Tag Archives: prague

it doesn’t get better than home

Posted on August 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

After a few traveling snafus, I am home, relatively over my jetlag, and happy to be here. I feel different than I did when I left. Calmer. More focused. More driven. Less dramatic. Unconcerned. Pudgier, too, but that will change when I start working out again. And less attached.

I am home again, but I am not in the same place I was when I left. I have a new job, and I am happy not to have the dark cloud that was the unhappy prospect of returning to a job where I no longer felt necessary, wanted, or useful. I have been reading a ton since I got home, and I am pretty disinterested with my Netflix account and even the wireless I just installed at my parents’ house, where I am now living again until I graduate and move to my grad school city. I have only seen one of my friends since being home, and that made me really happy, and there are a few more I want to see, but I don’t have this incredible need to see people. I’ve never had that, really, but where I’ve lacked an actual want to be around other humans all the time, I’ve always had a feeling of obligation to do so. Now I don’t. Though that’s not to say I don’t love people, obviously. But it’s nice to feel as if I can just be myself and be with myself, and with my family, and in general not feel the need to be doing something, whether it is a social activity or homework or a job activity or a phone call or any of the many chores I seem to assign myself for no good reason. This is, I hope, the end of my workaholic days. At least until I am actually someone who works. And, given my academic plans, that won’t be for close to a decade.

At the moment I am listening to the new CD I had waiting for me in the mail when I got home (signed unreleased Greg Laswell album “Good Movie”) and culling through my to-read list, which has gotten way too far over 200 books again. Damn Prague for making me want to read and write so much. More and more I am relishing the idea of getting to the point where I can be a writer, one who can cite her inspirations and influences and who spends months reading biographies, philosophies, novels, poetry, whatever, all in the pursuit of understanding the themes and issues she wishes to explore in her next opus. I am finding it especially hard to delete things, even though 215 books is an impossible endeavor when you consider the rate at which I add new books to the list (many, weekly) and the rate at which I read (less than many, monthly), because of that fantasy. There are books I know that I will not read anytime soon, but I don’t want to forget them; or I already own them; or I know everybody has read them and I need to, too; or I want to read them both for personal interest and for the way they will inform projects that I think would be interesting.

Also, something I realized in Prague, and just lately in general. I don’t like to say that I’m writing “a novel.” It has too many implications, and it’s also been an unfair thing to say as of late, because for the last academic year I did no real work on any of my “novels” whatsoever. Also, it makes people who are not writers ask things like, “what is your novel about?” which is an annoying and unanswerable question. I realized that I always say “project.” Because I work on too many things at one time, and because I work in different genres and also try to combine genres. Because before I’ve published at least one “book,” I don’t think I have the right to use a word like “novel.” Do other people feel this way, or am I just silly?

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house of the black madonna

Posted on July 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

I completely stole that image off of Google, sorry. But it’s where I was this afternoon, and it was awesome. It houses the museum of Czech cubism, and it is the second museum that I went to just on a whim, knowing nothing about it and thinking that I actually would be underwhelmed, and instead I loved it. My favorite artist was Emil Filla. I want a print of his work, or an original if I can have whatever I want in the world, when I have a home to decorate. And the museum itself, in the House of the Black Madonna, is a cubist building designed by one of the Osma, the group of eight Czech cubists.

I realized that one of the biggest reasons for travel and for visiting galleries and museums is a completely hedonistic one, and I feel guilty about that. But I also feel like it’s inevitable. Why do we learn about other cultures, why do we eat new foods, and why do we discover new artists except to enjoy the experience? But is it cheapened if I think about how I want reproductions of Dalí’s plates in my kitchen, and how I want Torres-García and Filla and Renoir prints on my walls, and how I would love to be able to afford to be an art collector, and how I’d like to cook this or that, and how I prefer cava to other wines and champagnes, and how I want to go to Ireland to learn how to sing and then incorporate that into the songs I write? Or is that in fact the most authentic way to travel? I hate these arguments, but I can’t help thinking of them.

