The Namesti Miru Christmas Market is Open!

The market at Namesti Miru opened yesterday, a welcome brightness in the days that darken so soon this month. This afternoon, on the way home from writing club, Caroline and I stopped by to see if our favorite vendors were back. Happily, they all were. We quality controlled a few - testing out a trdelnik, or sweet roll, and some cider - and C declared them ready for the season.

Tuesday evening, mid November, and still locals packed the square, meeting with friends after work. By the time we finished our cider, the sun had set and it was time for us to head off, content in the thought that for the next month, the market at Miru will be here to make the evenings bright.

Snails in the Shell, Graffiti on the Wall

 

For Saturday lunches, we like to turn out fast but tasty spreads of flavor. Summer finds us bringing home food from the Lebanese deli close by, or maybe the Greek store, or the Italian grocery...cold cuts, bread, olives, cheese and something different like octopus salad or falafal and baba ghanouj.

Teeth chatteringly cold Saturdays in the winter call for something different. I headed out this morning in 15F/-9C degree weather to do our Saturday morning shopping. Living downtown, far from the megamarkets, that usually means stopping at three or four little stores along the way. I stopped at five or six just to keep my eyelashes thawed. The last was a French cheese and vegetable store, where I picked up enough cheese to satisfy the many tastes of the family and then - on a whim - twelve butter and snail filled shells.

Nestled in aluminum foil to keep from tipping their butter out, they baked for ten minutes in an oven set to 450. We each had four and dripped the juices all over toasted bread to finish up. "I love snails," Caroline said. James said "no comment at this time." Which came out, "uhmmm, cheese". Will asked me to make more tomorrow.

We've got a can of snails we brought home from France last summer. We've got butter and parsley. That seems pretty much all you need to make your own. So I will. And maybe this time I'll remember to take pictures of the shells before we scoop out all the goodness!

**********
{The graffiti lady in the top photo seems very city-like to me, so I thought I'd add her to a post about city living. The tag above her head reads "AIR".}

Snow in the City

Enough snow for sledding arrived in Prague last night and we hurried to the park this morning to make sure we didn't miss our chance before it melted away. The snow is beautiful - powdery and perfect for sledding; not good for snow balls, says Caroline.

{1} Sleds replace strollers when the snow gets thick; {2} trees iced in snow; {3} C stops by a graffiti door; {4} James still does not believe in snow, but he humors us; {center} ready for her first ride of the day.

As always, click to see a bigger picture.

Slanted sun September

A quick post in between sneezes.

We didn't venture out of Prague this weekend but we did keep up our walking. Despite its slant, if the sun shines, we want to be out enjoying its efforts.

At the end of September, linden leaves cover the sidewalks [1], but there are still leaves in the massive ash trees that branch above the smaller trees [2].

Caroline and James get all dressed up to go out [3 & center]. After some discussion, C agrees to narrow her bow choice down to one - bow and wearer [6]. James may, or may not, have been relieved.

A gratuitous graffiti picture, recently discovered [4]. And glass bottles in a neighborhood bar [5].

As always, you can click on the picture to see a bigger image. And did you know that the Czech word for sneeze is kýchat ? Oddly apt. Kerchoo!

First Grade!

 

Caroline is an official first grader, since the first of September. She's very proud of her new role, and is enjoying all the trappings of being a prvňáčka, from the art suitcase (seriously loaded down with art supplies, I look forward to seeing the results) to the special backpack shaped like a briefcase, which every prvňáčka, or first grader, proudly sports.

C's first day of first grade was more ceremony than study. Her Czech family, our babysitters, arrived early that day, and we all walked together to her new school. It felt like a festival day, with groups of families and new students calling out to each other as they passed on the sidewalk, heading to their classes. Once arrived, C found a spot near her friends, oohed and ahhed over her new books, and tried to pay attention to her teacher in the midst of a frenzy of picture snapping and occasional sob (mostly from the parents, the children were quite brave!). The kids took turns introducing themselves, the teacher read her opening remarks, and an hour later school was over for the day.

