Na shledanou

That's it. That was life in Prague as I knew it (and now miss it, as I still miss Israel).

But since I seem to start another one each time we move, here's the next chapter: The Accidental Immigrant. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Čau lidi...

Hell Is Other People

A couple of months ago, I met one of my former students for tea at Karavanseraj. We'd agreed to meet a few blocks north of the restaurant, at 7:00 pm, at the National Theater. After work, I went into town, bought a sandwich, and walked to Žofín Island to picnic. Žofín is just south of the National Theater and just north of the Manes gallery; it was named, in the mid-1830s, for Franz Josef's mother, Sofie (Žofie, in Czech). The Neo-Renaissance building (known as the "palace"), built in the 1880s, and the garden pavilion, built in the 1930s, are one of the prime spots for formal dances and Prague's winter balls; J.'s Aunt Liana tells stories of dancing at Žofín, as a teenager.

The evening I was there, the sun was slanting through the trees, and the island's park was a Hawaiian green of leafy shade as I sat on a wall above the river to eat my sandwich. People were out in paddleboats on the river, going lazily past, and the swan boat was out again, drifting toward Strelecky Island.

J. sent me a text message from London, where he was interviewing for what turned out to be the job in New York: "I'm in Hyde Park, soaking up the sun. Tough life." An oriole started up, overhead, and I had a hard time seeing how Hyde Park was better than Žofín, at the moment.

Another message followed; this time, from my student: "Big traffic delay in Malostranske namesti. We go by feet." I figured that gave me time to relax, so I finished my sandwich just as a girl in a long peasant skirt and a boy sat down on the wall, a few feet away. Each had a bottle of wine--one red, one white. Aside from their bags, they had only a corkscrew, and looked as though they planned to stay, as long as they could find a bug-free spot on the wall.

On the southern side of the island, where the playground and garden are, a string quartet was rehearsing in the pavilion. Although the garden was closed for whatever private event the band was preparing for, one or two people were sitting on the park benches behind the pavilion, listening. I sat down, as well.

Another message came from Karel: "We are stopping in front of the National Theater. Where are you?" Trying to explain that they were half an hour early would have been impossible to send by text message. I made my way back to the bridge, off the island, and toward the theater, with some small degree of apprehension.

Earlier that week, Karel had emailed me. "Do you mind if my friend and his French friend come to our meeting?" he had asked.

"Sure, no problem," I wrote back, although I knew that tea with a friend's former English teacher hardly promised to be the most exciting evening in the world--although, for me, it was always fun to see Karel, a former student of mine with a passion for tea, cooking, rock-climbing, and differential equations. His friends would no doubt wonder why on earth he was hanging out with his former English teacher, one of the ubiquitious pasty, mathless, and far-from-bilingual Americans in town.

Karel, his friend Honza, and Honza's friend, a thin French girl with black hair done up in bobby pins and chopsticks and who looked exactly like Leslie Caron, were sitting at the top of the National Theater steps. We introduced each other and began walking down the block to Karavanseraj. Honza and the French girl trailed behind.

"How are you?" I asked Karel.

"Oh, fine," he said in a nonchalant tone, loping along and ducking his head. "I have sat thirteen exams. I passed all of them." He beamed.

"Well done, you!" I said loyally. "Wait--thirteen? Good grief."

Karel told me sheepishly, "I have already forgotten the name of Honza's friend."

"Berta?" I guessed, and looked back. Berta (?) was fanning herself, with a Chinese paper fan, at great speed. The phrase "hothouse flower" popped into my head.

"Tomorrow, I go see my family," Karel announced as we approached the restaurant and went inside, down the cool steps. "I need a rest."

"No doubt," I replied.

The restaurant was empty except for one waiter, who was behind the bar, cleaning a glass with a dishtowel.

"There are four of us," I told him, pre-emptively, in Czech.

"Sit wherever you like," he said, and then said something which could have been "There's garden seating in the back," or "There's no garden seating."

We picked a table in the front room which quickly seemed to be too small for four people, half of whom did not know each other. The waiter brought over the menus, which, at Karavanseraj, are thankfully the size of a cruise catalogue, and we all hid behind them for a few minutes. It occurred to me that I was approximately eight to ten years older than everyone else at the table.

