Tag Archives: Czech

Floating down the Vltava

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I got the message on my phone last week, saying something like “We are go for rafting. Meet at Hlavni Nadraži at 6 a.m. Bring rain gear. Pray for sun!” I prayed extra-hard, as I don’t own rain gear.

Soup Boy, my ex-flatmate, was having a birthday party, and he decided to do it in style. That’s the way Soup Boy is. He decided that a serene float down the river with his friends would be a jolly fine way to celebrate his annual quantum aging event. He called the rafting company, went over train schedules, sent out invitations, and managed the whole brouhaha. We would start our journey near the Austrian border and float gently north on the Vltava, stopping along the way for refreshment, paddling through beautiful scenery, and generally having a good time. At the end of the day, if we had not reached Chesky Krumlov, we would get a lift from the rafting company into the beautiful-if-touristy little town, where we would bunk overnight in a hostel.

And that’s how it worked out, sort of.

During the week I got messages from Little John. “Do you have a pirate flag?” was one of the first. Before long the party, under Little John’s influence, became a pirate outing. I had no problem with that, especially when I got the latest cut of Pirates of the White Sand the day before. Arrr!

The day approached and the forecast was changing by the minute, and all we could do was wait for the butterfly in China to flap its wings or not. I got to bed reasonably early, but I had difficulty sleeping. Not nerves, I don’t think, just one of those nights. I was already up and about when my alarm went off at 5, and under the fizzing glare of my noisy lightbulbs I packed a change of clothes and the Jolly Roger. A peek out the window was reassuring; the sky was clear.

As is my way, I got to the meeting point a bit early. I’m pretty laid back about most things, but when I’m traveling I’m not comfortable until I’m installed in my seat and ready to roll. After a short wait I saw Soup Boy and Little John, and their buddy Izzy. (Izzy because not only is that a damn fine pirate name, but because that’s the name of his dog.) While we waited in line for train tickets we were joined by Rosa. That made five out of seven, with time counting away. Soup Boy’s phone chimed and he read the message. “Jane and her boyfriend aren’t going to make it. They overslept. They’ll join is tonight in Checky Krumlov.” I had never met Jane, but I was disappointed. The more the merrier, I figured.

Tickets in hand, Soup Boy said, “OK, we have about fifteen minutes before the train leaves.” As I mentioned before, I like to have butt in seat well before the train pulls out. Generally, I bust my ass to get where I need to be, then sit waiting and wish I’d stopped to grab a sandwich on the way. Fifteen minutes. No problem. The group stood in a ring for a couple of minutes, then some people declared that they were going to grab sandwiches. Just relax, I reminded myself. You’re just along for the ride.

We missed the train. Soup Boy had been a little vague on just when the train left, and we got to the platform in time to watch it pull away. This is why I like to have a margin of error. Now I had no train and no sandwich.

The next train left in an hour, but we were going to have a long wait in Cheske Budejovice. Nothing wrong with that, the center is very pleasant. It just meant that we would be getting out onto the river late. On the plus side, Jane and her beau had time to join us. Overall, a net positive.

An hour later we were on the train, heading south. It is time to review the cast of characters.

Seven Deadly Pirates

Seven Deadly Pirates

  • Me. Mild-mannered writer, watcher of people, drinker of beer. Not so good with strangers. Quiet, except for the times I chew people’s ears off.

  • Soup Boy. Creative and competitive, he doesn’t do anything half-assed. On the surface very unlike me, but we are compatible. We both find the Universe to be slightly absurd.

  • Little John. Offer him any two pieces of information, and he will discover an interesting parallel between them. His answer will likely be given in song, either a snippet of a tune that was popular within the last 100 years or his own adaptation of one of the above. LIttle John is a talker. His enthusiasm is infectious, and a little bit scary.

  • Izzy. A relative youngster, and a good guy to be on a boat with. He speaks his mind, but is not a butthead about it. Izzy likes girls. A lot.

  • Rosa. Born and raised north of the arctic circle, Rosa has stories. She tends toward the talkative end of the spectrum, but not obnoxiously so. When she speaks her mind, it sounds more like criticism. Not sure what the defining factor is there.

