525,600 Minutes

I’ve been so good about writing lately that I’m making myself keep it up, but I’ll admit I don’t have the will to organize, so some scattered items:

- It is COLD in this house. So cold that I’ve been going to bed earlier and earlier because under my comforter is the only guaranteed non-shiver location. The house doesn’t have central heating, so we have to keep all of the doors closed, and in the hallway/staircase, which isn’t heated at all, I imagine that it’s colder than it is outside. Of course this isn’t true, but it’s close, and that cold creeps into all of the rooms. This is true of all of the Czech houses I’ve heard of- one of my friends confessed she spends her evenings hugging the heater- but it’s still not pleasant. In addition, the heating in the kitchen, which used to be the warmest room in the house, recently broke, so now the other rooms downstairs must try to compensate, and my haven is gone. It’s survivable, of course, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much when I say it is very very cold.

- Today I saw maybe the most harrowing thing I’ve seen since I’ve been in Prague; I watched a taxi cut over the tram tracks and get plowed into by the tram. Prague has quite the reputation for crazy traffic, and according to Simon accidents dominate the news every night, but this was my first sighting. The passenger popped out of the taxi right away, but I never saw the driver emerge. The accident meant that my tram’s path was blocked, and I decided to switch to the metro rather than wait to see the outcome.

- Today also brought me perhaps the most beautiful Prague sight yet: the view from Petrin Hill. I view Petrin an average of 8 times a day, but I had not yet made my way to the top. I decided to forego the draw of the famous cable car and trek up by foot- a choice I don’t regret. Petrin is crowed by a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower, in a somewhat humorous and certainly meager gesture by Praguers eager to see themselves as part of Eastern Europe. I again chose to stay on ground and watch the sunset from the paths which weave through the park. It was the first sunny day in a long time, which meant that my evening was beautiful.

- Last night Elena asked if I wanted to learn how to make Cabbage soup. Of course I did, so I watched and even got to stir. I think I can replicate it fairly easily. The key step, she explained, is boiling the cabbage separately first to “remove the bad water so it does not make you fart.” That’s a paraphrase, not an exact quote, but I think I came close. It did make some very good soup. I then hung around to see if she would let me help with anything else. She had premade dough for gingerbread cookies (only 1/3 of the amout she usually makes, she said, though we still produced well over 300 cookies), and she was rolling them out, cutting them, and then baking. I hoped to be able to flourish a cookie cutter, but was judged not yet fit for that job. I did, however, get to brush egg over the cookies as they came out of the oven to make them shiny, which was more fun anyway. Elena was not pleased with the resulting cookies, but assured me it was not my fault- she had used a different recipe than usual. I find this hard to believe, since I have not so much as heard the word recipe spoken since I came to Prague, but at least it takes me off the hook.

- I think I keep forgetting to tell two stories about Czechs which have greatly endeared them to me (have I already written about these? If so, sorry). Both were told to me during my history lessons and both involve their resistance to outside rule. The first is that during the previews to movies, when the screen played either Nazi or Communist rhetoric, everyone in the movie theater would whistle so as to not hear the message. The second is that in 1969 when the Soviets re-invaded Prague, the Praguers did not put up any physical barriers but they did take down all of the street signs. Prague is hard enough to navigate with full labeling, so it makes me chuckle to think of the tanks getting lost on their way to Staromeska namesti. Prague to this day is notoriously difficult to traverse, and while the signs for public transport are informative, they are also very small and usually hidden. I like to think of the Czechs protecting their city from tourists (and me, I guess) in the same way they guarded it against the Communists.