PSA

My friend M (who wishes to remain internet-anonymous) just moved to Thailand to work at a women’s shelter, and writes a blog that is infinitely funnier and more insightful than mine.  You should all check it out.

 

Lost in Translation

There are times when it’s hard to know if things are “Czech” or not.  When people behave in a certain way, when someone reacts to me as a non-Czech, I always have to wonder if it’s a matter of nationality or personality.  I can’t tell, for instance, when the person at the restaurant I’m trying to make a reservation at sighs and says, “Well, I guess you can come at that time,” if it’s because they’re genuinely unpleasant, or if it’s because we’re speaking English, and they, perhaps rightfully so, are tired of dealing with foreigners who can’t be bothered to learn the local language.  There are certainly times when I’m sure they’re just being obstinate.  My conversation with the receptionist for my building manager, for example (written phonetically for explanation and emphasis):

Me: Ahoj, Petra Navakova, prosim?  (Hello, Petra Navacova, please?)

Her: (Czechczechczechczech) (Something clearly along the lines of, Who? I can’t possibly think of anyone who works here who has a name remotely like that.)

Me: Um…mluvite anglitsky?

Her: Ne.

Me: Ahhh…Petra Navakova, prosim?

Her: (Czechczechczechczech)

Me: Petra Navakova?

(Several seconds of angry silence.)

Her: Ah, Petra Navakova.  Dobre.

I mean, really?  I understand that proper emphasis is important, but I feel reasonably confident that if someone called and asked to talk to Lindsay Lohan instead of Lindsay Lohan, I could still figure out who they meant.   It’s the same feeling I get when I’m in a movie theater, and the Czech part of the audience and the expat part of the audience laugh at completely different parts of the film.  2012? Not so funny to the Czechs.  Paranormal Activity? Absolutely hi-larious.

There is no time that I feel quite so American, though, as when I go out to lunch with my Czech co-workers.  I never thought of myself as a particularly American person.  Not that I’m ashamed of it, I just never identified one way or the other with the word.  It is here, though, that I realize how strongly my American-ness is bred into my actions.  Because, you see, Czechs (at least the ones that work at my law firm) are not very chatty people.  I never thought I was either, until I got here.

Every day, we go to lunch.  We talk about three things: What did you do/are you going to do this weekend?  Are you busy at work today?  Why are lawyers such jerks?  These topics last for roughly ten minutes, or, the time it takes to walk to wherever we’re eating, plus the time it takes for us to order.  And then we sit.

And sit.

And I get uncomfortable.  I am an American, and we make small talk.  We do not sit in silence while contemplating our napkins and the choice of cutlery sitting before us.  And so I ask questions.  Where do you live in Prague?  Have you always lived here?  I even brought out the big guns once by asking, How did you meet your husband?  I mean, who doesn’t like to talk about their significant other for at least a few minutes.  “On a bus.”  And… “That’s pretty much the whole story.”

And so it is, it seems.  The whole story can be summed up in a sentence: in the conversational cold war between America and the Czech Republic, I am destined to lose.

 

It’s Been A While

I’m sorry it’s been a while since I updated.  Somehow the last few weeks have really gotten away from me, which I guess could be either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

My birthday last week was lovely.  My coworkers brought me flowers and tiramisu, and after my book club meeting I went out with some friends for dessert at one of my favorite restaurants.  That being said, I don’t know how much I like being twenty-three–I feel like perhaps I should be doing something more important than a temporary proofreading job.  Then again, I guess this is the time for temporary jobs.

On a completely separate topic, I walk past these strange statues every day, and I’ve been meaning to take a picture of them for Kathryn, my cat-lady friend.  (In case you can’t tell, this is a cat dressed up as a sailor.)  They’re carved out of chocolate, and there is no explanation given as to why the cats all appear to be very, very drunk.

I’ve been doing a lot of food-related things lately, which are, of course, some of my favorite things to do.  Heidi and I have made apple cider doughnuts, lots of curry, and most recently, gingerbread apple upside-down cake. We also ventured out into the Prague suburbs to visit Little Hanoi, the Vietnamese neighborhood, where we had noodle soup. It was wonderful, even if the area itself was a little unnerving. I don’t think I would visit there after dark, meaning after 4 o’clock here during Prague winter…

I come home in just over three weeks, and I’m so excited to see everyone who will be in Chicago. I think having a chance to see the people that I’ve known forever will help fortify me to get through January and February, which are, by all accounts, pretty miserable here. But you know, positive thinking and whatnot. I’ll try to keep more up to date on this blog, since keeping in touch with people will also make surviving the winter easier.