  • Jane. The only Czech in the group. She is a very touchy-feely person, and also a talker. When not teaching english to Soup Boy, she is a psychologist and a tutor of gifted students. She is a very sweet, sincere person, but knows every trick in the book for making me feel uncomfortable. The contact, the probing questions, and the honest confessions when I have only known her a few hours are difficult for me to handle. Still, for that, she’s very smart and fun to be around.

  • Beau. No matter where he lives, he will carry Boston with him. Of all the people in the group, I did not form a strong personal opinion of Beau. From Jane I learned that he is a good cook and that he came into her life at a really tough time and he’s been great. Beau, I think, does not like the unexpected.

I am tempted right now to go back and rename all the characters after Gilligan’s Island. The only question: who’s Ginger?

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Payday!

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Well, at long last I’ve been paid for my rousing Soap-Selling adventure. I got the message from my agent yesterday that they had my money, and bickety-bam I was down at the office to pick up my sweet lucre. Even after a chunk of it was withheld to keep the Czech government running in top form [Insert image of Indiana Jones here… Jones: “What form?” Official: “Top. Form.”] There was still a tidy little sum for two day’s “work”. Athena wrote me a check.

A check! I’d not seen one in this country, except the one I had to mail back to the US to deposit. They just don’t do checks here. Then Athena explained to me that I have to go to the right branch of the right bank, and take along plenty of identification, and expect to wait a while. That will be my adventure for today. It’s a good day for it, seeing as rent’s due.

I haven’t done any extra-ing since then, unfortunately. This must be what people in the biz call a “dry spell”. With my acting career in the dumper, I don’t have a safety net anymore. Better get writing.

Thanks!

Why being a writer makes it more diffucult to learn another language.

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Each week I receive as homework a set of sentences to render in czech, each carefully designed to stretch my abilities with the language without breaking it. In the past three weeks the scope of these sentences has taken a gratifying and very enjoyable step forward. I will see a sentence, something that would seem quite ordinary, but it represents a whole new range of things I’m able to say. Heady times.

Last week one of my sentences was, “In the middle of my room, there is a chair.” This one really didn’t push any new grammar boundaries, but it was nearly the last sentence of my homework that I did. It seemed like a good opening sentence for a story. There’s a lot packed into that sentence, the narrator’s only room has a chair, seemingly alone, in the middle. It raises lots of questions. It was only the because my lesson was in two hours that I managed to keep on the homework. Homework completed, lesson survived, and a Czech movie with my teacher viewed, I was ready to sprint for the keyboard.

Which is a bit of a pity, because Iveta left the question, “so, what are you doing now?” out there, and I answered with “I’m going to go sit by myself and work.” It’s probably a good rule of thumb, as a single guy, that when a pretty girl asks me something like that, I should keep other answers handy.

Anyway, that sentence was pretty much all I could think about. The chair is in the middle, which puts everything else, narrator included, at the edges. What happened to give the chair such importance? The story’s not finished yet (it’s another of the ‘difficult’ style), but so far so good.

On another homework-related note, for the past two weeks I’ve been assigned to writer a few sentences about my day. The idea was for me to write sentences like, “Yesterday morning I got up at six,” simple uses of the past tense and handy day-to-day vocabulary. I have been unable to perform this seemingly simple exercise. My failure stems from my complete inability to write about something as boring as my life, and all in short sentences, to boot. My first attempt started “Alas, my life is not very interesting, but I did do a couple of things this week.” I managed that sentence all right, and the bit about posting a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer was all right except that “post” (in the sense of upload) and “download” were nowhere to be found in my prehistoric references. After that, I tried to tell about a story I had written, and I got deep into things I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to do.

This week I did a little better, telling the story about trying to tell a joke in czech. A little better, but not much. This week I’m on notice. I’m to write simple sentences that apply what I’ve learned, and grit my teeth and ignore cadence, flow, and expressing relationships in complex ways. In other words: No rambling. Do you know how hard that is?

On another side note, Iveta is picking up a very bad habit of saying things in Czech and expecting me to reply in the same language. The gap between my written and spoken comprehension is vast. It takes me quite a bit of work to separate the words and more often that not some word or cluster completely defies my parsing abilities. I’m considering hooking the TV back up, just so I can practice listening.

Thanks!

