Visit from moje maminka

Mom came for a visit last week. Outside of the obvious, the visit meant a fresh load of American TP, Nestle Chocolate Chips, home baked goodies, and a visit to the biggest tourist attractions in Prague.
Now, I'm usually not a fan of going to touristy areas, but I hadn't really seen the highlights (the castle up close, for instance) since my arrival. The reason for that is that with family and possibly friends visiting, and I figured I'd go to the sites with them, so here was my first opportunity.
However, my mom brought with her a cold front - weather about -20 Celsius. Walking around was quite a numbing experience. Hard to give the sites their due time when you can't feel your face. In any case, we got to see the astronomical clock in action, and the castle up close and personal.
Mom's visit also meant a trip to U Fleku - a restaurant that's hard to describe. It's part elementary school cafeteria, part brewery (their home brew is fantastic!), part alcohol-pushers (the wait staff walks around serving trays of beers and Becherovka shots, where you are forced to reject them after a couple), and part music hall - an accordian player sereneding any and all within earshot. Good times, and I recommend it to anyone visiting the city.



This weekend also gave us another brunch opportunity. Here's a basic look of our pre-gorged brunch table... And for those of you who told me to pass on to Ben he ought to shave, he did. Scary results.


more to come...

Brrrrr

Many people have asked me recently how Prague is in the winter. It's pretty simple.

Cold. The temperature has been hovering around the freezing mark for the last month, which is not that bad, especially once you get used to it. But these last few days, a cold front has come in, and has dropped the temperature to single digits. Fahrenheit. Factor in the windchill, and the weather has "stay inside" written all over it.

Dark. At its worst, the sun rose at around 8:30am, and set just before 4pm. Very annoying to start your day well before the sun gets up. A month after the winter solstice, though, we're up to the a 4:45pm sunset, so that's nice.

Gray. In the few hours of daylight there are, it's mostly gray. Winter in central Europe is not the most spiritually uplifting time. However, this most recent cold front brought with it some clear skies. It's been astonishing seeing blue sky (and shadows!) these last couple days. Though I'm not sure if I'm willing to trade the (relative) heat for blue sky, especially when the sun is far from warming.

So, how to battle the winter weather blues? Brunch helps. It's become a nice ritual for a few of us to get together each weekend for a pot-luck brunch, complete with eggs, bacon, home fries, fruit, and chocolate chip pancakes. Yesterday, the first day our current cold-yet-sunny front showed up in full force, we brunched at our friends Tim and Reed's place. They have a great attic flat, with a great view of the castle. from their window.


On the way back after brunch, Heather and I were doing our best to stay just above absolute zero, and we saw this sign. Neither of us is quite sure what it's advertising, but I leave it up to you to translate it for yourself.

Learning + Teaching = Leaching? Tearning?

In Czech, the verb "to teach" and the verb "to learn" are the same word. I like that, actually. I agree with it so much that this morning when a student said, "When you're in school, you teach so much, you become really educated..." the statement didn't register in the "that is incorrect" sector of my brain. It only did so when another student corrected him.
Being a teacher, I have learned far more these past few months than I ever did as a student. Teaching a subject matter really forces you to know all sides of it, so you can be properly prepared to respond to students' questions. Of course, plenty of learning happens after students ask their questions, when you go back and research the answers.

Along these lines, while doing some research for some lessons on Communism and its effect on the Czech Republic, I came across this op/ed article from the Washington Post written by the Latvian President about Latvia's participation in the Russian celebration of its victory over Germany in World War II. A great read.

A very interesting consequence of "learning" about many discussion topics is realizing the weight of the perspective of the teacher (or the organization he represents) has on how material is presented. Talking with different students about World War II (and then with their contemporaries on the other side of the Atlantic), it is pretty amazing the "facts" readily accepted by students. Here, during Communist times, it was taught that Stalin was a ruthless, but benevolent, leader. That he once killed 1,000 men in one day, but that he saved the Czech Republic (and other eastern European nations) from the dreaded Germans. One middle-aged student exclaimed, "Everything I was taught in school about WWII was a lie." On the flip-side of that, one friend in the States (about the same age as this student) wrote me that in his class "the lion's share of the credit for defeating the Nazis" went to the US, and that "the Soviets...somehow STOLE East Germany."
They say history is written by the winners, but it's worth realizing who considers themselves to have won.

