radish times

Well it seems like summer has come. Today was the first day that I sat in class and sweated and sweated and sweated. The first thing I did when I got home was to put on shorts and a tank top. If summer stays, we have the problem that we didn’t bring any summer clothes with us to Prague. They are all in New York. I think I will have to buy a few things, like tee-shirts with short sleeves, as I have almost none.

I am very pleased that The Tree in our park is now getting leaves. There are, of course, many trees in our park but The Tree is the King of the Trees. I first became acquainted with this tree in November before I arrived in Prague. Peter said that when he laid on the bed in our new flat all he could in the window was the top of a very tall tree. Now, I imagined that there was a tremendous tree right outside the window and thus it blocked the view of everything else. In my imagination it was the kind of tree that teenagers use to sneak out to a party when their parents think they are sleeping.

However, do not be deceived, it is not that kind of tree at all. It is a hugely tall thin tree standing approximately in the middle of the park surrounded by other shorter fatter trees. It is not near our building - it is perhaps one hundred feet away. My imagination did not take into account the fact that we live high on hill overlooking a valley. When you lay on our bed your line of vision is above everything, even the top of the opposite hill; everything, that is, except the top of The Tree. So, the picture from our window since last November has been the vast sky broken only by what looks like a bouquet of barren brown branches. But now, hurray! hurray! it is beginning to look like the green top of a great big, although somewhat skinny, tree.

I am tired today because we were out last night “a pili jsme pivo,” or more clearly put, drank beer. We didn’t stay too late but when you have to get up before 8 am even “not so late” is later than it should be. So today there are many things that I would like to do, such as to go to the second-hand store and look for clothes, or to Letensky Sady (a large park) and walk or roller-blade around, or go shopping for something besides clothes, or clean the apartment in this nice summer weather, or find something to organize… but since I am tired the nicest thing is to sit here and think about what active things I would like to do and then take a nap and dream about doing them.

As it is obviously the most interesting thing happening in Prague, I will tell you more about the little ducks and their doings. First you must understand where they are situated. You already know that they live in the “river” across from our house. This river is called the Botich. It comes from off my map (which is a big map!) and cuts across the south east quadrant of Prague before running into the Vltava (the biggest river in Prague). Where we live it is flowing from east to west on its last stretch toward the Vltava.

The place where I saw the little ducks for the first time is seemingly the very west end of the Botich (from there I assume it joins the Vltava underground somehow). Today, there were no little ducks on the West End. There was some convention of daddy ducks there. I saw four daddy ducks hanging out, chatting and play fighting as I walked past. At little up stream, I saw two more daddy ducks making their way to the West End. I came up with several possibilities for this exclusively male duck gathering:

1) some threat haunts the West End and the male ducks have put their women and children in a safe place up stream and arrived to patrol the area. The play fighting was actually serious battle practice.

2) the daddy ducks have completed their responsibility in raising their youth and have gathered to celebrate their freedom.

3) the mother ducks have embarked on some type of duckling training during which male ducks routinely make themselves nuisances. Thus, the mother ducks have banished the daddy ducks who are gathering at the West End which has an especially plentiful and stupid worm population.

Anyway, after noting this male duck gathering, I wondered whether I would see the baby ducks at all today. Perhaps they were really hidden. So, I kept walking. I walked for about 5 minutes without seeing any sign of baby ducks. I looked up from the river toward the upcoming bridge. There I spied a man looking intently down at the river. I knew that either a child was drowning or the baby ducks were there - and since there was no commotion, I figured that it was the latter. I knew that only these two possibilities existed because as I mentioned to you before there is nothing interesting to look at in this river. So, I made my way to the bridge and sure enough THERE were the little guys!

