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.
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