Teaching the words "proud," "pride" and "regret" this morning, I asked my students to write down a couple sentences of things they are proud of, and things they regret. One student, misunderstanding the directions, said, "I am proud of my pride." What is your first impression upon hearing that statement? How would you think to correct it? Would you correct it?

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I have done a bunch of lessons this week on racism, centered on American history, as many people here are ignorant of the race-based events which have taken place in the USA since its inception. I posed this to one class, and I now pose it to you - Are you racist?
As you pause to think about that, take a moment to think of any race-based stereotypes you may have in your head. What comes to mind when you read the following words: White, Black, Russian, Japanese, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Jewish, Catholic, Irish, British, gypsy, French, German, Arab?
After thinking about that, and noticing your thoughts, reconsider the original question. Are you racist?
Are stereotypes a natural result of us trying to sort out and classify the world around us? Or do our stereotypes signal something fundamentally deeper with how we judge others on spec?

We only need to put our hand in one fire before we recognize that all fire is hot, and it burns painfully. If we have a bad experience with someone of a particular denomination, how can we learn that that experience is for that one person only, and is not indicative of all people of that denomination? (also, how can we know that every fire will burn us equally painfully?) Put another way, what separates fact from stereotype? What separates what we assume from what we know?

One Fat Cat

So Heather brought her cat, Zoe, back from the States. Zoe is a very easy cat. Low maintenance. Quiet. Uses her litter box and doesn't cause any problems. However, Zoe is fat. To quote Verbal Kint, "I'm talking orka fat."
Zoe responds to her name, which is convenient. But I call her "Fatso," for obvious reasons. She hears the "zo" part of "fatso" and responds as if I were calling her given name. Pretty amusing. Here she is enjoying the heated tile floor.

She has taken a real liking to our heated floor, especially one or two tiles which seem to be a center of the heat. But notice how she blends in with the tile as a lion in tall grass, or (perhaps more appropriately) a turtle amongst rocks. This makes it hard to see her at times, particularly at 6:40 in the morning when the sun is still below the horizon. I can't count the number of times I have inadvertantly kicked, shinned, or stepped on this poor fat cat because of her incredible camouflage abilities. I assure all the animal rights activists reading this that my less-than-gentle interaction with the cat is unintentional and done with no ill will.

On a completely different note, I recently got to thinking about the wonder that is the German language. The country France is called "France" in French, "France" in English, and "Francie" in Czech. Why is it that Germany is "Deutchland" in German, "Germany" in English, "L'Allemagne" in French, and "Nemecko" in Czech? What's up with the completely dissimilar translations?

Want to learn English?

When I was in Poland, some American-made TV shows and movies were on the tube. To my surprise, one male voice did all the dubbing, for all the characters - old, young, male, female. The dubbing man made no attempts to change his voice depending on which character was speaking. I found that a bit odd, so when I returned to Prague, I asked a student about American-made movies and television shows dubbed in Czech.
He revealed to me that when Communism first fell, there was an influx of western media into the Czech Republic. But hardly anyone here spoke English, as Russian was taught in schools. Add to that the very steep price of any sort of video or audio recording equipment, translators were in high demand. So people made good money sitting at their kitchen table with a crappy tape recorder dubbing the Czech version of countless English videos.
My student went on to inform me that the most popular genre of movies was pornography. Because religion is not a large part of Czech life (the largest block of people in the nation, when broken down by religion, is no religion at all), there doesn't exist the conflicts between religious and social acceptances that plagues America and other nations. So the first large batch of western adult videos to be translated into Czech was translated by a sole male, sitting at his kitchen table. Imagine, for a moment, watching an adult video with only one, dull, monotonic voice doing all the dubbing... "yes." "do you like that?" "yes i do. that's great baby."
These days, that's a running joke here, and it's even been used to advertise for English lessons.

On a completely different note, I have to say that quaint is nice. European is nice. Old school is nice. But jebus, cobblestone is frickin' slippery when it has snow on it!

cau

Poland, Ponderables, and Peculiar Picture Posing

I went to Poland this past weekend, and saw some old friends. It was great to see familiar faces, and yet another city in Warsaw. It was also nice training martial arts again, something I hadn't done since I left the States. Warsaw was *cold*, but lots of fun. The trip was very informative, too. That city was so shaped by WWII, when it was completely decimated, that practically everything has been rebuilt since then. Kyoshi contantly commented on how new everything was, and how this building and that mall and that park weren't in existence 15 years ago. Truly a city on the fast upswing.


