Easter Weekend in Plsen

One of the most beautiful times I had in the Czech Republic last year was when I went to Plsen on Easter weekend to visit Hana, my longtime pen pal of twenty years.  We had started writing letters back and forth years ago, when an organization called World Contact Network was looking for Americans to correspond with newly-freed Czechs adjusting to the West.

I had fallen in love with the Czech Republic watching the Velvet Revolution on TV and was deeply fascinated by any nation so cultured as to elect a playwright for President.  I had to know more about Czechs!  Hana and I began writing and eventually Hana's daughter, Lenka, came to live with my family for a time in America.

I took over 250 pictures of my weekend trip to Plsen! I had looked forward to this day so much. Hana and I had raised kids at the same time. We both divorced about the same time.  We taught each other so much about each other's countries.

Unfortunately, on the train back to Prague, a train employee asked everyone in my compartment to switch to a new compartment. In that move I lost my camera. I don't know if I left it on the ledge, the seat, or someone took it out of my bag.  I was sooooooo disappointed because I had such a wonderful weekend there.

Hana and her family went to great lengths to show me a fabulous time in their city. It's taken me over a year just to accept that I wouldn't have those pictures to share with this blog post because I felt the loss so deeply.

Hana and her son picked me up at the train station.  I went first to meet Hana's parents and to see her son's village home which he was renovating.  Jiri took me out to the backyard to see the animals he raised for food.

Have you ever heard of the animal Nutrea?  I hadn't.  Hana's son, Jiri, said their meat was very tender to eat.  There were four or five pens with 2-3 animals in each. I thought "wow, I'm really in a European village now.  Hana's family is actually raising their own livestock in the backyard!"  Later, I laughed about how exotic and foreign I thought this was at the time, because it turns out that a very hip, very growing trend in Madison, Wisconsin where I would subsequently move, is to grow chickens in the backyard.  Madison has a whole web site for chicken farming aficionados called "Mad City Chickens."

On Saturday, we started with a tour of the Brewery Museum.  It was fun to see how beer has been created throughout the centuries.  After a tour of the museum, everyone gets a free beer.  We had ours on the back porch of the museum and put all of our new knowledge to work tasting a rich Czech beer.

Later, we went downtown to walk around lovely Plsen.  There was a wedding outside the fascinating, centuries-old Main Hall and I tried not to take pictures but it was hard!  Everything was sunny and blue, the bride was beautiful, and I was in the middle of a picturesque town square in the middle of Europe!  Eventually, they dragged me over to the beautiful church,  St. Bartholomew Cathedral, that's right in the Main Square.  We went inside to see the baroque interior and to climb the steps to the top of the tower.  I have no idea how roofs in the Czech Republic ever get done because the steep angle would terrify me if I was a roofer (thank you to those of you who are; I appreciate how dangerous it is and am grateful that someone else takes it on).  It was fun to see all of Plsen from every side and to look down and see the Plsner beer tent and all of the other kiosks set up to celebrate Easter.  We climbed down and had a Plsner beer in the Plsen beer tent in the middle of Plsen.  Gosh darn it, I want a picture of that!

That evening, Hana and her sweetie, took me to the Plsen Opera House for an evening of opera.  It's cozier than the Prague National Theatre (I haven't been to the Prague Opera) and it's just as beautiful. Again, it kills me that I can't show you the pictures because Europeans create the most breathtakingly beautiful performance spaces. Wait, have I been in other nation's performance spaces?  No.  Let me revise that to what I have personally witnessed.  Czechs make the most gorgeous performing spaces!  Everyone was dressed up too. We looked great! It was nice.

The next day we ventured out into the countyside to see Kozel Castle.  If I could have teleported my mother from Colorado to that chateau for their tour, I would have.  It was divine! My mother would have gone absolutely nuts seeing that place.  It was a hunting chateau in the middle of an idyllic lakefront setting.  The home was beautiful, yes, but it was the lightness of the decorating that I would have loved for my mother to see.