Each day for the rest of the week C's school added another hour to the first graders' schedule, working up to four hours a day. Caroline told us that mostly they were learning to behave, but that they'd also learned to talk Martian - spelling out words just the same way any self respecting Martian might demand to be taken to 'your lea-der". The first word they spelled was, predictably, Mama. The second? Praha.

Hapu

There is a cocktail bar we love here, called Hapu. Even after 8 years of drop by visits, we still don't know where its name comes from, but to us Hapu means cool atmosphere, drinks that deserve to show up on a dessert menu, and lots of memories. I've still never played the giant guitar yet though.

Happy Weekend!

Hapu
Orlicka 8
13000 Prague 3

A bike ride, and curlicues

1. Street graffiti, 2. House banisters, 3. Chestnut leaf shadows, 4. Shadows on the staircase ceiling, 5. C on Silver, showing us her pedaling technique.

Since my last post I've taken tons of pictures and written several half posts, only to leave all by the wayside as I remember one more thing I need to do before I head off for the weekend. This morning I'm flying to Arizona on my first solo trip since James was born. It's a whirlwind visit - fly in Thursday fly out Sunday - but I'm still taking a half empty suitcase, just in case I can get some Stateside shopping in.

As it's a business trip, I've become obsessed with trying to figure out what people wear in Phoenix to meetings when it's 100F outside and 75 inside. Other semi-senseless worries include trying to decide what to do on a plane without two children to entertain (C suggested stickers and an activity book), and wondering if James will forget me in four days.

But life in the Kolo* household is not just travel this, travel that. We're really more about wheels. Somehow going to camp helped C decide it was time to learn to ride her bike. She got home Friday and declared her passion. Saturday we spent the morning googling the how-to's and the afternoon trying them out. Thanks to a simple step break down, C started out coasting down a grassy hill, pedaling down that same hill, and then learning to steer round a handy tree. She took the practice very seriously, insisting on trying each step five times before moving to the next, and by the end of our first bike try, had graduated to concrete and the skating slope in front of a local school.

Sunday we packed bike and stroller off to our favorite park, Stromovka, to try out some of the paths there. Stromovka is just by the river and is wonderfully flat, with wide paths ideal for roller blading and biking (and the occasional horse).

Chanting "I think I can, I think I can" under her breath, C picked a path she could coast down, remembered how to balance, and took to the pedals. Instead of stopping after a few feet, she kept going and biked first 30 yards, and then more. By the end of the day she was confidently pedaling past dogs and other bikers, the purple helmeted princess knight C and her horse/bike Silver, ready to roll.

*Kolo, by the way, means wheel or bike in Czech, so it is quite appropriate that we're a biking household these days!

Caroline goes to Camp

 

Postcard from camp, I'm guessing there are three horses and she is getting to ride one! And happily, she hearts us. The back of the card says, nice and simply, "CAROLINE IS O.K., BUY"

Every year, Caroline's kindergarten spends a week at Škola v prírode, or school in nature. Half the school's teachers go and most of the předškolní, or 5 year old kids, too and for a week ahead of time, it is the only thing that the mothers picking up their children talk about.

This is C's last pre-school year, her year for kindergarten camp. Back in March, she brought her camp instructions home, and we started going through it line by line. I thought we'd have most everything already, but then again, I'd heard that the girls shouldn't pack dresses, and Caroline rarely wears anything else. So we poured over the list to make sure she'd be set to go.

There were all the standard things you'd expect, like a pláštěnka, or rain poncho, and holinky, gum boots, but it took me several calls to friends to figure out exactly what oteplene sustaky might mean. (Apparently, a track suit lined in flannel on the inside and nylon on the out. Now I know what they are, but I still don't know their name in English!)

Thanks to C's babysitters and several expeditions, we managed to find everything, even the elusive sustaky. The night before she left, I read C her clothing list and she ran back and forth collecting everything while I marked her name on each piece and we folded it away. All packed, down to the smallest bear and largest rubber boot, and I thought we were finished for the night. But no. "Mommie," C said, "can you teach me how to take a shower?"

So it was, on the eve of her first overnight camp, at nearly six years of age, that C decided it was time to step under water and voluntarily get her face wet. What else new will she learn this week? Come Friday, I'll let you know.