Hospitality

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Today I was served a huge meal by my brother’s wife’s brother’s girlfriend’s mom. She had almost no warning that we were coming, and we had no intention of staying for food, but there you have it. We were in southern Bohemia, two kilometers from the Austrian border. As had been the case the night before, the conversation was almost entirely in Czech, but I did get a little more tech support. There was a story about our host, who had been a border guard during the communist times until he got caught helping people escape into Austria. I never did learn what happened next.

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Žert

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If you were czech, you would have recognized the title of this episode as a reference to Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke. Last night I was surrounded by strangers who spoke no English, and I tried to tell a joke in Czech. It was my most ambitious attempt to communicate orally outside my lessons.

It didn’t work very well.

I had been listening to the conversation around me, not really hoping to understand a great deal, but at times I knew enough about what was going on that had I been able to form sentences more quickly I might have had something to add. Of course, by the time I had assembled a candidate sentence, conversation had long since moved on.

More often, I would catch words I knew (or knew I should know), standing out like little islands of comprehensibility in the swirling ocean of conversation. (Czech, in fact, when spoken by several people at once, does sound a bit like the surf.) On one occasion, I caught a few words that, when combined, were amusing: “… I bought … five kilograms … piece … zebra … nine crowns …”

I prepared my sentence ahead of time, and sure enough not long after Jirka came by and asked me if I was understanding anything.

“I understand everything!” I exclaimed in Czech, which got a chuckle. “For example…” That caught people’s attention, because I actually pulled off the pronunciation of například pretty well, and it’s not a common word for non-speakers to know. In the following silence my mind went blank. “Moment…” I said, stalling for time, which got another chuckle, a polite one, and I was free to stumble through my joke. “For example, I heard one woman say she bought 5 kilograms of zebra—”

“You mean Žebra,” Jirka interrupted. “Ribs.”

I could have replied, “oooooh, ribs. That’s not so interesting, then.” That would have been funny. Instead I pressed on with the story the way it was scripted in my head, but even after insisting that I had heard zebra, everyone assumed I meant žebra, and the joke came out as someone buying a shitload of ribs for only nine crowns. Which isn’t terribly funny. “I understand everything!” I finished, and got a courtesy laugh, and conversation went on without me.

That’s not to say I would have been adaptable enough to jump on the punch line opportunity in English, either, and I did trot out a fairly complicated sentence that leaned heavily on my new past tense skills, which surprised the folks around me. So it wasn’t all bad. It could have been better, though. It could have been Žert.

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Happy Birthday

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The reason I was in a tiny village far in the southeastern corner of the Czech Republic was to celebrate the 60th birthday of MaK’s mother. On the big day I sat down to lunch with the family, and after a brief altercation over who would have to drink the warm beer (I almost, but happily didn’t, ask, “whiy don’t you share the cold one and give the other one more time to cool down?”), we were all shoveling down the Special Birthday Soup. These people have a soup for everything. I was debating whether to do a courtesy choke-down on the mushrooms when I heard tinny music filtering in through the double-glazing.

“This is brilliant!” Jirka exclaimed. “When they have an announcement, they play some music, then they make the announcements, then they play some more music. It’s from the communist days. It’s brilliant.”

Jirka spent much of the Czech communist era in North America. He is very critical of all things communist, with odd exceptions. He is himself an operator, a wheeler-dealer, his currency is nods and winks. He is the fire chief (in a village of 300 people), and apparently that means he supplies the ‘club’, the place where the fire department can hang out getting drunk. He figures on being Mayor as well. Communism is not dead in places like this, and his motto is (something like) “work with them, but don’t ever let then forget how badly they messed things up.” I expect when a communist is in a position to help Jirka, exchanging favors and generally doing what it takes to succeed in politics (and everything is politics), history is not an issue.

“Listen,” Jirka says, bounding up from the table as the music ends. He opened a window to the oppressive heat outside and stood, gesturing in excitement with each distorted sentence. MaK and Jessica rolled their eyes.

Of course I didn’t catch it, but even before the end of the “bzhrpt bzfg brchtlejk…” segment of the show the phone rang. It was a call from a fellow villager congratulating her on lasting sixty years. Yes, Jirka had arranged to have the occasion broadcast to the entire village. I suspect most of those who cared already knew, but it was a good way to pick up any stragglers.

Jirka left the window open while the post-announcements patriotic music played.

So, I don’t feel bad about broadcasting Jessica’s age on the Internet. Jirka has already commandeered the most effective vehicle for getting the word out to the people who matter.