"I'm hungry," Honza grinned. "It's kebabs and chips, for me." With chin-length blond hair parted in the middle, he looked sort of like J. in his high-school days.

Honza's friend fanned herself and looked ready to wilt, after walking from Malostranské namesti.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think I heard your name correctly," I said, leaning toward her over the menu.

Berta-questionmark raised her eyebrows at me and said something ending in "tay."

"Sorry?"

"Liberté," she said.

I smiled stupidly. "It's a lovely name." Liberté opened her menu again and propped it up in front of her like a hymnal, but it was too late. My teachery self had taken over.

"And how do you know Honza?" I asked the menu.

"I am cache sur feeng," she said. Honza, who was sending a text message, was no help. Giving up on the menu, I tried hard to hear what Liberté was saying, but it had been a long time since I'd heard French-accented English.

"I'm sorry; you're what?"

"Cache sur feeng!" Aha! CouchSurfing! "I'm staying with Honza," she added.

Honza explained, "I'm a student of sociology. It's a great way to meet people, and my friends and I have had other CouchSurfing guests."

"Yes!" I exclaimed, delighted to have finally understood what Liberté was talking about, despite having learned of it only two weeks before that. "I've heard of that! And how did you pick Prague?"

Liberté's long fingers drew a halfhearted circle in the air. Her other hand propped up her head. "I just threw a dart at the map and this was where it landed." Honza looked at her with adoration. Karel stared at her as though she had turned into a complicated and elegant equation.

"Oh, dear," I thought.

After the waiter wandered over to take our order of kebabs, chips (fries), beer, mango lassi, and two cups of tea, I attempted to make conversation.

"So what are you studying? Where are you from in France?"

She glared at me. "I am just finishing the preparations for my baccalaureat. I like to sew, and I want to be a designer. I would like to study fashion. I'm from a small town in Bretagne that no one has ever heard of."

"Try me," I thought, remembering the trip with my dad around St. Malo in 1996, which had taken us through plenty of Brittany's landscape as we clattered from Rennes out to St. Malo on a regional train that had appeared to be made entirely of wood.

The guys weren't saying anything, and the waiter arrived, which spared me from more English-101-type questions until I couldn't stand it and decided to ask everyone how they were enjoying summer.

Honza looked thoughtfully at his beer. "I'm getting a lot of reading done. Mainly Kierkegaard. And there are lots of barbeques!"

"I am rock climbing, and studying the famous textbook on derivations, and then I will be working, painting walls," Karel said.

Liberté heaved a sigh. "I am taking this trip, and then I will be in a monastery, caring for trees."

Certainly, she did not look like the Lorax. But Liberté did, in some ways, seem like the embodiment of a wood sprite, as we gazed at her in a mixture of awe and intimidation. She looked like a SoHo fairy-tale princess, with her black hair, blue eyes, and longsleeved blouse dotted with tiny flowers.

We all poked at our food or drinks. What our conversation needed was someone who could be the life of the party, since all of us were either too tired from traveling (Liberté), too intimidated (two of us), or feeling way too old (yours truly) to be witty and charming.

"So! If you're interested in fashion," I babbled, "how do you feel about the death of Yves Saint Laurent? His funeral was this week in Paris, right? While you're here, you should definitely walk up Pařížská, which is Prague's Champs-Élysées. Many of the major haute couture houses are there, and it's a beautiful avenue."

Liberté did not take kindly to my insinuation that she was interested in the commercial, materialistic world of high fashion. She looked at me with disdain.

"I'm not interested in that kind of fashion," she said. "I'm more interested in art and design. I would like to go look at some trees. And there is an illustrator of--collages? He has an exhibit here." She stirred her tea and gave me a look of Really. Haute couture? No, thank you.

"Oh. Well, then, you should try the National Gallery," I mumbled. "I'm sure Honza knows where it is."

Honza, munching on French fries, nodded. Karel was watching the exchange from behind his cup of yerba maté.

"Do you know the famous French mathematician Pierre Fermat?" he finally asked.

Liberté pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at Karel.