Every room in that hunting chateau suggested "play."  The ceramics and the dishes were exquisite! In each room, there were fresh flowers in manor-sized containers.  It was worth it to go on that tour just to see a gorgeous, resplendent arrangement of flowers in each room on that elegant scale over and over again. With most tours, the tour operators wouldn't go to the trouble of giving you the feeling of being in the room as it was meant to be at the time using fresh flowers.  But the people who run this castle did.  Fantastic! The final room was the best of all.  We walked into a magical family-sized theatre.  I could just imagine the people putting on a play for each other's amusement in the 1830's.  Oh, it was painful not to have my mother by my side for that tour! She would have just appreciated it so much. And I can't even show her the pictures!

After that fabulous experience, we went into town to a new brewery and restaurant that had started in Plsen.  I would share the name of it with you but where would I get that from...you guessed it...my pictures.

I went home on Sunday night.  If I had been more educated about Czech Easters, I would have known I would be expected to stay through Monday.  Monday is also part of the Czech Easter holiday.  I did not know that though until Prague friends asked me why I came home early.  Now I know.

I had a WONDERFUL time at Hana's.  It was so meaningful to connect in person after all those years of letters.  It's my pen pals who really continued and built on my initial fascination with all things Czech.  If you can't see a picture of Hana and her family, I hope what you can feel is their hearts: open.

"Advancing Europe's Security" by Joe Biden

Joe Biden has an excellent piece in the International Herald Tribune this week about advancing Europe's security.  As an American citizen, what I appreciated when I read it was a sense that American foreign policy isn't "coasting" in Europe, with a "no problems, no-need-to-pay-attention" attitude. They're recalibrating all the time.  It's been quite well-reported how much Central European leaders worry about American "drift." Click on my title to read his opinion piece.

Smetana's "Ma Vlast" is worth knowing

One of the great attractions of living in the Czech Republic, is that high culture is so alive, so affordable, and so accessible.  Give it another twenty years of capitalism and it may not be so. 

No American could imagine a scenario where every single person in our country knows a specific composer and his works. We all come from too many different backgrounds as citizens.  There is American classical music, but do you think more than 10% of the population knows Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" or Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man?"

When I hear those American-composed pieces, they move me in a way that I consider almost nationalistic because they so perfectly capture an "American" sound and feeling. I wish I could share that pride with every other American when the music plays.

There is a shared culture that everyone knows based on being Czech here in the Czech Republic.  You can assume that when a Czech hears the opening bars of Bedrich Smetana's "Vyshrad" tone poem from his symphonic creation "Ma Vlast" (or "My Country" in English) whenever a Czech train station announcement is played overhead on the train station loudspeaker, they all instantly recognize the opening bars of the music.

One of my blog followers told me that Czech Airlines plays "Ma Vlast" every time they land a plane in Prague coming from out-of-country.

When the Prague Half Marathon began last year, and President Vaclav Klaus set the runners off, the athletes ran from the starting line accompanied by the second tone poem of Smetana's "Ma Vlast" entitled "Vltava."   I can see why.  "Ma Vlast" is a gorgeous, stirring piece of music.  I don't even feel the nationalistic pride that a Czech would but I can imagine how it must make their chests swell.

I recommend a specific album called "Smetana Orchestral Works" recorded by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra in Municipal Hall in Prague in 2001 if you are new to Bedrich Smetana's music.  It was recommended to me by the music library staff at Prague Municipal Library.  "Ma Vlast" is included, along with another piece of music that is played often in the Czech Republic called "Wallenstein's Camp."  Click on my title to get your "Czech music soul" stirring and see the album. Where else is Smetana's music used within the Czech Republic in ways that touch citizens?

Do you have favorite pieces of classical music that represent your homeland or that you associate with a specific geographical place?

Can Anyone Tell Me About this Beautiful Czech Pottery?

Twenty years ago, when I started corresponding with my Czech pen pals, one of them sent me a vase like the one pictured in the second picture below. I fell in love with the beautiful folk pottery! It's Czech, but I have never seen it offered for sale in Prague.

These pictures are on display at Celetna Crystal on Celetna Street. When I asked the salesperson about them she shrugged and said "too old fashioned." Say it ain't so! It's classic folk pottery. So who knows anything about these beautiful things?

Are they Moravian?

Peter Eigen: How to expose the corrupt | Video on TED.com

Here's an NGO (non-governmental organization) you should know about.  It's called Transparency International. I never heard of it until I came to the Czech Republic and I saw it advertised on buses, trams, and on T-shirts. I knew it fought corruption but I didn't know how. What a wonderful vision this man has of the difference he can make in improving governance throughout the world! Nobel peace prize people, are you listening?