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hyperlinked photo journalism or, it is so unfair that europe has castles and america does not

Posted on July 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

I find picture-taking and photo-uploading completely exhausting and unexciting, which is why I don’t do it more often.


Karoline and me with Arnost Lustig after hearing him speak


You gotta love a city with a giant metronome at the top of a hill.


Especially when the view from the metronome is fabulous.


Bars with awesome names must be remembered always, even if you do not go inside them.


It is important to know that the real Budweiser is not made by Anheuser-Busch.


I spent this weekend in the rain in Cesky Krumlov


Many Czech buildings use sgraffito, which from far away looks almost like a layer of wallpaper laid over the actual edifice.


The Cesky Krumlov castle!


The castle there has bears!


This is the view from up there.

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meat and bones

Posted on July 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

Wow. Somehow I only have a little over a week left. I’m ready to go home, but I’m also just getting the hang of things in Prague and want to enjoy that. And I have an unbelievable amount of work to do. The weekend trip I signed up for (and paid $95 for) was a bad idea.

I’ve taken a decent amount of side trips already, and I’m still adoring my classes. I have a lunch conference with my fiction professor, Robert Eversz, who is awesome–one of those people who will just talk and then all of a sudden you’ll realize that he’s teaching you something really useful. Our workshop is particularly for people writing novels, which means not only do we critique and talk about literature, but we also storyboard everyone’s submissions, talk about extended narratives, etc. I’m loving it. I’m learning. I’m inspired. I actually want to write a lot, and I do it. It’s been at least a year since I’ve been a writer like I used to be. I feel good about where I’m headed. I have three fiction projects I feel really good about.

My side trips have been to Kutná Hora, Dresden, and today to Terezín, but I don’t think I feel like writing about that. Leaving that space in my journal empty seems like the most justice I can do to it, at least today. In Kutná Hora is a church with decorations made from the bones of 40,000 people.

Yup.

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in which i remember why i am here

Posted on July 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

The other day I went to a cafe alone for lunch and got to overhear a couple arguing in French. And I understood bits of it. Later, it turned out that the woman also spoke Czech and the man also spoke English. Today, in a gift shop, I got to hear a girl and her mother speak Portuguese and English (Portuglish?) and understand a lot more.

Last night I got to sit on my windowsill (!) and listen to the rain. I think that’s something I’ve wanted to be able to do since I could read, because books always take place in settings where there are attics and basements and secret passageways and window seats. And the weather is always such that opening a window would not make your house unbearably hot. Rain in Prague is different from rain in Tucson, which is heavier, harder, and more driven. Tucson rain has a goal. Prague rain just rains. And there was no lightning, at least not that I could see. It’s lovely. But I hope it’s monsooning when I get home.

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linguistic neocolonialism

Posted on July 16, 2010 | 4 Comments

I just learned this week that the word I thought of as “expatriot” is actually “expatriate.” I think that’s a really interesting mistake, but I’m also disappointed in myself for not getting it, since I consider myself fairly linguistically gifted. It would be much more interesting, and also much more US-centric, I think, if it were an “expatriot,” because it would describe an American who leaves the US because they are dissatisfied with American culture or embarrassed by it, while at the same time showing how American they are. It would certainly describe me.

So it’s funny that we have this word “immigrant,” which is used as a mark of awesomeness in history classes and as a pejorative in political discourse. Without going to the OED, I would say that on the surface, “expatriate” and “immigrant” actually mean the same thing–that is, a person from one nation who lives in another–except that “immigrant” has the implication of inferiority as the main catalyst for the move from one country to another. That is certainly a reason for immigration, I’m sure, but it’s not really all that fair. Do we have one word for people who move to the US to find “better” lives that we don’t use for, say, a successful Hollywood actor who is actually from Britain but lives in LA? Who is that person? An expatriate, an immigrant, or something else?

This is probably not such an interesting observation to make, but this class is making me more aware of how Americans use linguistics, particularly euphemisms and the vastness of the American vocabulary, to assert its imperialism and colonialism without directly doing so.