"Pierre Fermat," he repeated calmly. "You know... The theorem that describes if an n is greater than 2, then aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c."

"Well, of course..." Liberté hedged. But it was too late. Karel set his maté gourd aside and started drawing on the tabletop. Honza reached for the ketchup. Karel began to describe Fermat's Theorem in detail. And then I bailed, but not because of Fermat.

"Hey, Karel," I told him, when I could get a word in edgewise. "I'm really sorry, but I have some work to look at before tomorrow. Send me an email when you're next in Prague, ok?"

"Very nice to meet you," I told Honza; "Enjoy your time in Prague," I told Liberte. "Sorry to rush off!" And then I dashed to the bar, paid my bill, and fled.

Směr (Toward) New York

New York City represents the Big Break for one of us, and the Big Job Hunt, for the other. Sure, two weeks after we made the decision to leave Prague, I'm pleased that we'll be back in my home country...but it's a big country, and the last time I was in New York, seven years ago, it didn't feel like home, exactly. Now, poring over the strange and specialized lexicon of New Yorkers (with its entries like "Pinkberry" and "Flatbush") online, it feels absolutely foreign.

(Or maybe I'm foreign. My mom cautioned, as we started to look for apartments, "Don't pick neighborhoods that are too ethnic," which was completely baffling, since this is the fourth year of living somewhere where I was the foreigner.)

Everyone here seems to be of one mind about New York: Go! I knew it exerted a strong pull, but my friends, colleagues, and husband (who know way more about Manhattan than I do), regard it as the center of the universe in a wholly literal way: If you're not, in a short-term or long-term sense, either coming from, or on your way to, New York, then you must be insane. That explains why they give me stupefied looks if I look anything other than starstruck at the prospect of moving to New York. But, in some sense, Europe is my New York. Why would I want to leave?

J. confessed to being shown a long series of Woody Allan movies, as a kid, which explains why his New York is the velvety city of jazz and 1970s intellectuals--and why he's beside himself with delight to be going there.

The New York of my imagination swirls around nineteenth-century Ellis Island--through which Italian great-great grandparents, and several strata of their sisters, brothers, and cousins, passed on their way to the West--and around the polished brick and brownstone outlines of Manhattan, which the turn-of-the-century Irish side of the family called home. From both sides, I can hear them saying, "Yes, the whole point is to go to New York and be successful." The stakes are the same as they ever were.

Austria: Part 1

We took off for Austria on Wednesday afternoon, two weeks ago. I left work around 1:00 p.m., weekend bag in tow, and had imagined leisurely having coffee in Slovansky dum, which is about a five-minute walk from Hlavní nádraží, before our train left at 4:15 p.m. After changing crowns to Euros, and buying a sandwich and snacks for the train, though, my visions of espresso on Kogo's patio vanished...and I ended up sitting on a bench watching impeccably dressed businessmen drink my espresso. The courtyard in Slovansky dum is one of my favorite places. Under its tall canopy of elm trees, you can sit on a bench and picnic in relative solitude and shade, and it's as quiet as a reading room, except for the comforting clink of glasses and plates at Kogo.

Around 3:00 p.m., I wandered over to the train station and stumbled into a bright, two-floor bookstore where there had been just a cavernous expanse of concrete for at least the last year (and God knows for how many years before that). On the second floor was a cafe, English-language books (Waterstone's remainders), a stack of our books, and, infuriatingly, right next to our 100 nejkrásnějších měst světa ("The 100 Most Beautiful Places in the World"), Slovart's 100 divů Česka ("100 Wonders of the Czech Republic")--with a cover design nearly identical to our book...but better, with silver ink and sexy font. I wanted to call my one of my colleagues and rant, but I figured no one would believe me if I called and said, "I'm sitting in a new bookstore cafe in the main train station." The contrast between the new bookstore and cafe and the old shell of the station (where most of Prague's down and out come to sleep or get out of the heat) is striking.