The Art of Missing Someone, and a Museum Visit

1 &2. Local graffiti, 3. Nearly empty chapel, 4. Spring at Mamacoffee, 5. Tactile exhibit, 6. Door from chapel, Center. Master of Theodoricus paintings*

Friday, Caroline waved farewell, swung backpack onto shoulder, climbed up bus steps, and headed for the country. As we waved goodbye to her through the bus's tinted windows, I did a quick mental calendar check, because surely she’s still only five. Why did it feel like she should be carrying a guitar and wearing sunglasses behind those dark windows, off to see America. And why were we crying when she’d be back in a week and anyway, we’d all been looking forward to her kindergarten camp since Christmas?

Imponderables. I moped a bit and then threw myself into a spreadsheet so I wouldn’t think for the rest of the day. By the time Will came home from work I was so deep in numbers it took me until the next morning’s coffee to recover my equanimity. We spent Saturday the way we usually do, shopping at our local stores, strolling by mamacoffee for an espresso, pushing the stroller through the park to check out the latest flowers, and keeping my camera ready for any new additions to our local graffiti.

This Saturday though, the green grocers wanted to know if we’d heard anything from the children yet (their daughter and Caroline were bus buddies). The Greek store cashier asked where the little holčicka was and the drug store cashier volunteered that maybe the weather was on its way to getting warm after all. We walked home and I couldn’t help thinking that big cities are full of little villages and I was happy right in the middle of ours, even if it took C heading to camp to remind me.

The next day, still getting used to the quietness of space without Caroline, we decided to do what we hadn’t had a chance to do for nearly six years - visit a museum undisturbed.

Or at least nearly. We lulled James to sleep strolling across the sway and rattle of cobblestone, and arrived at the Convent of St. Agnes happy to have won sixty minutes of quiet. We spent a few of those minutes wandering around the ground floor looking for pictures, lost in a maze of corridors, convincing ourselves that the art collection must have moved. We found empty chapels and a tactile exhibit for the blind (complete with a braille typewriter for leaving notes), we circled the gardens again, and just as we were about to leave, discovered the staircase up to the galleries.

The Convent houses the Czech National Gallery’s medieval art collection, beginning the exhibition with a wood carving from the very early 1200s, and ending it with prints from the mid 1500s. Sometimes, in an art museum that covers the medieval to modern, I’m happy to stroll past the rooms of madonnas and saints to get to the renaissance. But that morning, with a sleeping stroller, and a collection dedicated to the Gothic, we slowed down and took the time to look.

We were the only visitors, the guards decided we were harmless, and we were free of children, so we spent the rest of our hour arguing all we wanted: about the goldfinch in the madonna portraits (from the apocrypha or not?), the Theodoricus blank books and their bindings, the apostles and just who might be Judas, and the aptness of poor Catherine clutching her wheel. We had a deliciously nerdy time, and James slept until the last gallery.

When he woke, he wanted to be carried, and his wiggling turned the paintings back into art to rush by. It was time to go. We stopped to pick up a book to try to solve a few of our morning debates, and headed home.

And if you’re wondering how Caroline is doing, the latest news from this morning is that she hasn’t cried one bit, she can’t wait to ride the horses today and she’s been a perfect milá, or dear. Pshew.

****
Goldfinch – the jury is still out on this, Will thinks they are related to the birds in the apocrypha which the infant Jesus brought to life from mud. The National Gallery guidebook suggests the association of goldfinch with thistle bushes, thistles representing the crucifixion, the goldfinch thus foreshadowing the poor babe’s later fate. My guess is that it could be a combination of the two, depending upon where the tradition started from and if that group of artists even had access to the apocrypha books.

Blank books – it’s pretty unusual to see blank manuscripts already bound, as most medieval manuscripts would be prepped by assembling parchment into folios, scoring the skins for neatness, writing and illuminating the text, and then binding the whole. My vote is a tabula rasa motif, but Will is not biting.

*Master of Theodoricus paintings from the Virtual walk through of the gallery. Understandably, no cameras are allowed in the actual exhibition.

