found in the basement window wells and busted doorways. Turns out this is also the gypsy part of town. You start to see lots of kids just hanging out. There are people just sitting on the front stoop or at a table and chairs arranged on the sidewalk. Some of them have worn or dirty clothing, something that's not normal here, but mostly you can tell they're gypsies because they all look like Mexicans or Indians (the American kind). The area definitely has that lower income, socially outcast vibe to it. There are signs of gentrification, too. Some buildings have been recently re-plastered and repainted, with shiny nameplates for the businesses inside and intercom-buzzers required for entry. Some frou-frou businesses starting to pop up, too: boutique furniture showrooms and dance schools.

It's really hot again, 35 degrees today. Pulled a mad dogs and Englishmen in the gypsy part of town. When I got home and changed out of my clothes I had big, white salt deposits around the waist of my pants. Makes me glad I chopped off all my hair the other day.

Have I mentioned the pervasiveness of herna bars here? Gambling, slot machines, is legal and you'd think it was big business. You can't go more than a block or two on any busy or central street without seeing a “herna bar non-stop!” sign. (They are literally open 24 hours a day.) I haven't been in any except for Salvatore's, a small one that's also got some internet computers in the back, but the machines play these amazingly irritating sound effects and use lots of lights. They kinda remind me of pinball machines. Some are really big, glitzy affairs, others seem like nice, low-key, little bars that have just got some machines pushed over in the corner.

Travel.

Alissa had to be back to Brno before me for teaching so I had the house to myself for a few days and got to take the train back alone. Following the pattern of my travels here so far (wonderfully easy or nails-on-chalkboard painful) it was a long day. I missed my 7am train so closely that I got to watch it pull out of the station. I took my ticket to the window and explained my situation, asking for the next train to Brno, which I thought was @ 11:45. The woman told me I was going to take a circuitous route to Wratslaw (Poland), Hranice (Czech Republic), and then on to Brno, leaving in half an hour. Great! I said. So I get on the train, the conductor checks my ticket (which is a handwritten form, instead of the usual machine one) and tries to ask me what I'm doing on this train, which was eventually headed to Berlin. I told him I was getting off earlier and which stops I was taking after that, but he looked very concerned and told me that I needed to get out at Katovice and take the Polonia train from platform 1. We went round for a couple minutes, but I finally got the message.

So I get out and wait for the train. When it arrives I talk to their conductor and ask (sort of) if this is the train to Polonia. He gives me the “you foreign idiot” look with surprise and says no. (I find out later that there's an express train named Polonia, just like the town.) It's about quarter to 10 now. So I go to the ticket office, wait in line for a few minutes, jockeying with all the Poles who line up sideways, and get told to go downstairs to the other office (nothing is labeled in English). I do the same thing, waiting twenty minutes, and get told to go to the other window. I do and finally get a ticket agent who speaks some English, but I'm at the wrong window again. So I wait a few minutes in the other line, and kowtowing with my “I don't know any Polish, do you speak English?” in terrible Czech for the fourth time that morning I get to tell her with hand signals and a map what happened. She gives me the “idiot foreigner” look with a little bit of pity and eventually makes me understand that the next train to Brno goes through Ostrava and doesn't get there until 2:30. Great. So I wait for 4 hours, and at the appointed time on the right platform a train pulls in. There's no conductor so I end up pointing at the train and quizzing the passengers “Wien Sudbahnhof?” (Vienna – Main Station?). A kind Austrian family that's debarking says no that's where they're going. So we wait, and wait some more. The platform is filling up and people are beginning to look antsy. There's some announcements in Polish and one of the Austrians is able to pick 'late' out of it. There's some other Americans on the platform, and I eventually overhear a German sounding nun taking pity on them saying that the train has been delayed an hour. Great. So I wind up hanging out with Pete and Greg and Lynn, who'd each graduated just graduated from college. We all compared notes and talked about where we'd been around here. (Her – Southern Czech bike trip, Prague, and Kraków. The boys – Northern Czech Republic, Prague, Germany, Kraków, heading back to Czech Republic.) Was nice to hang out with some people my own age for a while. More hustle on the platform with 15 minutes to go, we gotta move to another one. When the train still hasn't shown up at the appointed hour, there's another announcement and it's back to the first platform. We keep waiting. A train pulls up under a ticker that says it's bound for a Polish town, but everyone jumps on so we Americans follow suit and are rewarded with our own compartment, something of a coup.