About half an hour before our train was scheduled to leave, J. turned up and looked equally shocked to see a bookstore in the middle of the entry hall. We met J.'s father, who gave us photos to take to Aunt D., and then ran to catch our train to Veselí nad Lužnicí, where we would change to a two-car train into the small town of České Velenice, on the Czech-Austrian border. Running down the corridor to platforms six through twelve, dodging all the construction, we stopped to buy water. As I looked up to the mezzanine, I could see the real cafe, the seventy-four-year-old Fantova kavarna (named for its Art Nouveau architect, Josef Fanta), hanging overhead, on the second floor of the station, in grime and clouds of smoke.

We managed to find seats among all the students going home for the weekend to study. (It's final-exams time, here.) Our compartment held the two of us and two university students, boys with backpacks and laptop cases who spent the trip comparing what each had paid for his plane ticket to the U.S., where each had studied (or was going to study--my Czech verbs are still a disaster).

The last time we'd gone to Austria by train was shortly after we'd moved to Prague from Israel, and Uncle V. was months into his diagnosis of liver cancer. Aunt D. had come to České Velenice to pick us up in V.'s car, and the car broke down, halfway to Mautern, in the Wachau Valley. D. called V. for advice and he sent friends of theirs in two cars, a couple who'd been having pizza with V. when D. had called. Before they met us, we'd had a harrowing stop-and-start ride on the dark hairpin roads out of Gmünd and through the Waldviertel woods toward the Wachau. It had been late May then, too. "Harrowing" meant nothing until we finally made it to Mautern and saw V., gaunt and quiet.

This time, when we walked out of the train station České Velenice , only Aunt D. was waiting for us. Even though it's been two years since V. died, it's still strange to see her without him, and we walked, not saying much, from the station to Aunt D.'s car.

České Velenice is the last village before the Austrian border. (In fact, up until 1918, České Velenice and Gmünd, the first town on the Austrian side, were one town.) It's always been strewn with the worst roads in the Czech Republic and has the most desperate-looking residents, it seems. Until the Czech Republic ratified the Schengen treaty (which abolished border checks with Schengen co-signers like Austria), the two blocks of České Velenice between the train station and the border comprised a commercial zone of Vietnamese shops doing a brisk business in cheap but well-fed and well-polished garden gnomes and garden baubles. These days, the border zone is boarded up and empty; the town, more deserted than ever.

Out of habit, I hunted for my passport as we swung toward the border, but Aunt D. waved it away and sped on through.

We wound through Gmünd and made the trip to Mautern in ninety minutes. J.'s aunt drives with the natural passion and fearlessness of a Formula 1 racer, and at times it feels like her black Mercedes (which is not much larger than a SmartCar), is a shiny black electron in a particle accelerator, hurtling toward a collision. It's best not to stick any part of your nuclei out of the car; you might lose it, at such speeds.

Safely in the short driveway of Uncle V. and Aunt D.'s home in Mautern, we carried our things inside and sat down at the dining room table for a glass of wine from the Mauritiushof vineyards. We sat there for a few minutes, tired from traveling and driving; the toast was in Czech but, beyond that, no one said anything else for a few minutes, listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen; J. was sitting turned away from the table, looking absently at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with V.'s books; I looked into my wine glass and at its wheat-colored wine, thinking of when V. had taken us to the towns along the Wachau and of how we all sat in the Mauritiushof vineyards, eating rolls and sampling wines; and Aunt D., who cradled the bowl of her wine glass with one palm, her chin in the other palm, was sitting at the head of the table, looking past us. She got up and went into the living room to turn on some music and came back with a smile that reminded us that she'd been without V. for two years and had learned to live with his negative space.

Summer, Part I: Austria

Shop signs in Krems (in the Wachau Valley), Austria.




























Lunch at a heuriger just east of Mautern, also in the Wachau Valley.






































































České Velenice, just across the now-defunct border between the Czech Republic and Austria, has got to be the saddest station in Central Europe.

I'm a Legal Alien

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to talk with two study-abroaders who needed to interview an expat for their term paper. We arranged to meet at Cafe Louvre, and I showed up early, looking for a girl with a silver purse, which is how one of them had told me I'd be able to spot her. (Never having carried a silver purse in my life or known anyone who has, I was intimidated and formed some snarky prejudices.) After scanning the Louvre for a few minutes, with no success and women narrowing their eyes at me as I eyed their purses, I went downstairs and bumped into two college students checking their watches at the entrance to the cafe. They were both blond, tanned, wearing jeans, and turned out to be Californian; with my pale self and bad haircut, I'd never felt less Californian.