They were having “Cross the river face forward without being swept back to the West End” practice. Mommy duck was swimming patiently and slowly from one side of the river to the other, demonstrating the correct foot movements and bearing. The little ducks were trying to copy her and several of them were very enthusiastic! I don’t know if you know, but the current is faster in the middle of our river Botich. Maybe it is true of all rivers but with ours it is especially true. There is concrete on the sides of our river - so that it is pretty shallow until you get to the middle - and then it is deep and fast! So, our little ducks practiced and practiced, constantly being pushed back and back and fighting thier way up and across.

There was, of course, one little duck who was not interested in this at all. While his mother and brothers and sisters fought their way back and forth across the river, he walked on the far bank (with his feet in the water) and looked for food. I hope he doesn’t turn into a fat duck that can’t cross a river!

There are baby ducks in Prague. They live in the little river across from our flat, although it is more of a concrete water way then a river. It is pretty ugly in fact. There is water at the bottom with concrete and garage filled brambles on its sides. It’s only decorations are dandelions and ducks. And what precious little ducks they are. They swim in this water way between the tramline and the train tracks. This afternoon while I was coming home from school the ducklings and their parents were taking a trip up stream. Little ducks in front, mommy in the middle and daddy following behind. I don’t know where they were going. I watched them for fifteen minutes traveling, traveling, traveling… but I couldn’t stay to see the end. The little ducks move very quickly - but sometimes they get mired in a fast current and then they struggle and struggle to catch up with the group.

It was sunny then. Now it is cloudy. How fast the weather changes here. It feels sometimes like the weather of my mind. Clear one minute, cloudy the next. Sometimes rain, sometimes sun. I am sitting on the balcony typing this e-mail. I wish I could send with it all the sounds I can hear. A helicopter flying over. A man yelling at his dog. Cars and trams moving past. Breaks squeaking. Lots of bird singing - but when a tram passes by or a loud truck, the bird songs are swallowed for the moment by the roar. From inside the flat, I can hear a cat playing with the top of a beer bottle.

Don’t you like how I am using the word “flat”? It is the real international English word, not apartment. Anyone who speaks Russian, French, German, Spanish or British calls the thing a “flat.” It feels more correct that apartment to me, mostly because the Czech word is “byt” and it also only has one syllable. Therefore, we are now living in a flat. Although we still have an elevator, not a “lift.”

So it is Friday afternoon. I have some work to do this afternoon. I have to type up the notes of an Amnesty International meeting I was at on Wednesday and I have to figure something out about teaching English. On Monday, I will take a trip to a refugee camp outside of Prague where I may teach English in the coming months. I want to research what the current methods of teaching foreign languages are now - because I think they are based much more on conversation than on grammar. Which would be good, as I have never excelled in grammar (or spelling, which you don’t know because I have spell check!) Anyway, I am very excited to go and see what the possibilities are.

Peter and I went to a few car dealers yesterday to begin to figure out what we want to buy. I think we were both a little discouraged about how expensive everything is. And we are getting lots and lots of advice about what to do and we are trying to figure out which advice is best for us. So, we will think for a while. Anyway, we can’t buy anything until Peter gets his permanent visa (which should be quite soon.)

Don’t know yet what we will do for the weekend. It is really funny in Czech class these days. We are learning the future tense. So all the questions are about what we WILL do and it seems that very few people in the class have lots of plans. So the conversation goes something like this “What will you do this weekend?” (Co budete delat o vikendu?) “I don’t know” (Nevim) “And you?” (A vy?) “I don’t have any plans” (Nemam zadny plan). It was much easier to discuss the past.

It got cold outside so I moved inside. It looks like it will rain. Even the cats are sitting inside. I will work for a while.

So it is Sunday evening about 11 pm. We just got home from having a couple of beers at one of our local pubs. Very often lately when I am out and about somewhere I have the strong desire to write the situation I find myself in, but by the time I get to a computer I cannot recall the feelings and the mood of that moment. This is partly because I am mostly used to writing about lighter things than I think of when I am out and when I get home the urge to write about the more serious things has vanished. It is harder to write about the more serious things. I feel more responsibility to capture things accurately. When I am writing about the supermarket or the trams it is better just to write a caricature.