Pete and Greg are both from Baltimore and we know lots of places in common from my time at American. Lynn is from New York, went to Ann Arbor for dance, and Greg is a stage tech, so they actually knew some people and institutions too. We whiled a couple hours away playing cards and killing the last of a bottle of absinthe the boys had. Much merriment and relaxation. Lynn admitted that she doesn't trust herself or Europe enough to drink when traveling alone so she'd been sober for a month. The boys, in comparison, had been going through their digital cameras and finding pictures that neither one of them remembered taking. Unfortunately my stop was first and I had to jump off in a hurry.

My phone had enough juice for the arrive at midday trip I'd planned, but by 5:30 when I got to Ostrava it had totally run out and I had to sneak behind the soda machines to recharge and answer the 'Where the heck are you?' texts from Denis and Alissa. Had a minor heart attack when I looked at the non-daylight savings clock, telling me I'd have to wait until 8:30 for my next train, but fortunately the computerized signboard had the correct time and I only had to wait an hour for my train, which was quiet, unless you count the guy who came by four times asking for cigarettes. Looked like he stepped out of the '80's on Whidbey Island. Wrinkles acid washed into his jeans, a denim jacket, missing at least one tooth, greasy blond hair, and a weatherbeaten tan. But my train got there at 9, 14 hours on the road later, and Alissa met me to take the bag of her stuff I'd brought down. I went to the Boland Half-way House for English Speakers in Brno, proprietor Denis J. Smith. We went out for a couple drinks at Charlie's Hat (Chaplin, that is) and I crashed for a good 12 hours.

Kraków

Kraków is cool. I really like this town, despite its cranky old people and the fact that I was hit by a ketchup covered roll as soon as I stepped off the train. Damn kids. (Like most European languages, their w sounds like v to us, so the town name is actually said “crack-of.”)
The train trip up from Brno had two changes and was blissfully easy once Alissa taught me how to read the boards announcing arrivals and departures. We had a Northern Irish med student named Shane on our 2nd and 3rd legs, delightful fellow who's been doing some volunteer work on his summer break. Got to discuss the British taking the troops out with him. I love trains, they're great for people and for relaxing while watching the landscape. The vegetation and terrain looked like what you see out the window of the Boston – NYC trains lots of locust trees and shrubby green plants, but the buildings and people stuff were more like south Jersey or back road Pennsylvania, all weatherbeaten concrete and broken glass with graffiti.

We avoided the main train station and got off towards the outskirts of town. Things this far out feel kind of sprawling and disconnected. Big blocks of apartments shoot up out of the ground at somewhat regular intervals. They don't look particularly bad or old, I think most are newer, and they've even got pastel color schemes in a regulated, housing development kind of way. There are a few decaying low-rise structures and lots of fairly empty flat ground here. There are lots of medium sized trees and sometimes gardens or old houses taking up a whole block. There are old ramshackle traces of things that were, like funky fences and bad paving and plain aging concrete walls, right alongside signs of progress, parking lots and alleys with neatly placed factory made concrete paving stones, the nicely kept trolley ways with fences, trimmed trees, and flat even gravel that lead right into new construction.