"Hi!" One of the girls stuck out her hand. "I'm Kelly." She hoisted her bag further up onto her shoulder and gestured to her friend standing next to her. "This is my friend, Mackenzie; she's doing the same paper. Do you mind if she joins us?"

"No, it's fine," I replied.

We went upstairs and into the open-air part of the Louvre, just off the entrance to the main rooms of the cafe. "How neat!" Kelly exclaimed. "I've never been here!"

"How long have you been here?" I asked with some suspicion. If you've lived here for more than three weeks and you haven't been to Cafe Louvre, one of Prague's best historical cafes, something is deeply, seriously wrong, and your study-abroad director should be taken in for questioning.

"We have three weeks left," Kelly replied. Her friend added, "I'm really ready to leave."

All I could manage was "Hmm." We sat down at one of the wooden tables, and Mackenzie popped open her laptop, on top of the menus. I extracted the menus and passed them around. Maybe this had been a bad idea. The couple at the table across from us gave us a sideways glance and lowered their heads, whispering.

The girls glanced at the menus. "I'm totally going to have a milkshake," Kelly said, flipping through her notebook.

"I'm really old," I thought to myself, and nervously clicked my phone open and shut. Job interview and your average interview alike, people sometimes terrify me.

The waitress arrived, took the milkshake orders, and I automatically ordered espresso with milk, in Czech. I can't help it, I felt like explaining to them. On my study-abroad program, you HAD to speak the local language. Now that I have a study-abroad life, I can't shake the habit.

"So you speak Czech," Kelly said.

I was honest: "No, I speak Cafe Czech, In-Law Czech, and Consumer Czech." Come to think of it, the first two overlap frequently. And I know a few mild (and thus mildly useful) curse words, mainly learned while watching J. curse at WindowsXP. "If you study a Romance language in high school and college in the U.S., it's not terribly helpful when it comes to Czech," I told them, "...as you probably know."

Mackenzie glared at her laptop screen. "Tell us about it. Our Czech final is on Friday."

I wished them luck and felt extremely lucky to have avoided the mandatory Czech exams required of permanent residents, beginning this year.

"So!" Kelly said, clicking her pen. "Do you just love Prague?"

"I guess," I said. Well, probably not as much as someone who grew up here might love it, I thought. "I like it here, for the most part." Our voices echoed in the tiny courtyard. How do you love a place? I thought. What do you really mean by "love"? Calvino claims you can only understand a city after you leave it; I'd extend that to only being able to love a city. Some places are more easily loved through a nostalgic haze. You forget how hot it was, how steep the hills were, how every store had a bomb-checking guard, and you remember only that it was lush and green and people were laughing.

It's hard not being a teacher when you've been one, your whole life. So I sat on my open-ended discussion questions.

"Why are you here? What do you miss about the U.S.? What are the biggest cultural differences between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?" They threw these questions out, first, and as I was trying to think, I looked down at Kelly's notebook and at the assignment sheet for the paper, which had a staggeringly long list of questions.

"Come on, lady, we only have an hour," I could hear them thinking. The waitress returned with the milkshakes and espresso, sparing me from trying to be coherent.

"Deekay," Kelly said.

Mackenzie stirred her milkshake, frowned, and then took a sip.

"Chocolate milk," she said, and placed it next to her laptop. She looked at me. "Ha! Just one of the many different things about living here, right?"

"Sure," I said. We could go on for days, with this game. "Like the bread--pardon me, rolls--house slippers, the main meal of the day, formality... There's a lot that's different." Two years of living here began to scroll through my mind before I stopped and tried to focus.

The main differences are: the lack of violent crime, the lack of diversity, and the shift in cultural attitudes that you have when you're a small country surrounded by former aggressors. Economically, living in Central Europe, you are envious of Western Europe--all of whom seem to be richer than you--and crass about Eastern Europe--whom you feel very lucky not to be.