What a day!

 

1. Sunday, we woke early and by 7 or so were squeezing on to a tram headed to the castle. It was a very crowded tram, and also a very quiet one.
2. We were so early the security gate we came through was nearly empty - a nice surprise.
3. C was in a great mood! Apparently early mornings agree with her ;-).
4. The morning haze over Prague never quite lifted throughout the speech.
5. Our tickets placed us right next to the Czech government stage. They arrived a lot later than we did. The police were out in full force, both on the ground and...
6. ...perched on the surrounding palace roofs.
7. One of C's friends from choir found us a few hours into our wait, C was ecstatic. If you watch C-Span, we've heard that both C and her friend appeared on TV.
8. The club wielding Titan guarding the castle's gates looked like it was about to take a swing at the press club. They seemed unfazed.
9. President Obama, gesturing during his speech. It was remarkable. A transcript is here, but listening to it live and feeling the excitement all around us made it seem even more powerful.
10. Unlike the audience, the current Czech government did not react with a great deal of enthusiasm to his speech. Central here are the ex-Prime Minister Toplanek and the President, Vaclav Klaus.
11. Caroline, listening to the speech. When President Obama declared that when he was born, few people would have predicted that someone like him would one day become the President of the U.S., Caroline called out from her perch on Will's shoulders - "We did that!!"
12. Michelle Obama joined the President as he finished the speech, and they walked hand in hand down to greet the crowds. Caroline's "Hello Mr. President!" got a wave.

An amazing day.

Light Fantastic

 

One of the constants of our life in Prague is that friends move. This year we have had to say good-bye to a record number - four sets of friends in three months. Saying good-bye is particularly hard for Caroline, who has come to believe that California is a sort of paradise where friends disappear to, never to be seen again. Over the weekend we said our farewells to another family - this time heading to the slightly closer but more unpronounceable land of Massachusetts. Before we had to say good-bye though, we all took a long walk together through the Prague castle and down the hill to the river.

The weather was perfect that afternoon and I took hundreds of pictures. This was one of my last, just as the light started to lose its luster. It shows the shore of the Vltava, a ferry turning around in the river, and Old Town in the background. This is one of my favorite views of Prague - I like the casualness of the shore meeting the water and the spires in the background, and I hope it is a view for our friends to remember with pleasure too. Bon voyage Kelly, Alain, Paige and Colby!

Slices of Friday

 

This morning the calendar declared that it is not only our nephew's birthday - Happy Birthday Julian!! - but also the first day of spring. The sun happily obliged the season and shone all morning. I worked away hummingly, every now and then thinking up a new reason to [1.] take another picture of the sun on daffodils, [2.] the sun on James, the sun on the floor creeping towards the wall. I saw some white flower blossoms drift by and felt what good timing that was too - the fruit trees all in bloom and the wind catching their flowers to whisk them away and into our courtyard. How poetic. How springlike.

A little later I looked out the window and realized the flower blossoms were a flurry of snow flakes. Apparently I see with a different part of my brain than I think with. As a side note, there are no fruit trees in bloom in Prague yet.

To celebrate Friday, spring, JuJu's birthday and the fact that neither household benefactor had a meeting until well past noon, W and I went to lunch together at a new Korean restaurant* nearby. I have an unabashed love of eating out of a box with chopsticks, and ordered [3.] the bulgogi box lunch. Spicey kimchi, sweet bulgogi, sticky rice, miso soup, octopus and spinach salad. Yum.

Walking home and back to work, I ducked into our local bazaar to see if they had any Easter decorations. They were still scanty on the chicks but I found [4.] an oil painting I thought beautiful. It was suspiciously cheap, and the frame is 60s awful but I brought it home anyway. In a moment almost as surreal as the morning's flower blossom snow fall, I met a French grande dame examining glassware in the store. She pulled me over to inspect the painting. "Tres tres bien," she declared, and then went into a detailed discussion about oil painting which I could not in the least follow. "Bonjour madame, hesky vikend Pani" I said as I left, the painting wrapped in newspapers and tucked under my arm to protect it from the snow, still falling.