In my workshop the other day, we ended up talking about the use of Spanish in literature that is otherwise all in English. We’ve also brought this up in my literature class, because the assumption is that American literature is all in English, but since the United States doesn’t have an official language, and since it is a nation formed through immigration, that’s not necessarily the only way of looking at it. Writers such as Junot Diaz, Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros challenge that. (And that’s just in terms of Spanish in America–there’s also the fact that Americans love Yiddish, and that there are tons of other languages spoken in the US.) And so a girl in my workshop had written a piece in which there is Spanish written. Thankfully, it was not italicized or immediately translated, and I liked that. Sure, some people may have to google a word or two if it’s not made clear by context (it usually was), and some people may stop reading, but literature isn’t written for all readers. That would be silly. And there’s no reason that nondominant culture should be overexplained in literature. But one woman in the workshop was offended by it, and when others of us tried to explain that being offended by Spanish and by culture that she didn’t understand was a white-privileged response, she said that that was just Americans being obsessed with political correctness. And, because she was an expatriate living in Prague, she was exempt from knowing what is going on in literature, racism, political correctness, and all that.

Fucking bullshit.

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good ol’ american kvetching

Posted on July 12, 2010 | 1 Comment

Possibly this is just more indication of my Americanness, but I try to be generally un-American when I travel and not take cultural differences as inferiorities.

But let’s face it, some things are just inferior. For example, all plumbing is inferior to American plumbing. You could flush a cat down an American toilet and probably not have as many problems as flushing toilet paper causes in other countries. Also, everywhere you go, there is free water, and in Tucson, at least, it is illegal to deny anybody water, even if they are wearing no shoes and no shirt. That is another wonderful thing.

But the real issue is cash. For one thing, Americans don’t generally carry cash, which can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. But when we need cash, we can get it from an ATM. So can people in Israel, Uruguay, the Czech Republic, and I’m sure in most other places. But in the US, when you want cash, you get it in twenties. $20, $60, $100, $1000. It doesn’t matter; it will come in twenties, because any place you go will have change for a twenty.

International exchange rates are most to your benefit when you use an ATM, not a cash exchange place, and it’s best to withdraw a significant amount of money at a time. I like getting $100 worth of local currency; it means I won’t need to go back for awhile, but it also means that if I get robbed, it’s not the end of the world. But in Prague, and in Montevideo, that adds up to around 2000 crowns/pesos. So when I withdraw that, I get it in a 2000-crown bill. That’s fucking stupid. Everyone hates someone who wants to buy a sandwich with a 2000-crown bill, but what choice do I have? I have to eat. I just don’t understand a country that refuses to have enough change but also refuses to provide useful bills in their ATMs. It is absolutely infuriating.

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what you see if you are me

Posted on July 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Praguers drive like New Yorkers and cut off the streetcars. Streetcars drive like molasses, but they go uphill, and they’re more stylish than buses and more sightseeing-y than subway trains, though Prague has both of those as well. Stoplights go back to yellow again before turning green.

Dresden has buildings that are eight feet of originality and a million more feet of rebuilding after bombings. There is a Protestant church as ostentatious as a Catholic church, and you think that Martin Luther, who is right out front, would be offended. It has a river. It has a bridge where you will be stopped by young men and their parents, and the young men will ask you to have a drink with them or let their friend, who is about to be married tomorrow, clean your shoes. Another one of them will play the accordion. In Dresden, you can buy shot glasses that look like beer mugs. There are clubs that represent the best of American clubs (good music, not techno) and the best of European clubs (no sleazy guys to grab your ass), and they will also have a screen that flashes DJ advertisements and a night of “tits, techno, and trumpets.”

Then you go back to Prague, where there is a museum of Alfons Mucha and Salvador Dali, and you will be obsessed with finding prints of Mucha’s calendar girls and where you will want a large print of Dali’s painting of people made out of flowers and butterflies and vinyl records, but they will not sell them in the gift shop, and the museum will not label the Dali with a title enabling you to google it. You will go to faculty readings twice a week and a student reading once a week, and you will be inspired by how you are among (almost exclusively, with very few exceptions) really smart and talented and creative people, and it feels like it’s been too long.