Other cultural differences include the Czech emphasis on education (but not critical thinking), literacy, and cultural literacy. Nearly everyone on public transport is reading something: people over thirty read novels or magazines, and kids are studying. The fine arts aren't seen as "sissy," and dance, theater, film, and the visual arts seem to be thriving and valued by most reasonable people (except the Prague city council, who cut arts funding and faced a two-day demonstration by citizens, this weekend, on the plaza between the National Theatre and Lanterna Magika).

On the other hand, since every list comparing both cultures ultimately winds up being a list of advantages and disadvantages of each, feminism doesn't get such a bad rap in the U.S., malignant extremism is not tolerated, and there's nothing there quite like the lingering social and cultural effects of Communism. One of the hardest things for me to understand, although I didn't tell them this, is how pervasive and deep-seated the effects of Communism were. Although it shouldn't, it astounds me when I bring something like pudding home and J. says, walking past, "Oh, my mom once stood in line for hours, to get that for me, when I was little." I look at the package of pudding and can't begin to understand what life was like here, before 1989.

"Do you feel less American, now that you live here?" Kelly asked.

I stared at her and laughed. "What? How could I be less American?" Then I understood. "Oh. You mean, have I assimilated? Do I wear socks with sandals and eat rolls for dinner? No. But I do try to fly under the radar--except for right now--because the U.S.'s position in the world is not as good as it used to be, to put it mildly. I don't feel like serving as any sort of confirmation for whatever people think about Americans."

They must have realized that everything they asked me was going to get a double-edged response: yes, I'm happy here, but of course I miss my family. Yes, there are things I'd change about Czech society (and it's probably what any reasonable Czech would change--the country's institutionalized racism), but, for better or for worse, I married into the culture. Do I miss American culture? No, not mainstream American culture, or what the rest of the world thinks of as American culture; I do miss the Southwest and not having people become suspicious when you say, "Hi, how are you doing?"

Of course, I miss my family, but I would miss Kazakhstan tremendously if they were in Kazakhstan.

Other questions on this strange tour of my subconscious expat self were

"What are the major differences between you and your husband?"
American grammar and usage versus British grammar and usage.

"Would you do the same things together if you were living in the U.S.?"
I guess, although they would be much more expensive, so we would probably do them less frequently. We walk a lot, here (although much less than in Israel), and it's not hard to imagine that we'd quickly adapt to living with cars, again.

"Ok, that's it!" Mackenzie snapped her laptop shut and grinned. "Check, please!" she called to the waitress.

I took out my wallet and counted out the money for my espresso, but the two girls pushed it away.

"Please, it's the least we can do," they said.

I tried again. "No, really; it's not fair... You're students." They settled the bill with the waitress.

"Wait, at least let me pay for tip," I said.

They packed up their things as though they hadn't heard me. "Oh, no, we never tip," Kelly said happily. "Our professors told us not to."

"What? You're kidding. You have to tip!" They looked at me with pity. "No, really, I'm sure your professors just meant that you shouldn't tip as though you were in the U.S. But you just round up to the nearest ten crowns, in a cafe." The waitress, who wasn't collecting anything as I was lecturing, glared at me and walked away. Kelly and Mackenzie got up and shoved their chairs in. I sat there with coins in my hand. Wait! I thought. I have to come back here! I have to tip! And also, Wait! At least tell me you learned something, during those three months. What was it?

A few weeks ago (ok, a month ago) the British Chamber of Commerce and the Czech-Irish Business Association held their annual day at the races at Velka Chuchle on Sunday. The car was in the shop, so J. coordinated bus schedules so that we would arrive fashionably late.

This was good, as I tore through my closet until about three minutes before we left, looking for something suitably warm and yet Derby-worthy. No dice. (As it was, most people were wrapped in winter coats.)

As we went to change buses near the concrete monstrosity of the Barrandov overpass, we got off the first bus, only to see our connecting bus head away in the opposite direction in a belch of smoke. By the time we arrived at the racetrack, it was 2:00 pm, post time, too late to place bets included with the price of admission. (No matter, since it took us four hours to understand the program's hieroglyphic and hierarchical horse data.)