Going there, and seeing where that country's flagship city is 15 years after Communism, and comparing it to that of the Czech Republic, is also pretty remarkable. Prague seems to have a pretty unique sense of lethargy or indifference. Not apathy, but more of a "eh, it doesn't matter so much." Warsaw seemed to have a much stronger rebounding force. The architecture there was also quite different from Prague, which is to be expected, given that much of Prague's architecture was designed a very long time ago, while Warsaw's is within the last 50 years, and really, much more so in the last 15.

And while the Czech language is difficult, I found Polish even tougher. The only reason being that Czech is completely phonetic. Even words with crazy letter combinations like "zmrzlina" are pronounced exactly how they are written. But Polish has consonant combinations with new pronunciations the way English does. For instance, the combination "sz" is like the s in "treasure", "w"s sound like "v"s and they have other letters - e's and a's with cedilles on them, and l's with slashes through them.
Yet one of these combinations did shed some light on a mystery I've wondered about for quite some time. I've been curious as to why the word "Czech" is spelled as it is. I can't think of the letter combination "cz" appearing anywhere else in the English language (and even you came across it, would you think to pronounce it as a "ch"?). But, in Polish (and, I would imagine, in other Slavic languages too), "cz" is pronounced as "ch" in English. (AHA!)

Other ponderables:

in English we have hummed communication, such as "mmhmm" for yes, "mm-mm" for no, etc. Do these hummed sounds carry over from one language to the next?

Who are "John Doe" and "Jane Doe" in other languages?

My friend Ben and I went out for a beer and some soup the other night. At the table next to us there was this couple in their early 40s(ish). They were clearly not from Prague, and were having trouble getting the attention of the waitresses. Ben and I told them to say the magic word "prosim" to get the staff's attention. They thanked us. No biggie... or so it seemed.
Well, a short bit later, Ben and I got up to leave. Immediately, the woman we aided jumped up and handed us her camera. We said, "Sure, we'll take a picture of you..." but that was not her intention. She wanted her man to take a picture of her with the two of us. She stands face-to-face with Ben, literally about 6 inches from his face, looking him up and down. She tries to pull his jacket down off his shoulders, and Ben pulled it back up, saying "No, that's okay. It's fine where it was." Unfazed, she tried again, and again he pulled it back up, reinforcing his no.
The lady then, in a tone of voice which was full of honor, luck, and awe, said, "Punks." She was apparently honored to be taking her picture with two "punks"... She then turns to me, about 6-8 inches from my face, and stares at me. It was a very odd look. She poses for the picture between Ben and myself, and her mate snaps a photo. Ben and I looked at each other and said, "uhh.. ok... we're gonna go now...", but she wanted to take another picture.
For the second picture, she turns her head towards me, and leans in as if she wants to kiss me. I believe my exact thoughts were "Wtf?" The second picture is taken with her leaning in towards me. Then, as we're leaving, the lady thanks us profusely in Russian. "Sposibo sposibo sposibo sposibo..." I reply "pejalsta" and we leave. That ranks up there with the odder experiences I've had in my life...

One last thought -
A comment left on a previous post talked about "333 silver firehose nozzles..." What that is, in Czech, is a phrase used to teach Czech children how to pronounce the Czech letter ř. The pronunciation is - at the SAME time - that of a rolling "r" as exists in Spanish, and the "zh" sound that the "s" makes in "treasure." Go ahead, try it. I dare you.
One of my students introduced me to this phrase, and it got me thinking about that ř sound. If it is so unnatural to the human mouth that even children - who are designed to learn language and speech - have trouble learning it, does anyone else out there think that maybe, perhaps, that sound just may be wise to eliminate from the language entirely? That thought isn't based on a "I'm American, so you should talk my way" idea, but rather, more of a "That's just damn hard for everyone, so maybe everyone's lives would be eased if it's removed..."

Shtastny Novy Rok

Shtastny novy rok. Bonne annee. Happy new year.

It's been a busy two weeks, as I was on vacation in northwest Europe. Spent a couple days in Amsterdam, one in Den Haag, two in Bruges, and a few in Paris. All in all, a fantastic trip.