So we were sitting in a local bar at the last table by the wall. Peter and I were both sitting there sipping our beers, both in our own separate worlds. It felt to me like we were cartoon characters with our own bubbles above our heads and our thoughts were running through them like the flashing light of a television in the window across the street. Our eyes were moving all around looking at this and then at that, but not at each other. My thoughts alternated between my own stories and observations and wondering what was in Peter’s bubble. Many times I have wanted to know, oh Peter, what is in your bubble? What is the color of the light in there? What kinds of things are happening in there? Then after some time of sitting we both started listening to the music. So we were both thinking about the same things. In this way our bubbles kind of merged and we began being together.

We went to the bookstore today. In some way going to a bookstore as a resident in a foreign country is a great frustration to me. In the US, where all the books are in English, a bookstore is a great adventure. I can go from section to section reading small parts of all kinds of books. I can satisfy almost every mood. Sometimes I am in the mood to read the plant and flower books. Other times I am happy looking through the new fiction section, checking out the new authors. Here in Prague it is not like this at all. All the sections are closed to me, except the English Books section (for real reading, not studying). This section is very limited. In most stores it means you can find the absolute classics and the absolute shit but nothing in between. So it is hard.

The really good thing about it is that we don’t have very many books. So the books we buy we read! So I have read a bunch of authors I wouldn’t have read in the US. I bought two books today, one Toni Morrison and one Czech author Milan Kundera. I know I will read both and I won’t buy any other books until I read these. There is something very satisfying in that. In New York I used to go to the book store and buy five or six books, read one or two of them, and then find that I was not in the mood for the others. I don’t feel like I have that luxury here.

When I was about 22 years old, I went to visit my friend Jessica and her family in El Salvador. Her father worked for US AID in San Salvador and had worked in Guatemala and Honduras. At the time I was kind of scandalized that they lived in such an exclusively American foreign service community. All their friends and social life revolved around other families in US AID and not around the local community or population. Now I understand something that I didn’t then. Readjusting your life, your goals, your career, your understanding, your interests, your self-identity to another culture and country is very difficult. If you are moving around all the time and you know that your stay in each place will not be long, it could be very hard to try to integrate with each new culture and place. So, since the US AID community is relatively small in each region, it must be much easier and more stabilizing to anchor yourself in this community rather than trying to find a new identity every where you go.

Coming to know a new culture, or a new place, is a slow business. At first I think everything is interesting and good. I can’t take someone else’s description of it for my own unless I personally experience. Sometimes I feel this is unfortunate for me. For example, if someone says “banging your head against the wall really hurts” and I have never done it, I am likely to try it to prove to myself that it really hurts. And of course, it does.

So, that’s all for now. Kind of ended in the middle of a thought but I will continue it soon.

It has been my great recent good fortune to meet the six year old daughter of our friend Arkady. Her name is Liliana and she speaks Russian, English and Czech. She has been to our apartment two times and she is very interested in our cats. It has been something like this:

- Which one is this?
— This is Pippin.
- What does he like?
— He likes to sit on my lap and cuddle.
- What else does he like?
— He likes to play with the stick cat toy there.
- Really? What else does he like? What does he specially like?
— He likes light reflections. I will show you. [DEMO]
- Oh. What else does he like?
— Uhhhh….
- Which one is this?
— This is Krolik.
- What does he like?…

I have not thought so consciously, so in depth about what each of my cats specially likes. And it is not so easy as telling an adult. Liliana wanted a demonstration of everything I mentioned that the cats liked - even when it was clearly impossible.

- Well, we can just try. Can’t we try?

The only answer to this is:

— Yes, of course we can try…

She wanted me to show her how BoBo will chase a cat toy and bring it back, like a dog. There are several circumstances that made such a demonstration completely impossible”

1. BoBo at the time was hiding, scared to death, under the huge bookcase in the living room. This is BoBo’s usual state whenever someone visits us. He had absolutely no intention of leaving the said hiding place, even if a line of living mice formed offering themselves to him for dinner.