Thanks!

A Quiet Afternoon in Moravia

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“And then I coughed” my host narrated as I reacted to the bite of the Slivovice. “That’s how I knew it was the good stuff.” He laughed, then turned serious. Like many people, he knows what I should be writing about, and now he was starting to write it for me. “People in America, they would want to read about this, about life here. There are lots of stories here.”

‘Here’ is a farming village whose name I’ve never caught. Horní Something. I was sitting in the home of my sister-in-law’s parents, enjoying the homemade plum vodka (it’s not just wishful thinking, the homemade stuff really is significantly better), while Jirka regaled me with stories of his life in the village, his adventures elsewhere, and most of all, the ongoing restoration of the home in which we sat.

He gestured out the window, where across the street is a small church in moderately good repair. “I was a choir boy in that church,” he said. “800 years old. I could have had a villa in Florida, or an apartment in London, but when I came back here I started to feel it and I knew I had to come back here. Home. I can never be lonely here, even when there is nobody around.” I weighed mentioning some of my own thoughts on home, but for conversations like that I prefer to think slowly, and with Jirka there is none of that.

The house, too, is old, but though the plank floors had fallen victim to moisture and long neglect, the thick walls of stone and brick stand straight. The tile roofs on the main structure and most of the outbuildings were also intact, and the exceptions have now been removed. As with any place that has been filled with humans for a long time, there are stories attached to this old building, and I think more than anything else that is why Jirka bought it.

Some of the stories are larger, and reflect the ebb and flow of history. Before the communists came, a wealthy farmer lived here with his family, and apparently he kept a journal. With the communists came an inversion of the social order, and the family’s lands were confiscated and the people who were put in charge knew little of farming. According the Jirka, the man wrote of mistakes and incompetence as the productivity of the land plummeted. Jirka summarized. “They did not know to spread the manure in February, then they took the man’s last two horses for the slaughter. ‘It is all tractors now,’ the communists said. Too late they found out that their tractors would not work on that land, it was too soft.”

I would like to be able to read that journal myself, not just for the sweep of history, but for the smaller events that transform a building into a home. I don’t know what I would find there, or even if the diarist recorded things like that, but it would be an interesting read.

The house has come a long way since the last time I was here; in fact, it wasn’t really habitable before. The rooms that are complete are very comfortable, and parts of the project reinforce some of my stereotypes of the Czech work ethic. It is obvious Jirka is of the “do it right the first time and never worry about it again” school, and the local craftsmen he has hired do quite well with the message, “time is not important; what matters is precision.” The woodwork is the most obvious example, and one I am less unqualified to comment on. In many cases the old woodwork was lovingly restored, and once again reflects the beauty it must have displayed in the 1930’s, or perhaps even the 1830’s. When new parts were needed, the old style was carefully followed, often using wood from the same era. In the wine cellar he has stripped away plaster to expose the old brick vault, and then coated the brick with modern products to preserve it’s rediscovered glory.

So, you get the idea. It’s shaping up to be a nice place. Assuming Jirka’s money holds out, he should be done with the restoration of the house and outbuildings (“the barn will be a local playhouse”) in another fifteen years or so.

Jirka tells me that there’s another fixer-upper (although already habitable) in the neighboring village going for a pittance. His description of it is intriguing, but I’m not in the market for a career in home repair. It does seem a great chance to build up some sweat equity, though. If anyone’s looking for an escape hatch and isn’t afraid of a hammer, you could do worse.

Thanks!

The quiet between games

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It is quiet in the LIttle Café Near Home right now. Franta has thankfully hung the horn back up on the wall, the music is peaceful, and most of the patrons have gone home. Clouds in the west have hastened twilight, and the weekend streets are quiet. There is a hint of rain in the air, just a little extra something on the breeze that steals in through the open window from time to time. Pretty girls come in, buy cigarettes, and leave again.

Ghana beat the Czechs. The US team is about to play Italy. As you read this, you already know what happened (assuming you care at all). Consider this a message from the past, when things known to you were still mysteries. It is a naive message from an innocent time, a time when we suspected the US team was a joke, but we weren’t completely sure yet.

