z prahy: new suits

The motley crue of mostly advanced Czech students boarded the bus Saturday, 9am, late, which is to say, way late by Czech standards. While most of the buses parked in the lot outside my bedroom balcony window are of the fancy, tinted windows take no prisoners tourism type, this was a good old fashioned excursion bus – something you want to attach speakers to and pile out of to steal a pee like a prankster of olde. The bus belched violently blue-purple haze from its rear whenever it was started up and inside the bus was like smelling a sharpie for too long until we started sailing the narrow winding curves of our random backwoods vylet [trip].

I confess. On Friday, the moje ucitelka asked 'one of the students in another class wants to know if it's okay if she brings her baby on the trip.' And of course no one raised their hands, and so, though my brain begged to defy gravity and stand up for the sanctity of the adult swim rule, I let go. So for the rest of this reading, set your TK drone box to "baby cackle/scream and every woman over 25 who wasn't me obeying their genes and fawning sickly sound." Granted I wouldn't want said woman not to come, but then she let said baby wander/scream/crawl all around the bus because she just assumed it was okay with everyone and that the baby would become 'group property' and people would pay attention to/help it – to an including at our sit down dinner. To je problem.

Whatevs, the trip. Went to the home of Karel Capak, likely mostly known to most for inventing the term 'robot' although until about 20 years ago he was prime comp. lit. material, the first moderni cesky spisovatel [writer] and a fine fine amateur gardener. His house, in Strz, was pretty modest and unlike most American museums, it was more exhibit than, don't know the curatorial term, "just as if he'd stepped out for a minute." There was a nice bowler hat and cane, but more interesting were pictures of him greeting other writers to Prague, like H.G. Wells, correspondences he kept with writers all over the world, and photos of interwar Prague in general. Capek's garden and first floor flooded the spring before he died, washing away the garden he loved - 1938 – it was said that he had severe depression and as someone who spent a life writing sci-fi/speculative dystopian fiction as leader of a cosmopolitan vanguard, it is little wonder what made him so smutny [sad]. He also loved his dog, Dasenka (I think my old Czech teacher used to call me this!) and wrote a children's story about a 'dog and kittie.' Reminds me that I want to buy bell hooks childrens' book.

In Pribram we went to a 19th century silver mine, wore hardhats and entered the mining area by a long double banister-like slide that you rode down on by a giant rectangle of felt. Mind you, there was a retired gentleman on the trip who often summoned the miracle of his pacemaker (he's the arch-conservative Proctor and Gamble guy on the trip who apparently argued that the Japanese interment camps 'weren't that bad). Sooo…this little slide thing was amazingly unsafe and fun, the mine was nuda [boring] but fun-boring (a little too close to Ikea's 'un-boring,' but maybe the same sentiment).

I decided in Breznice that one of my new things to do before I die is either a) wear a suit of armor or b) have a suit of armor made for me and then wear it. If there's ever a reality show about pretending to be a knight, please contact me. Armor is cool and swords and battle axes and all of those things are cool, but even cooler was that this total d&d Czech 16-yr-old boy was giving us the tour, and was like totally all over the weaponry. All the dudes in the group stood in the front, and most women were audibly nuda. Going to places like this reinforces some kind of bizarre traditionalist view of history as a procession of war, conquest, strategic marriage, serviceable oil paintings, relics, intricate monograms placed in unlikely places, and the creation of superlative braggarding at any cost "the first library to use shelves in Central Europe" !!! Well, I'm sure Benjamin would send thanks for the shelves before sliced bread at least (end of the aura of the loaf!). I had an undergrad moment of drawing the belltower from a bench near a lake while taking a break from the herd.

Our hotel was completely just us, but they wanted us to be three to a room. I often get a sense when staying at a hotel that everyone working at the hotel would rather no one was there at all, and this was def. the case v hotelu Kratochvil. [at the hotel 'short stay'!]. I roomed with a nice Jewish girl from Boston who is doing a dissertation on 20th Czech history, as by the end of day one everyone had found the person on the bus most similar to them and settled into that weird chat where one knows nothing of another and finds any topic acceptable for the sake of camaraderie. Anyway, Laura seems to rule.

We went to dinner and sat with the pacemaker man, Lorenzo, and the Midwestern medical R&D guy turned missionary (who explained that his wife wasn't with because she runs a camp where they teach English to disadvantaged Czech youth using the Bible…which, I'm afraid to say, I might have to think as more than 70% unacceptable in my brain) who might be the perfect example of someone you can total disagree but completely get along with – an actual factual good Christian living what seems to be a humble and just life (Isaac too). I ate smazeny syr [fried cheese], which, you'll be unsurprised to know is becoming my favorite Czech dish.

At 10pm they kicked us out of the dining room and into the bar, across a five foot hallway, and immediately the group got engrossed in some card game using another deck of cards with hearts, balls, leaves and TK. They were playing a game called TK which seemed a lot like Uno and had all the non-Czechs confused because of the difference in suits. I will likely buy and bring back some of these cards, wanting to start a Brooklyn version of the PacNW game night institution I know that folks like Brooks long for. Love cards, not just cause in the twinkle of the slot machine and dim lights our table resembled some enchanted Bruegel painting, but because they are fun-boring too, the perfect mental state for great conversation, antics and the beginning of friendships.