minuly tyden

some excerpts from my life as of late:

I saw the most intense Czech film ever, Skritek. Elves, a slaughterhouse, marijuana plants, nosy neighbors, a supermarket and absolutely no dialogue. Crazy and sad but amazing. Go see it.

I went to a Halloween party given by the Danhelovis' family friends, who have an American father. They set up a haunted path in the woods and at the end of the path there was a graveyard where they hid candy for the kids to find.

I found out that I am now at the Czech speaking level of a 2 year old, so my host cousin Emma and I understood each other perfectly. She also taught me some words for colors.

What is Central Europe? I may never know.

I ate french toast at Kava Kava Kava, one of the few places in the Czech Republic that serves peanut butter and maple syrup.

My host mother bought me an avocado. Isn't that just the sweetest thing?

I like discussing American elections and campaigns with all my Czech acquaintances.

I am going to Germany, specifically Dresden, in 2 weeks. Needless to say, I am excited.

I am studying the Vietnamese immigrant community in the CZ for my study project. I!ll keep you posted.

last of krakow and also zilina

The morning after, the group went to the Bunkier, which is one of the few contemporary art spaces in Krakow. There were 2 exhibitons going on: one of an artist from Albania about fleeing the country that consisted of various video pieces, and the World Press Photo exhibition, which is a surefire way to make yourself depressed about the state of the world. Following lunch I tried out the Krakow arachaeology museum, which was a strange combination of dioramas of ancient Poland and a random assortment of ancient Egyptian mummies. I also tried to go to a museum that showcased an 15th century cult group that worshipped a silver chicken (seriously) but it was closed for repairs. Sigh. I did a lot of walking through a beautiful park that runs through the center of Krakow, though, which was great.



For our last morning in Krakow I went to the old Jewish district, Kazimierz. I say old because there definitely aren't any Jews there anymore, or for that matter, in most of Poland. Kazimierz is now a large tourist attraction--half of it is filled with trendy pubs and clubs and the other half is basically a Jewish theme park without the Jews. This all sounds very negative, I'm sure, and Kazimierz is beautiful, but the whole sense of it is just rather depressing when you see restaurants with names like "Alef" or "Rubenstein" and contrast it with the anti Semitism that is still strong in Poland today. It's a little weird, and probably the reason why I never felt totally great about Krakow or all of Poland.

The next morning we went on another 5 hour bus ride, back to Slovakia to visit the city of Zilina. Our penzion was kind of creepy and the proprietor bailed out on us and said we could only stay there for a night. While our academic director pondered this dilemma, we ate traditional Slovak food at a restaurant that looked like a place Daniel Boone would have eaten at--animal pelts, log cabin, fake guns. I had ovoce knedliky, which are fruit dumplings. Day two in Zilina: we went to Stanica, the objective for our visit. Stanica is a train station that is simultaneously an art space. It has a gallery and a space for kids' workshops and a beautiful theater. We got to help out by doing various chores. I raked leaves and it was a blast. That night we saw an amazing dance performance in the Stanica theater with music by Godspeed You Black Emperor. (I didn't sleep too well due to a disco party being held in our hotel that night, but oh well.) Áfter some mishaps the following morning I eventually found the train station and it was snowing! Beautiful! And now back to Praha.

more of the regional trip

Our second day in Bratislava, I went to the Bratislava castle, which is not very attractive (it was mostly reconstructed in the 1950s, actually), but there was beautiful weather, and I got to witness the Slovak national dish, halusky--it's gnocchi covered in sheep cheese and bacon. Intense, no? But the Slovaks love it. That night I got to see a wonderful modern dance performance at A4 involving witch-like costumes, pseudo-strangulation, and blips and beeps. (Modern dance is always a little hard to describe. I should probably post my review here sometime.)

The next day we got on a five hour bus ride to Krakow in Poland, where we got to stay in a pretty swanky hotel. I ate traditional Polish barley soup, but really, traditional eastern and central European cuisine, let me tell ya, they are all about the potatoes and the bread and the meat and the onions...yes. We went to Nowa Huta the next morning to see the community theater. What is Nowa Huta, you may ask? It was a "Socialist paradise" suburb of Krakow built in the 1950s, which means that it's a huge group of massive concrete panelak. A neighborhood of identical apartment buildings, if you will. Now it's pretty run-down and considered a sort of "bad neighborhood," which it really isn't, just kind of unattractive and industrial-looking. Anyways, this community theater is objectively trying to bring the people of Nowa Huta together--old and young, Roma and Polish. (Speaking of Roma, we have been learning a lot about them. More on that later, I think.)