The blue and white buses are roaring fumey affairs with doors that clatter open and closed like you'd lose a hand if it were in the way, bought second hand from Italy I'm told. Streets don't have a grid and can curve or juke sideways as they please, so you wind up with forking intersections and loops radiating from the town center. The old city walls have been removed, but there's a green park ring there now with the old town immediately inside. It's beautiful, having been recently renovated and revitalized. Most streets are closed to cars and paved with those factory stones so the streets are smooth. The buildings are old and authentic, some with plain fronts and others spouting little architectural flourishes like cherubs or scrollwork on supporting beams. There are throngs of people everywhere, luxuriating in the balmy cosmopolitan atmosphere. The stores vary from tourist trinkets to furniture boutiques to designer clothing stores with a healthy smattering of pubs and kebab stands and other restaurants. Then you get to the Rennik, the main market square. It's huge, easily four football fields put together, lined all around with café tables sheltering beneath umbrellas. The crowds thicken here, but they aren't claustrophobic. In the center, looking like an imposing castle with buttresses and sinuous arches holding up turrets and ramparts, is the Cloth Buying Hall, which is only about four stories but stretches most of the length of the square. A long passage takes up most of the fist floor where they sell tourist trinkets from stalls now. Alissa tells me that four years ago only one side of the square had café tables, things closed at three on the weekend, and you could barely find someone who spoke English. Today the beggars will speak to you in five languages and the Cloth Hall is hosting a wine tasting with live chamber music in the midst of the sellers hawking their wares at ten o'clock on Thursday.

There are innumerable themes and variations tucked away in odd corners. Cathedrals off the Little Renick, Roosters is the Polish version of Hooters, Tribecca Coffee is a highbrow Starbucks clone (with posters in English) that's hooked into the cool jazz café with cartoony and eclectic paintings on the walls. There are underground pubs where you can see an old man in a beige suit waiting at the top of the steps with a young woman and exchange a ticket for the money when her date arrives. Overpriced Irish pubs host the English speaking expats, while all the young foreigners flock to booming brightly colored dance clubs. Bars and dance halls fill converted apartments in what were originally burghers houses. There's a summery feel to the city and it's wonderful to bask in the glow of all this polyglot hum and self-satisfied capitalism, the locals and the tourists each happy with their end of the bargain.

Alissa showed me the English language bookstore near the university, Massolit. Tres cool. Would be a modest but high quality place at home, but here it's like a treasure trove. Comparably priced, too. Lots of the prices are the same in absolute terms as the bookstores back home. Alissa mentioned that books are subject to the Value Added Tax in the EU, which I don't really understand, but in many instances works out to something like 20% of sticker price. But it's a cool place. They have American style brownies and a few tables and copies of the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, some other English screeds, and a gigantic stack of old copies of the Onion.

The oldest university in Europe is Charles University in Prague. The second is Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Alissa tells me that Charles was founded as or quickly became a forward thinking/heretic-friendly institution while Jagiellonian is the reactionary version and has traditionally been something of a wellspring or shelter for conservative thought. Much like Poland itself, I guess.

Saw the Simpsons movie while I was here. In English, with Polish subtitles, a very odd experience. The average age of the audience was something like 20, and they got most of the language jokes, but a lot of the visual puns missed them. Homer bouncing back and forth between a large rock and a bar called “The Hard Place” was a non-starter. And when they went through Seattle by train in the movie, I thought it was Toronto. Good fun though, well worth watching.

Back in Czech Republic.

Hi guys! I realize that I've been out of touch for awhile, sorry. Short version of everything: finished the course, graduated if you will, spent a week in Poland, looking for work and hanging out, now back in Brno. Job prospects are still on the horizon. People here can take a month off in August and most managerial types seem to. Still waiting on lots of responses. Staying with Denis in Brno. Not sure what happens next.

Update

Tests are 3/5ths done, ok-well done so far. Sending out lots of resumes this weekend, we'll see if anything comes of it. Going to Kracow, Poland on Tuesday cuz Alisa has to go up to give her notice and grab her cat, plus I'm gonna interview for her job and she has a flat that'll be empty for the rest of the month. Funny that I'm going to Poland before I even get to Prague.
Ahmet, of the drunken belligerency, has a birthday tonight. Denis tells me that he's sworn off alcohol until after Ramadan, sometime in September, but we'll see if this is true, because I'm going. May go to a movie with Sam and Marketa tomorrow.