 

5 Things

I’m so, so tired. I’m two weeks behind on responding to anyone’s emails (sorry!), I’m behind on my book club book, I keep messing up the scarf I’m trying to knit, I’m just tired. But it’s not really a bad thing. Actually, the last two weeks have been pretty good.

1. I found peanut butter. Actually, I think what I should say is, I found Marks & Spencers. It’s so much cheaper here than it is in London. I nearly cried when I went in for the first time a couple of weekends ago. They have tea biscuits, and parmesan cheese, and smooth AND crunchy peanut butter. And I can afford all of those things.

2. I spent almost a week in London with my mom, and got to eat a lot of really good food and see this exhibit, which was great.  She also brought me 7 pounds of brown sugar, a bottle of vanilla extract, sea salt, two cans of pumpkin, and peanut butter M&Ms.

3. I found a dog!  I had her for one night, and I called her Sadie.  She was really sweet, but I knew I had to find her real owner.  I was walking her to the police station the morning after I found her, because they can scan her for a microchip, and we ran into her real owner.  He said that she had wandered away when she was in the park, and that they have two small kids, so I’m glad she’s back with her family.  But here she is curled up on my bed.

4. I also have a dog to dog-sit.  His name is Sparky, and we’re going to watch him when his owner has to work late nights and weekends and doesn’t want to leave him alone in the house.

5. I come home in 48 days.

 

Grown-Ups

A lot of things continue to amaze me about my life now. I’ve graduated from college. I’m a grown-up–when did that happen? Because I don’t feel like one a lot of the time. Yes, I technically have a lease contract, and I’ve learned the ins and outs of dealing with my property manager when I still don’t have curtains four months after moving in, our oven is broken, and our heat still hasn’t been turned on even though it’s been snowing. (Persistence, to the point of obnoxiousness, is the key, it seems.) I have a job, but a job where I can wear whatever I want and I spend large portions of my day reading Jezebel. Is this what real adults do?

And every once in a while, I will be walking down the street and think, “Oh my god, I live in Prague. Since when? And how? Are you sure I’m not just visiting here?” But I’ve actually made a life. I get up in the morning, I make breakfast, I go to work. I’m in a book club and I go to yoga classes. I have friends here–actual friends, not just semi-awkward acquaintances. And I still don’t know how any of it happened.

And while I may like my life here, having moved a few inches out of my not-liking-Prague phase (though perhaps not at full-blown adulation yet), I miss being in school. I look forward to my book club every two weeks just so that I can go and argue with people about agency and symbolism. I have seriously considered suggesting that we include supplementary theory articles with the books, but I’m certain that I would be overruled. I don’t know if I’m ready not to be a student.

The real world is a strange place where you have to work very hard to make friends, to be social, even just to keep yourself busy. I still don’t know how I feel about that. I think that graduating, leaving all of my friends, and moving to another country all in one fell swoop was a big, not entirely thought-out move on my part, even if it’s one I’m glad I made. I’ve always done that, though. Sure, I can go to Ecuador without a guidebook when I’m sixteen. I can travel around Thailand by myself. I might as well go to Egypt if I’m already in Europe. For all of my impulsive decisions (mostly involving going to other countries), I haven’t made one yet that I really regret.

I have no idea where I’m going with this at all, except that I still think that a conversation I had with Ali a really long time ago holds: you know you’re a grown-up when you stop using the word “grown-up.” I’m pretty sure.

 

Do You Like American Music? We Like All Kinds of Music.

The girls who work in the office next to mine usually play the radio during the day, and it’s usually tuned to what I assume is the American “hits” station.  This is a sample of what I have heard so far:

Shaggy–It Wasn’t Me
Journey–Don’t Stop Believing
Lou Bega–Mambo No. 5 (We also used to hear this all the time in London.)
Celine Dion–My Heart Will Go On
Nazareth–Love Hurts
Kelly Clarkson–The Trouble With Love Is
Taylor Swift–Love Story (I hate, hate, HATE this song, and I hated it before Kanye West had anything to do with it.)