I even had fun without a hat.



And they're off!



The presumptive winner of the hat competition.



Does it look cold? It was, very. It had rained the day before.



We discovered that when we looked in a direct line east from the middle of where we were seated, across the racetrack to the tower in the center of the photo, we could see where we live.



The tower in the middle is the apartment complex across the square from us.


The British brought their dogs, of course.



Since I'd never attended the races before, I was surprised to discover that there were, in fact, six races, with one every half hour or so. In between races, everyone at the British party, including us, ran back inside and dove into the buffet. The wine importer pouring glasses at one end of the table was English and exclaimed to his Czech business partner, "Everyone is only drinking white! Why?"



Toward the end of the afternoon, after the buffet began to look unloved, we went down to the paddock.



Down in the stands, there was the best mix of Czech cooking smells: sausages, mustard, and troubicky, cinnamon dough rolled and baked around a cylinder. And, of course, beer.





The poster for the hat competition. This seemed a bit stalker-ish to me, not to mention sexist. Men were instructed to wander around and ask the women whose hats they found most interesting for their names. Then the men were supposed to email this to the organizers. The prize was a "day of cosmetics," as if to say: You think you're stylish? Think again, sister!







Things were far more exciting (if less intriguing on a networking level) in the paddock. Owners slapped jockeys on the back or discussed race minutiae in low voices. About a third of the jockeys were women, and most of the paddock staff were girls who leaned affectionately into their horses, steering them around the circle.









For one of the last races of the day, we stood at the finish line, close enough to smell the turf and boxwood and to hear the horses pound past.





As there was no cotton candy being served at the British buffet, I felt robbed.

Last weekend, we took the back roads to Hrad Karlštejn (Karlštejn Castle)--about half an hour away by highway but an hour away via other roads. Every time we try to head somewhere via Zbraslav (the first town to the south of Prague, on the other side of the river), we get lost and there's a lot of heated discussion about maps and missed detour signs until one of us slams the map book shut and says, "Dammit, look how scenic it is! Isn't it LOVELY?" Then it's truly enjoyable. The moral of the story is that mathematicians and poets (people who like exactitude) make lousy navigators but appreciate a good landscape or two.

But it really was scenic--one of those early spring days where everything is light green and the sun is still burning through the mist at noon. The towns we went through looked unlike anything inside metropolitan Prague, with their old signs, pocked plaster house facades, and backyards with dozens of fruit trees beginning to bloom.

Karlštejn dates to the fourteenth century, and was the repository for royal treasures and relics, particularly during the Hussite era, when the crown jewels were kept there.
View of one tower, way at the top...

View of same tower. Did I mention you have to climb ten minutes up a steep slope, to reach the main gates?

A town sprang up around the castle, down at the bottom of the valley. Today there are dozens of souvenir shops hawking very little to do with the castle or the Czech Republic, or castles and Europe in general... But there are a couple of good restaurants (in April, still not entirely overrun by Italian teenagers on Spring Break); we stopped at one and sat outside, for lunch. It was wonderfully quiet, with the wind in the pine trees on the slope below the castle. Quiet mountain air is hard to come by in the center of Prague.




Photo of Karlštejn Castle and a market analyst checking his Blackberry.

This weekend's big event, the horse races at Velká Chuchle, are tomorrow. It was gloomy, drizzling, and cold, all day, so I couldn't get into an inspired day-at-the-races excursion through the closet. More importantly, I HAVE NO HAT to wear to the very posh event hosted by the British Chamber of Commerce and will probably disgrace my country. I can't help it; I had a honking big beachy hat in Israel but left it there when we had to move, as there was no box big enough for it... Now that's a big hat.

Friday!

After work yesterday, we went for a walk along the river, stopping at Žofín in order to sit on the wall above the river, for a while.









That's the view looking back at the street.













From the wall, we could see across to the other side of the river; one couple had rented an enormous paddleboat shaped like a swan, and they disappeared behind Střelecký ostrov, another island. I couldn't convince J. that we should take out the swan boat, too.
(Evidently, all the real swans had taken one look at this thing and swum off for safer waters.)















Close-up of the swan boat.