You will stay up until 3am talking to your suitemate, who goes to school in Michigan and whose roommate there is from Tucson and has 14 friends in common with you on Facebook, and then you will sleep late for the first time in ages. You will miss breakfast, but you will not care, because you can eat the Milka you bought at Tesco. When you are tired of being alone in your double room with no roommate (score!), you will go upstairs to see your friends, whom you adore already. You will not find any boys you feel like hooking up with, and though that is maybe a bit boring, it is so nice to know that you won’t be distracted by angst or sexual frustration. You will have a little bit of asthma difficulty because Europeans smoke like chimneys, but you can deal.

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the ashamed american

Posted on July 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

I hate that I cannot speak Czech, and yet here I am in Prague, walking around and enjoying myself and not even trying to learn how to say thank you, even though I bought a little phrasebook. I hate assholes like that, and I think it’s making me not enjoy myself as much as I could be. And that’s a bit silly, because so far I just try to be polite and smile, and most people do speak a lot of English, so I don’t think it’s actually a problem. But I think this may be the last time for awhile that I go somewhere where I don’t speak the language or where I can’t fake it convincingly, so that leaves only places where romance languages and English are spoken.

My favorite thing about everyday life in Prague is that, even though there is a subway and a bus system, I basically only need the streetcar to get to my classes and readings and dorm, and streetcars are the bestest (that, conveniently, is my tram and the photo is taken near Charles University, though I just googled it to find it). Today I was on my way back to the dorm, nearly falling asleep from having stayed up way too late last night, and the tram was fairly crowded. A woman with a cane got on, and since I am that bitch foreigner who speaks no Czech except “please” and “good night” (“thank you” is such a difficult word that I cannot remember), it didn’t really occur to me to offer her a seat. I’ll chalk it up to being out of it and sleepy. Anyway, she didn’t look at me and instead asked the girl across from me to give up her seat.

Totally valid. I can’t think of a public transport system I’ve ever been on that didn’t have a sign asking you to please give up your seat for the elderly, disabled, or pregnant (which, according to health insurance, is a disability anyway….yay, America!). But I’m pretty sure she didn’t ask politely; she just told the girl to get up. (And then I had this flash dream of her telling me to get up, me not understanding, and her beating me with her cane. This is my linguistically challenged terror.) There’s something about language that is totally understandable even when it’s unintelligible. I always knew in Kenya when I was being talked about, even when my head was down in a pile of potatoes I had to peel and the women were speaking Kikuyu. I understood Portuguese in my heart long before I took a college course. And I come from a family in which one set of grandparents uses Yiddish all the time and the other speaks only Spanglish. Language is fluid.

So should that make me feel less guilty? I still feel guilty. There are lots of things I love, but generally I am ashamed of my nationality, and it also saddens me that we cannot have a collective national identity (even if that’s kind of silly to assume any country can have one) in the way that the Czech Republic or many other countries do, because we have such a tradition of dissent and marginalization and because being either subversive or rebellious is the way to be and because patriotism these days only implies Republicanism. So here I am, an ashamed American who cannot quite be called an expatriot. What am I?

(Also, every time I hear a language that I don’t speak, I want to speak Spanish. I’m not sure why.)

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praha 1

Posted on July 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

First full day in Prague, and while I was sitting at a bar with some new friends a Czech guy pronounced me “very beautiful” and asked me to a restaurant for a drink. I let him give me his number, but this is usually where I cop out, and then I complain that nobody wants me. The irony is that he asked me right after I talked about how creepy it is when guys hit on you on the street out of nowhere.

We walked through the old city, and my new favorite kind of city is a city built on hills. Prague is a close second to Jerusalem in the contest for most beautiful city.

peacock
Oh, I’m sorry, do they not have albino peacocks in trees where you live?


The view everywhere is spectacular.

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