I learned that everything in Krakow closes really early. The only thing that was open after our late lunch was a Japanese museum, which turned out not to be a Japanese museum because it was apparently getting repossessed by the Polish government or something. So instead, they had a display of art from Java. Hmmm.

So, feeling a little confused, Tom and I went to see Wawel Castle, the big castle in Krakow. Of course, everything there was closed, but the castle was very beautiful and provided some great views of the city. There is a legend in Wawel Castle that a dragon called Smok lived there and ate young maidens till some brave Polish warrior slaughtered him and everybody celebrated. I mean, who doesn't love a dragon story? Krakow is really into Smok. You can buy stuffed dragons everywhere there. Afterwards we got Indian food, which is always really funny in central Europe because all the waitresses are obviously very Slavic but wear saris and bindis as if they are Indian. I also went to some interesting pubs, including one called the "Tram Bar," where the menu is the tram line of Krakow and every stop on the tram line is a different beverage. A thing I find hilarious about many pubs in this part of the world is they tend to play American music, but the weirdest variety imaginable. They'll start playing Celine Dion and then a grunge song and then a rap song and then suddenly a central European techno song. It's a little crazy, but you just have to go with the flow. After visiting the pubs we wandered the streets of the old town and found a weird cathedral that looked like Haunted Mansion from Disneyland. (Maybe an inspiration?)

Don't worry. More to come soon, yet again.

finally updating!

Last Thursday, we took a field trip to Josefov, the Jewish quarter of Prague, where I saw the old Jewish cemetary (where the creator of the Golem is buried) and various synagogues that were ancient and beautiful. Kind of depressing though, because most of the people who used all these synagogues were all killed, as is the case with all the Jewish sections of the Central European cities we see.

Then on Friday we left for Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia. It was a five hour train ride and it's always a thrill to get a new stamp on your passport. We arrived at Chez David, a pseudo-Jewish themed penzion, got a brief tour of the centrum, and went to dinner with a group of Slovak students in a cellar hospoda. The next day Tom and I hiked up a tall hill to see the incredibly ostentatious Soviet war memorial and cemetary, which had a great view of the city and its castle. Later that day the entire group went to A4, an "alternative" art space in Bratislava, to make arts and crafts out of used computer parts. I definitely am not artistically gifted when it comes to handicrafts. I got a lot of glue on myself, which was fun. Three of us met with a man who runs an NGO for the Roma population--very enlightening---and then we went back to A4 for a "retro party" where people watched old Communist music videos from the 70's and 80's. I will try and post links to some of these videos, because they're hysterical.

To be continued!

this and that

...on Monday, we had an SIT birthday celebration at the Alchymista (the cukrarna next door to school). We had an entire medovnik to ourselves and I got to drink yerba mate and also received a stuffed goat that looks....well, you'd have to see it for yourself.

...on Wednesday night, I saw a one-man performance at the Archa that involved puppets, trampolines, beer, acrobatics, candy, dance and video. I followed this with a visit to Cross Club, the most surrealistic place possibly ever--it is filled with spinning gears and sculptures and looks like the interior of a Disneyland ride.

...on Thursday, Tom and I went to Zoo Praha. It was pretty great. The best part of it was the Indonesian Jungle, where we innocently stood in a dark tunnel looking at nocturnal creatures when suddenly---whizz! We saw and heard something fly past our heads. Slightly terrified, we walked a little further when we realized there were bats just flying around the exhibition not even inches from our heads. The strange thing about the zoo compared to American zoos was that all the walls in the various habitats were very, very low; anyone could hypothetically have reached and grabbed an animal and picked it up. I even got a shirt that says in Czech that I am an anteater. Later that night we had a discussion and debate with Czech students and one of the members of the Plastic People of the Universe (look them up on Wikipedia---they're very important in Czech history).

cesky krumlov and a czech birthday

Cesky Krumlov was marked by a delicious arrival at a pub that was built into the castle ramparts. We ate in a small cozy room with wooden benches and stone walls while bagpipe and Indian pop music played quietly through muted speakers and had an absolute feast. The next morning I went to the cathedral, a marionette museum and a great English-language bookstore where I bought some Flannery O'Connor. It was freezing cold, but we all went to tour the restored Baroque theater (one of two in the entire world) and the Krumlov castle, which was also amazing. Throughout the day the St. Wenceslaus (Vaclav) Fair was being held, which involved lots of arts and crafts booths, people dressed in medieval costume, folk dance, and Czech street fair food. Cesky Krumlov may be touristy, but it's gorgeous. I'd recommend going there.