Amsterdam - a very modern city: clean and efficient. Bikes rule the road - they're EVERYWHERE. Locals ride bikes the way LA'ers drive cars. They have the highest priority of any moving traffic, and if you're in their way, although the "ding ding" sound of their bell is gentle enough, you had best move to a pedestrian-only path. The other thing that really struck me about the locals was they had a focus and a determination completely unseen in Prague. They stepped with calculated efficiency. They city has a whole lotta water too... I had no idea there were so many waterways and bridges there.
The weather wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. Warmer than Prague, generally cloudy with the occasional light rain... but that didn't prevent me from snapping plenty of pictures.

If you make it out there, I highly recommend the Van Gogh Museum. The Anne Frank House and the Jewish Historical museum added a somber tone to the trip, but following that with a tour of the Heineken Brewery wasn't a bad idea. There was also a nice exhibit at FOAM, a photography museum.

Den Haag (The Hague) - Den Haag was only okay. Nothing that special. Granted, I was there on Christmas Eve, but it didn't look as if there was much to do in any case. I say this having seen practically the whole town. Now, I am not an expert cartographer by any means, but I am used to grids on a map having one letter per column and one number per row (of course, you can invert that). The map I was given - from the official tourism office - had one number per row, but 2 letters per column. Okayyy, I thought, maybe they have two letters per box for a finer detail. That's an interesting approach. But, as it turns out, the 20 letter headings were scrunched into the first 11 columns, leaving the other 9 columns letter-less. Meaning that when I trekked for about an hour on foot to location M7 on the map, I had really travelled way out of the city to location B7, and had to trek back. An hour later, I made it to the hostel at M7, which was when I realized I was four blocks from my original starting point.
The next morning I was able to make it to an MC Escher museum and the Peace Palace (though the Palace was closed). The Escher museum was real cool - it even had a virtual reality exhibit which allowed the user to explore his paintings in 3D. Very neat. Each room in the museum had a very wildly-shaped chandelier - everything ranging from a cello to a skull.

Bruges (Brugge) - this town was fantastic. My friend Jessica recommended it to me, describing it as "a whimsical little town...very old worldish... quaint and european feeling," which turned out to be a very accurate description. Gorgeous place. Hard to take a bad photograph - many bridges over reflecting water, colorful architecture. And the food and drink - incredible. I've heard all about how great Belgian chocolates are, and when I moseyed into this chocolate store, I thought, "Ok, let's see what the fuss is all about." I walked out saying "Holy crap! That's AMAZING!!" Exact same thing goes for Belgian beer and Belgian waffles. If you like sweet food and / or beer and / or photography, I highly recommend this town.

Paris - And of course Paris. All I can say is wow, what a city. Paris quickly jumped to the top of the list of my favorite cities. The people were incredibly nice and very patient with my broken and horribly-accented French. The sights were amazing, the food was incredible. No complaints at all about this leg of the trip. Experienced the expected (and over-hyped!) French snobbery just once, as everyone I spoke to was incredibly accommodating - whether I was asking for directions, or a recommendation on where to get des pains aux chocolats.

Of course, having recently read The DaVinci Code, I had to scope out the Louvre for places described in the book, including the inverted glass pyramid:


Also, my roommate visited Paris a couple weeks ago for her job, and she told me that the Eiffel Tower glitters every hour on the hour. Fortunately, I got to the tower at about 10 minutes to the hour, so I was able to record it:


For anyone who's interested, I posted some other pictures from my trip here.

So all in all, it was a fantastic trip. I arrived back in Prague with enough time to crash and unpack before celebrating New Year's.
My friends and I left the bar around 10 to midnight to go up this nearby hill for a good view of the city below and the offical fireworks. However, I don't thnk we ever saw the "official" fireworks. Given the lack of open container laws, and the apparent lack of firecracker laws, firecrackers were being set off in every direction all around (and directly over) us. Add in some sledding on a homemade sled dubbed "The Filthy Dingus" and you have one highly enjoyable New Year's.
Here's Ben posing with the Dingus.


I will say this one last bit about my travels. I was extremely happy to leave the Czech language behind, with its zahoranskeho's and zmrzlina's. However, getting off the bus in Amsterdam, I was pretty disheartened to see Scheepmakersstraat and Derwindermakerlaan. Fortunately I could get by on English there, as well as in Den Haag and Bruges. However, after a few days of re-learning my French, and getting pretty good at it, I return to Prague to find that my brain wants to speak French, not Czech. "Merci" is so much easier than "Dekuje." And even if you don't speak a lick of French, you can see a sign for "L'Academie Nationale de Musique" and know exactly what it is. Not so much here. Back to the world of sentences without vowels: strc prst skrz krk (meaning "put a finger through your throat").