Weekend at Sam's

---Due to the limitations of technology access around here and my time, this was mostly written on Tuesday, but is just getting finished on Friday.----

I mentioned Sam, the other Seattlite at school. Last weekend he'd invited me to a BBQ at the flat his wife owns north of town. However, the other couple who was supposed to be there didn't show because one of them had wrenched their neck and all the other school people had decided not to attend. I had leapt at the chance to spend any time I could with people who spoke English and I didn't have to see 5 days/week already. Anyway, Sam pulled up in a little white Škoda (imagine an '80's Chevy hatchback or a VW Rabbit) with a half keg of beer in the back as I was leaving the house to do some shopping. He told me the above details and said that he was thinking they were gonna move the party to her family's cabin in the country, Did I still wanna come? My response was Hell, yes! Satisfied with my response he drove off and I hurried to get my errands done. (I got two good t-shirts at Tesco, the UK-exported Kmart clone, for 38 krowns Czech!)

Caught the bus out to Sam's house. Transportation here is so easy to cheap out on. You're honor bound to buy a ticket and get it punched as you board the tram or bus, but many people have passes that don't get punched and you can get some tickets that you punch on your first leg and transfer to your second. Or you can just pretend you have one of these things. I was good and bought a pass from the bus driver. Also so freakin' cool, that you can buy your pass from the bus driver without exact change OR get it from a machine OR buy it a the little cigarette/magazine stands that are everywhere. After a very humid and hot half hour I got off the bus.

The flat is in a subdevelopment a few minutes north of town. Nice seeming, well planned without looking too manufactured, lots of whitewash and red-tile roofs. The flat was pleasant, but a bit small, even by Euro standards, I think: a single main room with a reasonable sized balcony, a bedroom, and a bathroom (seperated toilet as per Euro standards). However, it had nice fixtures and very tasteful furnishings. Sam's wife, Marketa, is a very nice woman. Speaks good English, said she spent a couple years in Seattle nannying and another in Manchester studying. She and Sam met at the ?Crown? & Dragon in Fremont. Right now he's teaching and she's working for an asset management firm while they're waiting for her US papers to come through.
We grabbed the now cold keg and piled into the Škoda. We left from Kuřim and headed further north thru Hradčany and to a little town called Drahonin. Couldn't of taken more than half an hour. There are no mountains here, but they got things that we'd call decent sized foot hills. There's lots of open yellow fields with grasses, wheat, and sometimes corn that turn into green forests as they slope up into hills. The transition from Brno to rural surroundings, even with the mid-step of Kuřim, is drastic. The towns along the way are mostly little buildings huddled next to the road. Drahonin is truly a village, a bunch of houses, a soccer field, a church, a few other things. Very cozy. We were ten minutes outside of town, it felt like driving through a hilly version of Ebey's Prarie with no water to be seen. We finally pull into some trees on the far side of the last field. We then walk down a steep bank to the cabin.

It's very traditional and rustic. There's cool looking wrought iron on the door with a funny shaped, dark colored pad lock to keep anyone from breaking in. It's all blond wood with a little shine to it, maybe 2o feet on a side. We go in and unlock all the shutters and and swinging, slatted door covers, letting light in. There's a balcony in the back. There are trees to the right and left with a sharp plunge into a little valley down below where I can see a small, glinting patch of water. The trees around Drahonin, unlike the leafy ones I saw on the drive up, are skinny pines that shed their bark as they get tall to reveal red skin like a madronna tree has. There are also a number of white barked, yellow leafed aspen trees scattered throughout.