*Sami Grill Anny Letenské 1235/5, Prague 2
Phone: (+420) 222 524 666

Silhouettes in Spring

1. Strahov monastery 2. View from Prague castle gates.

Life cycles

(or, I've got Slate's Shoot the Recession photos on my mind)

When I went out to lunch today I carried my camera with me to see what shots I could find. Unfortunately for the picturesque, the weather is behaving just as it should in March, blustering about and supplying us with wind, clouds and rain. So despite my best efforts (and I had no children with me, so no excuse really) my shots of the castle, the Charles Bridge, and the National Theater all turned out flat and gray. Then I passed a window display and I knew that this would be my shot of the day.

Explainer: SLEVA means sale in Czech. Stores across town are marking down their goods, waiting to see what happens as the Czech Republic moves into a recession. And any guesses about the street art in the reflection?

A Little Gardening

Caroline loves puttering about in gardens and would happily spend all afternoon watering and rewatering any plant she comes across. We've reached an understanding on this subject though, so she now asks me before she turns on the deluge, and we hope our plants will survive a bit longer as a result.

At the beginning of March, we grew an amaryllis bulb into flower. Yesterday James and I picked C up from school and we walked to our favorite flower store a few blocks away to see what we could try next. Bulbs have a disheartening habit of blooming and then dying away for the season, so we're branching out into herbs and C has a promise that we will plant our retired daffodil bulb in the next available garden.

How I came to know Prague*

We tell our friends it all began with our honeymoon. We say it was Venice and the coffee, the architecture, the little grocery stores: they won our hearts. Flying home from Milan, we were ready to go back and see more, but knew it would be a long stretch until we could afford our next vacation abroad. We started talking about jobs in Europe before the plane reached Greenland.

Or maybe it was earlier, when my twin sister and I were in college and we traded a debutante dance for a trip to Europe. We traveled around Belgium with two great uncles and our great aunt, visiting every cathedral and art museum in the country, pretending to be the urban Europeans we were not but our great aunt certainly was and our great uncle would (on occasion) deign to be. This was the great uncle who left S.C. and never moved back. Who skipped out of his PhD work to defect to Europe in the 50s, marry an art historian, become a professional bird watcher and houseboat owner. He was the breaker of all family traditions, an iconoclast, the most infamous black sheep of the family. Ellen and I thought he was wonderful.

My first trip to Europe was in 1991. At the other end of the decade, in 1998, Will and I married and traveled to Italy. Then we came home to our respective jobs: I wrote for a research magazine in N.C.; Will went back to work on his dissertation in a university up north. We knew one of us needed to move but which of us and where - that was the great debate. It got easier when Will won a fellowship to finish his PhD. I decided we could live anywhere as long as we had an internet connection and started to look for jobs in San Francisco and Europe. Europe bit first, so to Prague we went.

That sounds simple, right? It helped that my sister had moved to Zurich to be a consultant the year we got married. I got my job in Prague because the person who hired me worked with Ellen. He told her he was looking for someone, just like her, who could run the design department in his new start up. She turned the job offer down, and sent him my way instead. The job paid start up wages and had a dubious future but we decided it would do for a bit. My editor offered me a year's leave of absence, we gave away our cars and arranged our wedding presents and library in Will's mother’s attic. We flew to Prague with four suitcases and a violin. Will’s suitcases were mostly full of books, but I didn’t find that out until later.

Our first week in Prague, we stayed in a pension right on the river. For ten dollars a night we were the proud renters of a drawing room in a fin-de-siecle flat. Despite its decay, I loved our room's fourteen foot ceilings and high windows looking out onto the water. The bed though, with its inch thick mattress and humid feather blankets, lost its charm quickly. As soon as we could, we moved into our own flat, empty of furniture but with our four suitcases to prop us up.

What happened then? The person who hired me quit to form another start up. I took over the office - the development arm for a tiny consulting company. In the excitement of the internet bubble, I conveniently forgot why we had moved to Europe. Instead, I worked until midnight for months on end, building that office into a medium sized business with its own income. It was thrilling. I learned a lot. I didn’t see much of Europe though.