My birthday celebration was kicked off with my arrival to the Danhelovis’ (my host family) house in a small Sudetenland village called Zderaz. On the way to Zderaz from Prague my host mother, Kristyna, gave a vague explanation of how Zderaz used to be a German village but the Germans “had to leave” after World War II. I didn’t ask any further questions because I got the sense it was an uncomfortable topic, however, I would be interested to know the full story behind Zderaz and how the Danhelovi family acquired the house.The moment I arrived at the house I was immediately presented with a cake that my host sister Anna had made for me --it was a very unusual cake made from jello, mandarin oranges and vanilla wafers and was delicious.

Every member of the immediate family, extended family and family friends kissed me on each cheek and wished me happy birthday in Czech and then sang “Happy Birthday” in English. Though I had been told ahead of time to expect this, it was still a little bit unnerving to receive kisses from some of the guests who were absolute strangers (definitely not the American “norm”), yet it did make me feel like I was truly part of a large and warm extended family. The Danhelovis presented me with a CD by a Czech group called Gothart and a calendar of Prague. After a dinner of knedliky and mushroom sauce we all moved to the family room, which had a beautifully painted ceiling (painted by a French man) that was 100 years old and in excellent condition because, according to Kristyna, the house wasn’t used much for long periods of time. This family room also had a fireplace and a piano and was extremely cozy.

One of Kristyna’s father’s friends played the accordion and Kristyna’s brother-in-law Pavel, who is in a band, played the piano and they all sang Czech songs that sounded to me like songs one would sing in a hospoda. I was plied with lots of vino and pivo and after a while I got drowsy, feeling like I was in some kind of strange surrealist dream, surrounded by all these people speaking Czech in a warm room…but I digress.

The next morning I woke up to a long, relaxed breakfast, where we all sat in the equally cozy kitchen and drank cup after cup of caj and ate lots of toasted chleb. Around noon everyone gradually began to move outdoors to the yard and Kristyna came out of the house and announced that her sister Gabriela had given birth to a baby girl, Nela. We all gathered in a circle and everybody but me sang a congratulatory song and then I was plied with even more alcohol, this time slivovice. I ended up spending a lot of my time with one of the cousins, Stefan, who is four. We bonded over the broken bathroom door because we were both trying to fix it.

It was actually quite nice to spend time with a Czech person where there really was no language barrier; because Stefan was so young, he was very content just to have someone to play with and he led me around by the hand and talked to me in Czech. We drew pictures and he showed me all his favorite toys and where all the bikes and the apple trees were and it made me feel good to be able to make somebody happy. I even learned some Czech from him, like “shneck” (snail) and “velka sestra” (big sister). My host brother Ondrej very kindly gave me a tour of the grounds in his best English, showing me where the cow pastures were and where the horses and sheep used to be kept. (Ondrej always makes me happy because he is always trying to communicate with me, even if he doesn’t know the right words, and is always friendly and sweet and funny; he’s a terrific kid.) I also talked with one of the family friends, Karel, who spoke eleven (!) languages—Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, Bulgarian, English, Slovenian, and a few others I don’t remember. I have been continually impressed by how many languages many people in the Czech Republic can speak, even if it is rather broken.

After a late lunch I went with the Danhelovis, who stopped in a larger village to go to Mass while I received some phone calls from my family back home and ordered jedna horka cokoladu from a highly attractive waiter at U Zlate Slepice (I promised myself I would remember the name of the kavarna because of the waiter). Following Mass we all drove to the hospital in Prague to visit Gabriela and baby Nela. The hospital was in a building so beautiful it seemed odd there would be, of all things, a hospital inside. I am so accustomed to seeing white, sterile, ugly hospital buildings that it just felt unreal to have a hospital amidst great beauty. I was also surprised that there were no sanitary regulations about all of us going inside to see a newborn baby, unlike back home where they are quite strict about sanitation inside hospitals. I’m not sure how to explain this sort of cultural difference; perhaps it is because I am coming from an overly sanitized environment in general (i.e., air fresheners, highly toxic cleaning powders, Windex). We didn’t wash our hands or anything like that and there was even another woman and her newborn in the same room as Gabriela, and baby Nela was passed around to everyone for kisses. She was small and had a large tuft of dark hair on her scalp and was sleeping peacefully and it was an unusual and remarkable birthday that was literally a birth day.