Take 16 minutes by clicking on my title or the link below to listen to his TED talk describing his work organizing suppliers to create a corruption-free business culture. Just by listening to his arguments, you help create a less-corrupt environment that honors great products rather than corruption culture in developing markets. Think of the cynicism this man is helping to prevent! And is there anything that keeps more people from political action than cynicism? I think not.

Can you share his ideas with one other person, especially someone who works at a global company? You, as a member of civil society, can help reform cultures across borders by developing beliefs and expectations that this can change. It can change, you know. Believe.

Peter Eigen: How to expose the corrupt | Video on TED.com

The Journeys of Captain Oddsocks

When you decide to move to a country and want to learn all about it, one of the best things you can do is read the blogs of expatriates who are already living there.  Today I want to give a shout out to an expatriate blog about the Czech Republic that I have loved reading and that has introduced me to parts of the Czech Republic beyond Prague.

The Journeys of Captain Oddsocks is such a well-written blog.  Here's one of the posts I appreciated the most: "What and Where was the Sudetenland?"  For example, one of the things I learned from Captain Oddsocks' post that I didn't know before about the Sudetenland was the role reversal of German-speaking citizens governing the country at the time from a majority position and then all-of-a-sudden becoming the minority.  There's a similar parallel today with the Sunnis in Iraq who used to govern the country and are now getting used to a new role.  I hope it turns out better than the Sudetenland did!

I will know that I know the Czech Republic really well when I start winning Captain Oddsocks "Where the Czech?" photo contests.  Haven't won one yet!  Have you? Another post he did I totally love is "100 things about the Czech Republic."  How many items on the list did you know about? What makes you smile?  What would you suggest to him as an addition?

Yesterday, Captain Oddsocks started a series on Czechland architecture with an initial post: Baroque for Beginners.  Who can resist a name like that?  I didn't want you to miss a single entry! I recommend signing up to follow Captain Oddsocks on his blog or through Facebook.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Jana, center, invited colleagues

Justin and me

to join her at a reception

for a Czech photographer's

exhibition of Tibetan culture.

It was the 50th anniversary

of the Dali Lama's exile from Tibet.

I predicted that one of my students

with a thing for Tibetan culture would be there.

This was the only time I ever played hooky from class.

I guessed, correctly, my student would be playing hooky too!

We rescheduled the class for another time.

The reception was at one of the Czech Parliament Buildings.

Here is the receptionist's nifty period in-and-out-board

for knowing which official is in the building

and which isn't.

Prague is full of beautiful cloak rooms

with pleasing period fixtures.

and a few toys.

The librarian in me was completely enthralled by

these glorious documents on display

on the way to the reception room.

Look at the "signature" seals on these things!

The explanations were only in Czech

but I believe the document below is a

Czech constitution from some moment in Czech history.

The reception was very intimate

and felt more so due to a light rain outside

falling on the skylights.

Yet, this government-sponsored reception

felt completely accessible, open, and friendly to

anyone with an interest in the topic

whether they were Czech or from some other country.

I love that about the Czechs.

I never get the feeling of "exclusion - natives only please."

There were all kinds

of interesting people in attendance.

The guest of honor: the photographer

who took the beautiful photographs on display.

A sample of her photographic work above.

Czech people know what it is to be a tiny country

that feels forgotten.

I came away from this evening understanding that

there are supporters of Tibetan rights
all over the world, not just the USA.

Jana was excited to meet Kateřina Jacques,

Vice Chair of the Czech Green Party.

"She is like our Obama!"

Jana explained to me that Kateřina Jacques

had become famous throughout the Czech Republic

ever since a You Tube video surfaced

of her 'treatment' by authorities at a political rally

at the start of her political career.

Jana was toying with getting involved in Czech politics.

I admired my friend for that because

my experience so far had been that Czech people don't see how their

individual involvement in politics can make a difference. 

It can! It does!

And to end on something lighter than politics:

my favorite food discovery of the evening

was this Czech pastry I was

introduced to that night - věneček.

It's the one second from the right.

Totally, totally worth the calories.