2. Even if the moon were blue and BoBo came out, he won’t play this game even in front of Peter. If there is any other movement in the apartment, BoBo is unlikely to play this game.

3. If he did decide to play the game, Krolik would never allow him to take the toy anywhere.

But for Liliana’s sake, I tried to show her.

Eternal optimism. It makes me feel how much I have grown old and cynical. It also makes me acutely miss being around children and teenagers!

I have determined that Kisco is the only cat that really likes to eat rabbit. I have never seen any of the other cats eating it but it is always gone by morning. Today I gave them the last of the rabbit (actually for several days I didn’t give them any because it takes quite a long time to cut it into pieces small enough so they will eat it).

It has been a busy week. On Monday we went to dinner and a concert. It was a great concert (I begin to mix all my languages as I tried to write Koncert - which is concert a la Czech) by a band called Gogol Bordello - a Ukrainian band based in New York. They are super high energy and it is impossible not to dance while listening.

On Tuesday I got my haircut. I like it. The only thing is that it really doesn’t look different at all even though it was the longest haircut of my life. My appointment was at 6 pm. First they washed my hair and then started cutting. I was sitting there feeling tired. After a while my eyes started burning and my back started to ache. And of course I had had to pee since before I got there. It felt like it was taking forever but I kept telling myself to relax, that I was probably just tired from the concert the day before and therefore was impatient. When it was all done and I looked at my watch I was stunned. It was 7:45! and there was only a tiny pile of my hair on the floor (this incidentally was in some way good. Peter said before I went, please please don’t cut too much). Actually, it took something like 30 minutes for her to blow dry my hair, for which I have only my parents to thank as they both gave me thick full hair genes. So now I have thick thick full full hair which is also heavy heavy when it’s long. By the way it is now down past my ears.

On Wednesday we went to Anton and Lina’s for dinner and then played dominoes until just in time to catch the last tram. “The Last Tram” is a big thing here. There are actually very many of them as every line has one - but just to the point every line has only one. So, from Anton and Lina’s The Last Tram leaves at 11:41 pm. If we don’t catch this tram it is an annoyance - as either we have to figure out a longer more complicated route by way of trams whose last member has not yet passed, or we have to call a cab (I suppose in the summer we will also be able to walk although this would probably take about 45 minutes).

Every time we go out (especially to Anton and Lina’s for some reason), everyone knows at about 11:30 the topic of The Last Tram will pop up. It is always the question about whether to try to catch it or not. But it is a trick question - because it is really the choice between going home between 11:30 and 12:00 pm and going home sometime after 2:00 am. (Only in very isolated cases is this not true.) However, in the discussion no one ever will admit that this is the question for the following reasons:

1) The person(s) trying to convince the Last Tram Seeker to stay wants the Last Tram Seeker to think as little as possible about what time it is.

2) The main strategy to convince anyone to stay anywhere at any time is to utter the magic words “Just One More _____.” The words can apply to anything at all. The most obvious for Prague of course is “Just One More beer,” however it can also be: game, drink, bar, song, story, CD, movie…etc. For this strategy to be successful, the Last Tram Seeker must somehow convince himself that the Convincer is sincere and therefore that he will really have just one more of _____ and then leave. Therefore it is in the far best interests of the Convincer to suppress the “Later Than Two AM Reality Rule”

3) It would be very rude on the part of the Last Tram Seeker to crush the hopes of the well-intentioned and diligent Convincer by invoking the “Later Than Two AM Reality Rule” and thereby so openly call him a liar.