In 2001, the bubble burst, my first company and I parted ways and I launched my own business with two partners. Around that point, we began to travel, take longer vacations and try out a more European life style (weekends, hello!?). Caroline came along in 2003, and we discovered just how much more you become a part of a country when you have a child in it. Having C turned Prague into our home, not just a place to work and explore Europe from. And so, here we are.

* Eurolush asked me the other day how we happened to move to Prague. I often wonder about other expats' arrival stories, so I thought I'd post our own too.

Sunshiny day

 

After a week of weather forecasts calling for dreary with a chance of more dreary, the sun decided to pay a surprise visit to our neck of the continent today. Caroline, home from school with a cold, thinks its timing is all off, and has retired to her shaded room with a stack of books to flip through before her next nap/snack/game of Uno. James, on the other hand, thinks the sun is great. Here he is playing peek-a-boo with the light.

He's not always this smiley of course, and at nearly ten months has developed definite ideas about what he should be able to do. Climbing off furniture, hanging out with me, and playing with every toy that C shows an interest in are top priorities right now. Last night before C's cold struck, she and Will practiced sword fighting in the play room. They closed the doors to ward off the noise, but mostly succeeded in offending James considerably. Abandoning me to my book he crawled across the living room to bang on the doors and shout until he was let in and given another sword* to chew on while he watched.

*Lego makes great foam swords which Will and Caroline use to practice fencing with.

History said "Let's Dance!"

 

And I can't think of a better reason to have a ball.

Prague is the only city I've lived in where we regularly get the chance to go to balls. Starting around Thanksgiving and running until Lent, Prague hosts a plethora of events that call for a tux and a taxi (ball gowns on the metro - very chilly). You can go to a ball to celebrate Thanksgiving or St. Patrick's Day, dance at charity balls put on by expat groups or try out the State Opera Ball just because. Dancing is not a prequisite, but getting dressed up pretty much is. Last year I was pregnant and we skipped the ball season. This year we decided that our ball of the year should be memorable, so we decided to go to Prague's Unofficial Inaugural Ball.

We donned gown and tuxedo, I strangled Will into his bow tie and we headed out the door, Caroline calling after us that she loved my outfit and could she have my shoes next? The ball was at a hotel famous for its funicular, and on the ride up the hill I looked out over snowy gardens and down into town and I wondered if this would be the best part - the gown tryouts with C and our sitter (complete with high heel practice), the spritz of scent and dash out the door, the contained elegance of a car ride in dress black, and finally this trip up the hill in a brightly lit box full of anticipation.

But then we arrived, and we met friends and more friends. A guitarist, Tony Ackerman, melded "America" with "We Shall Overcome" and "A Gift to Be Simple", and the music was just right. We watched President Obama's swearing in and heard speeches, live and taped, and we cheered and clapped. The room was full of excitement and I heard again and again how proud, just how proud everyone was to be experiencing this moment in history. It was a wonderful night, and I came home all bubbly with the fun of it all.

Tonight Caroline and I sat down at the computer and we listened to a short speech by Martin Luther King and we saw again President Obama's swearing in. She was more interested in his two little girls and their outfits than in the ceremony. She asked if the little girls were princesses now. We watched a little bit longer, then it was time for bedtime, new era or not. And I wondered - years from now, what from yesterday and today, balls and videos and pictures of little girls dressed in warm colors, what will we remember?

Pond skating in Prague

 

A few years ago I vowed to start enjoying the winter and learn a winter sport. I bought a pair of skates and took up ice skating. Caroline joined me the next year, and this year Will decided he'd watched long enough and he bought skates too.

We used to stick to indoor rinks, but January's unusually snowy weather turned Prague into a wintery wonderland and tempted us into trying something new. Last Saturday we met up with friends to skate on a fish pond in the Liboc neighborhood of Prague. Even the baby enjoyed getting into the act, as you can see from his picture!

Three Kings Day in the City

 

Tram speeding by; C in bobble hat; C hands out change to our first trio of kings; kings stand, robed and ready, at metro stairs; a smaller set of kings; crutches cast a shadow; trees crooked against the sky.