And one that I haven’t heard but I love:
The Violent Femmes–American Music

Last week I had my first film class, which was…underwhelming. The professor didn’t ask us a single question. That might have been all right if he had lectured well, but instead he just showed us clips of different films and occasionally said things like, “This is a really good example of film noir.” He also told us that film noir deals with “a little thing he likes to call the unspoken.” I’ve got news for you, Professor, you didn’t coin that phrase. The readings are good, but the class isn’t great, and I just can’t decide if I want to spend a lot of money on something I’m not crazy about, considering my rather small salary. Because of the way the class is structured, and the fact that it ends at 9:30, I don’t really think I’m going to make any friends in it, either. I don’t know what to do. I have another class tomorrow, so I’ll go to that. If it’s just as bad, though…what should I do?

Unrelatedly, when someone finds this blog through a search engine, I can see what the terms they used were. A lot of people come across it by searching for “nemluvim cesky” or something similar. However, a few days ago someone found it by searching for “the cutest most tiniest puppies in the world.” I have a feeling they were disappointed when they found this instead.

 

The Bone Church

Am I still frustrated here?  Perhaps.  But on to bigger and better things.  Well, more macabre things, anyway.

Something that I regret about my time here so far is not traveling more in the Czech Republic.  There are a lot of beautiful small towns that I’d like to see, and I just haven’t gotten it together yet to leave Prague, except for one small side trip.  About an hour outside of Prague is a town called Kutna Hora, and Kutna Hora’s claim to fame is its ossuary.  In a small church behind Kutna Hora’s grand, gothic cathedral, the bones of at least 40,000 people have been used to decorate the walls.

The church came into being during the 14th century; it was built on a graveyard that had at one point been a mass dumping ground for victims of the plague, and when the church was constructed, the bones were taken from the graveyard to decorate the ossuary.  Supposedly the task of exhuming the bones and stacking them in the church was given to a half-blind monk who lived there.  In 1870, a woodcarver was hired to arrange the bones, which he apparently took to quite well.

The church is full of bone “statues.”  There are crests, patterns, and a huge chandelier, all made out of various human bones.  It’s not actually that weird to be in the church–I didn’t think so, anyway.  While it’s a reminder of a frightening time in human history, the skeletons weren’t from people who had been killed by the church or anything like that.  Now hundreds of tourists come every day to a small town that probably wouldn’t see any if the ossuary weren’t located there.

I wish I had gotten to see more of Kutna Hora itself.  Maybe I’ll try to make it a point to go back there some weekend.

My film class starts tomorrow–let’s hope it’s good.

 

Culture Shock: Czech Republic

From the book Culture Shock: Czech  Republic, regarding the stages of being an expat in Prague: “euphoria in the first month or two, to a rather sudden low period during the third month or so, to a gradual reawakening to your new country, with a strong sense of confidence and energy.”

Having been here for exactly 12 weeks as of today, I can confirm, as a member of the three-month category, that I am experiencing a “rather sudden low period,” as you might have guessed from my previous post about how much I miss London (and Chicago.)  I’m frustrated by so many things, very few of which I can do anything about.  Although I finally submitted all the paperwork for my visa, I have not heard anything back about it, not even an e-mail confirming that the embassy received the paperwork.  I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now, and when I’m sick in a new place, it always makes me want to go home.  I accidentally locked the SIM card on my phone, and when I went to get it fixed today, I found out that since my phone is through my office, I need to get the “password” that allows T-Mobile to just unlock it.  It’s been a series of unfortunate events, all of which are small, but combine to something that seems to loom much larger over my time in Prague at the moment.

There are certainly things to be grateful for–I am very glad not to be sitting at home, unemployed.  (I know my mother is happy with this as well.)  I’m lucky that I didn’t take the job in Manila, which is currently under 4 feet of tropical rainwater.   And I know, poor little girl living in Europe for a year.  But none of that changes the fact that I desperately miss going to the drugstore and knowing what the boxes of medicine say.  I miss going to the animal shelter, which I have tried my best to do here, only to be told that volunteers are “liabilities”.  I want to see my friends and my family and my dogs. My job is boring and routine, and does nothing to give me a sense of purpose.  I debated whether or not to post about this, because I don’t know that anyone really wants to hear my complaints about living here, but I decided that part of the reason for keeping this blog was to tell about my experiences, and right now, this is it.  The experience at the moment is not ideal.