The inside of the cabin is far more spacious than it seemed likely. It's traditional, so it has no power, an outhouse, a fireplace, and the only running water is what they collect in tank off the roof (currently empty). Everything is still blond wood. There's a large living room, taking up the back half of the first floor. There are all sorts of pelts and skulls used in the decor, but there are some cool artifacts like a cavalry saber and some folky looking knicknacks scattered about. The interior walls are slats, angled sort of like a fence. You can't see through them from straight on, but you can if you move to the side. I guess that allows better circulation and more even heating when you have to heat the place by a central fire. There are two bedrooms pushed under the eaves on either end of the top floor, with a central room and a bed/couch in the middle. The stairs between floors are about five inches wide and go seven feet up for six feet of length.

We happily fired up the hibbachi and do some shrimp and chicken on the grill. Very, very good, especially with light Czech rye bread and fresh vegetable for the chicken. The tap for the keg is a two foot tall metal tube that hooks over with a faucet on top, not the usual pump and tube affair you get at home. There's a Schraeder valve at the base where you attach a bike pump. We just had a little hand pump, but Sam and I both liked the idea of having a stand up one, so you could really get things cooking and look silly at the same time.

Some friends of theirs came over, Ivana and Rudolph and their three boys, the eldest of whom was about 12. Ivana spoke some English and understood almost everything. Rudolph had nada but Czech and the boys had a few words between them. It was really pleasant to just hang out and eat. The boys were crazy the way happy young men are and thought it preposterous and funny when Sam and I tried to speak Czech with them. He's been here a year and I don't think he speaks much more than I do, which is close to zilch. But they were good sports and it was lots of fun. They took off after a while, ridding on this contraption that was a cross between a rusty WWII motorycle and a 3 wheel ATV.

We soon headed into town after them. However, Sam convinced me to try absinthe first. This is one of the few countries in the world where the 'real stuff' (made with wormwood) is still legal. I had roughly two shots and it set me spinning. Fun, but not what you need on a too hot, beery evening. (I know this blog makes me sound like an absolute lush, but so far I've normally only have experiences worth writing to you about while drinking.) We went into town where there was a band playing and lots of people. There was this crazy old fart named 'Mickey' who speaks English like I speak Spanish (functional, but reeeaaal funny to listen to.) The town drunk was a very worn looking character with gray hair and deep lines on its face (I have no idea which gender to use for this individual), who was soon sleeping on the table near me. A live band was playing, nothing but Czech music, but still pretty good to dance to. Ivana, Rudolph, and the boys were there. Sam and I agree that they were probably the most fun part of the evening, just being themselves and trying to grok the foreigners. I eventually wore myself out and fell asleep next to the town drunk. Sam wasn't falling asleep, but I understand he also was in quite a state by then. Somebody took pity on us and poured us into the backseat of their car and drove us back up the hill.

The next day dawned bright, but much cooler due to some strong winds that blew all day. We were very thankful. Got the hibatchi going again and did up some sausages. I wasn't great, but Sam was in lousy shape. Marketa either has a stronger constitution than either of us or is just more sensible for not drinking the absinthe the night before. After some food and a lie down for Sam we took a walk down to the river.

The wheat is just about a foot high and starting to bow over because it's so ripe, everything is a little parched. Once we got into the trees it was like being in the eastern foot hills of the Cascades. They even have stinging nettles here. Turns out the hills are mostly rock with a little dirt on top. They get really steep, really quick. We're talking about 2oo-500 feet over a quarter of a mile depending on where you stand. So we got down near the river and there were a bunch of kids who'd just rolled out blankets and slept under the stars the night before. We walked by them following some blazes that had been stenciled onto the trees at about chest level. There was a cliff with a bit of a trail in it. By cliff I mean a 60 foot drop off with a narrow little ledge and an occasional rope to hang on to. At the bottom there was some sort of memorial to an ancient duke with a portrait and a wreath of flowers around a beer bottle near a huge fire pit. Random highschooler graffiti looks about the same here as it does at home. The river was narrow, about 30 feet wide, and shallow. Sam and Marketa said they'd never seen it so low. We walked back up a tributary to stay in the shade and cool off some more. Eventually we turned around and headed back to the cabin, locked up, and returned to civilization.