Ghana beat the Czechs. Italy must be celebrating as they prepare to meet their North American adversaries. If Italy beats the Americans, they advance. The Czechs will play Italy next, but they will play a man short due to a senseless red card in today’s game. If the US loses to both Italy and Ghana, the Czechs could very easily be eliminated, and Ghana would advance to the next round instead. Now the Czechs really, really need the US to win at least one of their games. That may be asking too much of the Americans.

It is game time, but the music plays on.

Thanks!

I Like Potted Meat

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For lunch today I went the simple route – fresh czech bread, cheese, and a little tub of something that, according to the label, had once been associated with chickens in some way or another. I pulled back the heavy foil lid and there it was, pink and homogenous. Mmm… potted meat.

This stuff was on the pink side. I looked at it for a moment and wondered if there was any difference between this stuff and cat food, besides the label. Some cat food claims to have extra vitamins and provide a more balanced diet, so, ignoring issues of quality and health inspections in the factories, cat food may well be healthier.

Still, it doesn’t matter what other mammals like this stuff, it’s mighty tasty, and the Czech Republic is the place to go for potted meat. They devote more space in their stores to potted meat than they do for ketchup, and that’s a lot of space. Beer, of course, has more space on the shelves than any other product. And what better for washing the old chicken goo down than a nice cold one?

Thanks!

Just So

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I had brunch with Graybeard the other day, at a place popular with Americans. They serve big American breakfasts on the weekends, and that is always a Good Thing. Mmmm… Big Brain Scramble!

After we ordered the waitress brought us our utensils and napkins. Exactly two napkins. Graybeard, as you might guess, has a long, gray beard, and he likes extra napkins to keep it clean. He made a comment about how cheap the Czechs are, only bringing one napkin per person, but on reflection I think he’s missing something about Czech culture.

The czechs as a group are craftsmen. Do not confuse this with industrious or efficient, but in the little daily tasks most czechs I know like things to be just so. Rather than provide some napkins, the waitress will carefully count out the correct number. Not out of cheapness, but out of rightness.

I doubt this attitude would carry over to a repetitious task like working in a manufacturing plant. There’s little opportunity for craftsmanship there, and other czech habits, like drinking beer with breakfast, would probably reduce productivity. Where I would hire a czech would be for something that required skill and patience, but the deadlines could be a little looser. Perhaps manufacturing high-end musical instruments, or glass blowing.

Thanks!

A Sweet Friday Afternoon

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Got a call from Amz this morning at 4:20; it was already getting light outside. At first I thought it must be later than that and I tried to work up some semblance of coherence, to no avail. I just couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation, no matter how much energy was coming over the wire. She quickly realized she was talking to a zombie and let me go back to sleep, after lamenting that we were not in the same city. I feel the same way.

If my fuzzy impressons were correct, Amz had just had a fight with her boyfriend. She had just moved the last of her stuff into his place, but apparently it was still not their place. A thought tip-toed across my less-than-nimble brain as I drifted back off to the land of nod. I am the only one who has crashed at her place for more than a day or two that she hasn’t wound up being angry with. Amz would be, I think, a very challenging roommate. She’ll patch things up with Cute Boy, and that’s good. Should things fall apart, though, my advice to her for her next relationship is this: “Sure, sure, marriage and all that, just don’t live together. Ever. Make sure there’s a short taxi ride between your house and your husband’s.”

One night, enjoying the lights reflecting off the still waters of Mission Bay as we walked along the deserted shore, we forged a pact that if we were both single January 1, 2012, we would get married.

Note to self: start saving up cab fare.

I woke up for real a few hours later, the morning sun blasting through my windows, my head clear and sharp, knowing I had a lot of cramming to do if I was not going to waste my czech lesson today. I got some studying in yesterday, but there’s a lot of shit in this language. I have another episode about that coming up soon, as soon as I get my head around do and na well enough to even ask the question.

It was a good lesson; my studies paid off, and I’m finally getting the concepts she’s been pounding into my head week after week. We were done ahead of schedule, and she took the opportunity to throw a new pile of vocabulary at me. Parts of the body. That was good; just the day before my landlord had been complaining of his knee, and for some reason I had wanted to know how to say “foot” this morning.