4) If the Last Tram Seeker runs out of all compelling reasons to catch The Last Tram and therefore invokes the “Later Than Two AM Reality Rule” there are several counter invocations which are unpleasant and difficult to refute in the few minutes left before The Last Tram. These include: a) We bore you and you don’t want to stay with us for the next two hours. b) You are not a real man or woman. c) Your philosophy of life is misguided and your priorities misplaced. d) You can easily catch a cab especially as one of our good friends is a cab driver who will give you a discount and will probably hang out with us for a while before driving you home, don’t you want to see him? The last of course being the hardest to refute.

Now I must fly. I would love to go to sleep before 11 pm!!!

The real title of this e-mail was going to be “oh boy, now you’re in trouble” but I didn’t want to frighten anyone. You see now that I have realized how comfortable it is to sit on the couch with my laptop on my lap and type e-mails, you may be in for a flood of e-mails from me. Peter usually sits at the desk on his computer in the evenings. So I would always read a book, play with the cats, do my homework from class or some other non-computer related thing. I never thought about moving my laptop somewhere else until yesterday.

I am also sitting next to a substantial amount of candy, which I am eating while I type….

Today Peter and I continued our four month long hunt for something to hold our CDs in. It was the second Saturday that we went out in the morning expressly to get a CD rack, but several other times we were looking for a CD rack along with other things. We have seen many CD racks but they all have some problem, such as being too expensive, being too small, being completely ugly or very poorly constructed. So this morning we went to a huge second hand market where we spent several hours without finding anything remotely interesting. So we went to Ikea (where we have been several several times looking at CD racks only to dismiss them all). We decided that today we WOULD BUY SOMETHING, anything.

So we spent many hours there. We looked at all the CD racks again and decided we couldn’t buy any of them. Then we started looking at bookcases that we could convert into a CD rack and… we actually found some that we liked!! Unfortunately they were all way to big for us to carry home on the metro. So we didn’t buy anything today but we know what we want and if they don’t sell out (as they were on sale) we will buy them as soon as our car-owner friend goes to Ikea with us.

Some observations on Prague and life here some of which I know I never told you and some of which might be repetitious:

1. It SNOWED today. BLAH. Where is Spring?
2. The toilet in our apartment is flushed by pulling the string hanging from the elevated water basin and it flushes with such force that it routinely alarms our guests.
3. If you sit in the toilet room for any length of time you can generally ease-drop on what people are talking about in the apartments above and below us. It is the only place in the apartment that I know of that allows so much sound to pass between apartments.
4. Prague is the host of more dogs than I have ever seen in any city. Dogs are also allowed a great many rights, including the right to ride on trams and metros, to pee anywhere without restriction, to socialize in bars and pubs and to move about anywhere in the city without a leash.
5. Cats are not generally seen and I do not know what rights they enjoy.
6. A very common Czech food which you can order in almost any restaurant is chicken with ham. In fact you can order it in several varieties: chicken with ham and mushrooms, chicken with ham and cheese, chicken with ham and mushrooms and cheese, chicken with ham and mushrooms and cheese and pineapple… At first I liked this combination. I don’t any more… TOO MUCH meat. I comment on it because two nights ago I ordered chicken without ham but with cheese and mushrooms but got chicken WITH ham and cheese and mushrooms. Needless to say, I took the ham off.
7. I can’t wait to have a CD rack.

That is all. I ran out of numbered items to discuss. Today I started a list of places to remember to take visitors to Prague. I have been several places recently that I want to remember to take people - one was a great huge park on the other side of the river, and another was this second hand market we went to today. They are both a little out of the way - where you might not go as a tourist. I have to write them down because when someone is actually here I can’t remember anything at all.

The cats say “hi.” They are suffering a new round of enforcement of the rule that cats are not allowed on tables with food or computers.

Peter was looking very cute today. He shaved his beard this morning. This always makes him look younger. He cooked meatballs tonight and taught me to cook cabbage soup. So we had a very tasty dinner! He can tell when I am writing about him because I can’t stop myself from sneaking looks at him which are so obvious of some mischief that he immediately knows what I am doing. Right now he (I think from the sound of the mouse) is playing Mindsweeper…. but it is possible it could be Hearts.