I’m working on moving on to the “gradual reawakening” period.  I found a film theory class that I can take, and I’m so relieved to have something like that, something that I can develop and look forward to and get something out of, that I can’t even express it properly.  I think the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make since graduating is not having something I care about to structure my time around; at least now I can feel like I’m working toward something, even though I’m just going to be auditing.

To compensate for all the whining I’ve done here, here is a picture of my friends Holly and Joao’s puppy, Lucky.  Because Lucky is still so small, they often carry him in a messenger bag, with just his head poking out.

 

The Luxury of Eavesdropping

Why did I ever leave London?  I never should have gotten on that plane home two years ago, and I definitely shouldn’t have gotten on it last week after I went to collect my short-term visa (thank god–I can now stay in the country for at least the next 90 days.  After that, we’ll see…)  I should have just stayed there and hidden–there must be illegal immigrants in London, right?  Because if I had stayed there, I could have worked toward my eventual dream of owning this house in Notting Hill.

Did I mention that I miss London?  There are so many things about it that I love.  I love walking on the South Bank when it’s windy and gray and you have to wonder why there are so many people that aren’t at work, and instead are strolling or jogging by the river.  I love the vintage stores and restaurants in Notting Hill, and all of the beautiful, colorful houses along the quiet streets there.  And I love the Hummingbird Bakery, where I had a coffee-walnut cupcake.  Even though Books for Cooks was closed, spending a few hours in Notting Hill was like a shot in the arm, and I remembered why I love big cities so much.

I like Prague, but being in London and having the luxury of eavesdropping on other people’s conversations is something I didn’t even realize that I missed until it suddenly confronted me again.  I stopped wearing my headphones just so that I could hear what was going on around me.  I spent part of the morning in the Tate Modern, something that I didn’t appreciate nearly enough when I was living there.  Free museums–not such a common thing in Prague.  Actually, museums period aren’t such a common thing here, except for the Museum of Torture Instruments that I pass every morning on my way to work. 

London also has my favorite graffiti, including this new gem.  For anyone who is having a hard time reading this, it says: “Darling Hugh Laurie, if you are reading this–Tayler loves you.”  This was found, by the way, written on the door of a bathroom stall in the Tate Modern.  I think it was Amanda who said last year, when we were discussing House, “Who doesn’t love Hugh Laurie?”  I don’t know, certainly not me, and obviously not Tayler either.

I’m enjoying my time here, and I appreciate it and value it and know that I would have regretted not coming, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is a part of me that looks forward to understanding what goes on around me again, and misses the opportunities that a larger city brings.  What’s strange, though, is that I never (well, almost never) felt this in Grinnell.  I guess it’s a good thing I’m coming home for Christmas–it gives me a way to break up the solid wall of Czech (which I’m still not any better at, unfortunately.  Although I did learn “dobry pes”–good dog.)

 

Visa Troubles

There are all sorts of challenges to living in a new country.  The language barrier, the grocery store, streets not laid out on a grid system.  But all of these things pale in comparison to the visa process.  I know that the U.S. has one of the most ridiculous, difficult visa processes around, but that doesn’t stop me from whining about the Czech process.  Believe me, if it was up to me, both versions would be much simpler.

To get a Czech visa, you have to apply for it outside of the country, and you have to go somewhere with a Czech embassy.  That’s how I ended up in London, which I don’t mind at all.  Going to the embassy isn’t the awful part.  It’s just everything else.

I’m living in my apartment under a sub-lease contract, which means my roommate, the main tenant, has the actual lease contract.  To get a visa, you need proof of your accommodation for your entire stay in the Czech Republic.  Not a problem right?  If only.  Our lease only officially runs through the end of this December, and my roommate has not decided yet if she wants to renew it.  This was not brought to my attention until I mailed my lease contract (which is in Czech) to the embassy, and they informed me that I only have an apartment for the next three months.  Now, not only do I not know if I will have to find somewhere else to live in January, but I do not have the correct document for the embassy.

I don’t know what to do.  I don’t want to pressure her into signing a new contract, but I really, really need that document.  If I don’t get it, I don’t get a visa, and it’s that simple.  I don’t want to have to go through the process of finding a new apartment just so that I can get a new contract, but I’m worried I’m going to have to.  I like my apartment, and I like my neighborhood.  I don’t want to leave, but I don’t want to not have a visa more.