Otakar Ptáček talking about knees and Iveta discussing body parts are very different. My teacher is a very pretty czech girl who is dating a friend of my brother’s and now a friend of mine. But pretty she is, by gum, and a guy can’t help but think things. I can’t help it anyway, especially when she throws in the word for “kiss” after teaching me “lips”. They’re similar. It was all for linguistic interest. Not sure I can justify learning two ways to say “breasts” the same way, but over here breasts just aren’t the same deal. I was taken back to the line in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World when the english guy says “All you Americans are so fixated on bosoms.” (Actually, I doubt he used the word “fixated.” It was the 60’s, but ridiculous psychological theories were still not part of pop culture.)

Rose once said, (and this quote I do have right) “Boobs are man’s kryptonite.”

See that? And incident that lasted perhaps fifteen seconds, thirty at the outside, has now taken up a big chunk of a narrative that was supposed to just be about what nice day I’ve been having. So she taught me breasts. (All her indications of body parts were accompanied with unambiguous gestures.) And she also taught me boobs. And butt. Inspired by that, I had her teach me the phrase “I’ve been sitting on my ass all day.” After “stomach” we discussed Czech food. I told her that when all czechs drive they will be even fatter than Americans. Then I told her that Americans will drive around in circles until a parking space opens up so they don’t have to walk very far. She looked at me, incredulous.

“That’s horrible,” she said.

Czechs, speaking English, use that word a lot. Horrible. And they say it with feeling. One language or the other has a more nuanced way of expressing badness, and things don’t map across the void between the two quite right. I think it is English that has more shades of gray, which surprises me. The Czechs are to unpleasant like Eskimos are to snow. (That’s not really fair, but I like it too much to delete.) I think perhaps it is not in the czech nature to differentiate. There is that which is pleasant, and that which is to be survived. Last week Iveta misspoke in English, not her native tongue. “I’m horrible!” she exclaimed. “I’m so stupid!” She said this after she had listened to me massacre some ordinary phrase she had known before she had known what knowing was. I look forward in the future to comparing the different gradations, of “bad” and “stupid”. Perhaps if you were to graph them in czech and english you would discover that the axes are completely different. Now wouldn’t that be interesting? It’s stuff like that that keeps me going. Language as a window to the soul. The words people use, the phrases, the parts of life that language simplifies, show where that culture’s heads are.

It was a good lesson, and afterward I hustled over here, to the soulless free Internet bar in the mall. I won’t be here much longer; the day outside is completely perfect, I’ve got a great Hawaiian shirt on, and the people-watching is optimum. I’d be out in the day already, but they’re playing some old Rolling Stones and I’m feeling good. I’m feeling velmi dobře, and I don’t care who knows it.

Thanks!

It’s a Schizophrenic Little Bar, But it doesn’t Suck.

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I sit, knocking out a backlog of blog stories, sipping from a tall, thin, glass of Zwettler (a German beer). The café has six small tables, closely packed, and four stools at the bar. The sun is pounding in through the west-facing window with an intensity I have not seen lately.

When I got here today I thought perhaps I had come through the wrong door. I even recognized one face from the Cheap Budvar Place next door. The place was thick with flavored smoke and old men. My favorite neighborhood bartender was working, though, so I knew I belonged. She’s past her prime now, perhaps, which means I can still think when she’s around.

I made my way to the last empty table, settled in, and after a few minutes opened the laptop. After I had been working for a few minutes a guy near me started speaking louder in my direction. I actually did the look-over-the-shoulder thing to see who behind me he was talking to. No, he was talking to me. he had Harry Carray glasses and was wearing a suit only a golfer could love. He said some more stuff at me. I made an honest attempt to understand, but it’s hard enough figuring out what sober czechs are talking about. I finally had to shrug and apologize for not speaking czech.

It was as if I had “You don’t say, sir; please expand on that fascinating observation.” No sooner had I explained that I didn’t know what the hell he was saying that he opened up the tap and let the conversation fly. The man’s little buddy turned to give me a shrug and a smile filled with unhappy teeth. Instantly I liked Little Buddy. He was apologizing for his friend in a way, and I was apologizing to him for not knowing the local jazz, but more than that we were sharing a joke.

Gradually a transition took place. I’ve seen it happen once before here, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t publish that episode. As I’ve been sitting here, the bar has gently transitioned into a gay bar. I’m sure of that – for all the Czechs pride themselves on their laissez-faire attitude they seem less tolerant of homosexuality. Then again, I’m not really the guy to judge that.