Have you ever played hearts against the computer? It is Peter’s habit these days to play and win the entire game with something between 0 and 5 points. One time he shot the moon four times out of five and (I think) won with zero or very close to this. Do you know how hard that is? It is great and it’s really funny too - he is sooo determined that “IT will be just this way!!”

TAKE 1

– Erased –

TAKE 2

This is my second attempt to write an update today. The first one was so obtuse that I erased it about an hour ago and took a break before trying to write again. Because of some strange writers block, I am writing this e-mail on this laptop and playing a card game on the other laptop. This way when I lose the train of words I am trying for I can concentrate on something else, instead of getting frustrated. Right now the game looks about as bad as I feel my chances are of actually writing this update.

TAKE 3

Well I didn’t erase it but I didn’t get any further than that. This is many many hours later.

Kisco says “Meaaahhh meaah maah meahh, ppuuuurrrr purrr” Translated it means “Hello, hello, can you hear me? I would like to say hi to all my people out there. Is it you? Is it you? Oh, yes, it is. Great. Great. I am so happy to talk to you. Oh, how happy I am to talk to you.” She said a lot more but it is hard to translate it. In short, she sends you her most profound kitty thoughts and wishes.

BoBo, Pippin and Krolik are all sleeping on the other side of me. All their profound thoughts are resting as well.

I am sitting on the couch with my lap top appropriately in my lap. We are listening to some music that Peter downloaded from the internet today. Everyday he comes home with between 3 and 8 CDs of live concerts. It is great. Peter is sitting at the desk working on his lap top on our CD database - which shows among other things where all our CDs are located (New York, Prague, with people we lent them to… etc.)

I don’t seem disposed to tell tales today. All I seem to be able to write is about what is currently happening. For example, Peter just yawned and then scratched his ear, looked at me and asked me what I was writing and why was I looking at him. Then I read him what I just wrote and he didn’t seem very amused.

I think I will just try to jump into a story:
I went to the store last Friday to get groceries. I was shopping for all kinds of things so I was wandering about the store when my cell phone rang. It was Peter asking me to get our second set of keys from Lina before going home (as the store is very close to Lina’s house). Lina was in something of a hurry, so we agreed to meet twenty minutes from the time of the call. This meant that I would have to hurry to get the rest of my stuff and pay and get to our meeting point. I have to say that in addition to being in a hurry I was also in some sort of Friday afternoon daze. But I did my best. I got cheese, bread, milk, meat, and pie.

I met Lina in plenty of time, got the keys and went home. That night when Peter came home I was telling him about what I bought. He mentioned that the package of chicken breasts I bought seemed really expensive. The chicken wings were not near as expensive. I said that I had been in a hurry and wasn’t really checking prices so probably I just made a mistake.

Monday, I wanted to prepare the chicken breasts so that we could make chicken tortillas. I took them out of the package. They felt really really weird - not like chicken at all. I looked at them in a kind of panicked puzzlement - what were they? So I pulled the package out of the garbage and grabbed my Czech - English dictionary to find out that what I had were RABBITS LEGS, not chicken breasts!!

What on earth to do with RABBITS LEGS?? I sat down and calmly reflected on the fact that I greatly doubted that my husband would have any pleasure in eating rabbit (or more to the point, eating Krolik)! So, I fixed the chicken wings. I was quite right about Peter’s taste. He seemed thoroughly depressed when I told him that there were rabbit’s legs in the refrigerator.

I had pretty much formed the resolution of just throwing the rabbit’s legs away. However, I told my Czech class the story just for fun the next day. They all thought it was hysterical and advised my to cook the rabbit for the cats. I did this when I got home only to find out that our cats do not care for rabbit either.

Huh! I actually wrote a story today! Of all thing great and wonderful!

So, with this strange update I will leave you for now.