But the old men with their cigars have been replaced with younger men who exchange clandestine gestures of familiarity. Perhaps at this moment this is not a gay bar but an in-the-closet bar. Or maybe these are just regular guys who are more physically expressive than their czech brethren. It’s all the same to me. [An aside: three or four years ago I was in a gay bar in San Diego, and I was worried about what I would do if some guy hit on me. Then it occurred to me that if no women hit on me in my regular bars, no men would hit on me either. Being non-sexy means I can go to any bar I want, and damn if they don’t mix the drinks twice as strong in gay bars. Karaoke night in Vegas, at a bar with the “buy one drink with good booze and drink beer free the rest of the night” deal, was a night to remember. I sang Kinks and Queen.]

Back to the here and now. There’s one guy, thinning gray streaky hair, bad teeth, scruffy, me in fifteen more years, standing at the bar. He’s watching the window and the door, and demanding far more of the bartender than she wants to give. I know that look; bartenders have looked at me that way many times.

There are three guys in one knot, speaking earnestly, and since I can’t understand them it sounds terribly important. Aesthetics, I think, or perhaps the nature of consciousness.

Another changing of the guard is taking place. The second couple just came in, young and with enough scent to send an owl running for cover. [Nature note: owls are the greatest natural enemy of skunks. I’ve been told by people who should know that some owls will leave a dead skunk rotting in the nest to keep other predators away from their offspring.] My eyes are watering. I’m sure there are times I don’t smell good, but this, this is a smell the person chose to wear on purpose.

I’ll save the rest of that rant for another day. What’s important is that the nature of this tiny place is changing again, as the sun makes its way toward the horizon. It is turning into a place to bring a date. Couples, groups, kids with their infectious cheer are starting to arrive. The music, which I hadn’t noticed before, seems to be moving with the trend; right now there is a calypso-disco cover of a 70’s disco song playing. D-I-S-C-O.

How does this place change so readily? Have the different groups come to a tacit understanding of who gets the bar when? Is it just that the place is so small that when one group dominates the others find somewhere else? There are other bars in the area; down the hill are restaurant bars and close by is the Cheap Budvar Place (not to be confused with the Cheap Beer Place, which in retrospect should have been named Cheap Gambrinus Place). This place is different than the others, though. They aren’t like the fancy places with a full menu, there’s a neighborhood feel here. At the same time this place is not like smoky boozerias that dominate this neighborhood. It’s a little place, with a fleeting touch of class.

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No minimum sample size

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OK, so the Czech Republic is a whole country and everything, complete with it’s own traditions and character. You won’t find much of that on Czech TV. They have their own version of Superstar, on TV, where people with moderate talent compete to sound exactly like pop stars and thus become pop stars themselves. Just like America.

What prompted this episode, however, is the show blasting here at Roma right now. I think it’s titled “I’ll join your sham of a talent show and humiliate myself as long as you put me on TV.” The name is much shorter in czech, but I’m pretty sure of my translation. It’s like the gong show with more contestants and no gong. And the talent pool – and I’m using talent in the loosest possible sense – is much smaller here. Scary.

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A new record

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I spent the evening writing at Roma. After the batteries were dead and the brain cells were well on their way, fuego and I played some pool. I am not very good at the game at the best of times, and last night was not the best of times. I lost, and then fuego started playing against the bartender. I played a couple more games, but most of the time I was standing at the bar talking to a czech guy who didn’t like being a czech guy.

“I am mad,” he said. I laughed it off, but he convinced me he was right. Nothing like talking to a drunk suicidal misogynist with violent urges on a Tuesday evening. Or on a Wednesday morning, for that matter. The sky was getting lighter when we came home, and at this lattitude in winter that’s saying something. The crazy guy walked with us. I think he wanted to sleep with fuego. He had already given up on me, so I was free to give him drunken pseudo-philosophical advice. I’m sure he will treasure the nuggets of wisdom I offered. At some point I stopped drinking beer, because, well, there wasn’t anything more it could do.

The rest of the night will have to wait for fiction.

The sun is up now, and has been for a long time. I’m listening to the Karel Gott, the Czech Elvis equivalent, cover “Seasons in the Sun” and watching the wind blow outside. It looks mighty cold out there.

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Sweat Cheese Filled Crepes

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There’s never any question when I come in to Ů Sl

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