One last Czech note...

The neighbors have continued to marvel me, as they really do talk about the pool nonstop! It is a site to behold, so much so that David secured a photo for me. (The neighbor happily invited me over for a night of vodka drinking and I sadly declined. He was sorry to hear I pass on the "vices" of alcohol and meat and said no one could do so on all three, but it was unadvisable to do so on even on :)

Notice also the "god-like" glow of the night-time shot. They'll just sit out here at night and watch the pool all night like a television. Well, healthier at least, you gotta give them that!

Go West!

It’s been a rainy day in the small town of Humpolec. I am getting packed and ready for a big travel day to Mennigem, a small town outside of Munich where my friend Cathrin lives. We were friends at Willamette University in Oregon when she was a German TA there for a year, and haven’t seen each other since I graduated.

This is a picture of David at a beautiful castle in Telc...















I’ll stay for just a short while and then get to the Swiss Vipassana center to serve a ten day course— this will be very nice :). It’s amazing how distracted and noisy the mind gets in the world, and how limited modern society understands, let alone tries to care for it. It’s like when it gets too noisy and wild we try to drown it out with yet greater noise and wilder distractions, and trying to push it down we give it so much more strength. Such madness! May true wisdom arise everywhere…


And here's a shot of David's children deciding to pack it in...

Kickin' It in the Czech Countryside

It’s been a relaxing few days with David. He has taken some time off work to show me some of the nearby sights, which are by far the most beautiful and least touristy (imagine that combination!) I’ve seen yet. I visited the cottages of some of his friends who were influenced by Thoreau’s WALDEN POND, and went to swim in a rain-water pond formed out of an abandoned marble quarry. When he’s gone away to work, I am vastly entertained by watching his rather rotund middle-aged neighbor walking around his yard in tight Speedos. (For SIT people I have to say in all seriousness that the slideshow photos of that Russian man actually make a lot more sense now!) He has a pool that must be about 8 feet by about five feet in width, and according to David, talks about it incessantly. Every day he checks the temperature and duly reports it to David, and shockingly enough, keeps up this routine (along with the wardrobe of gray underwear-only) even in the coldest months where temperature drops to -5 degrees C. One day I saw him entertain houseguests, another, supervise the placement of some bricks. You can almost see the love this man has for his pool, a shame he never goes in it. (a note—from my forays into the Czech countryside, wandering around one’s neighborhood in only underpants is, I must say, quite accepted. But it still makes it no less funny…)

I’ve spent a little bit of time walking around. Turn right on the nearby road and you get to town, a neat sprawling little place (though a population of 10,000) complete with old buildings and churches and archways and courtyards and squares and all the other things that I still haven’t been in Europe long enough to not notice and enjoy. Turn left on the road and you get into nature. I walked past a pond, equestrian stadium, farm, and up a hill that lead into a path taking you deep into a Bohemian forest. Somehow you can just feel all those fairy tales taking birth in places like this. You just expect to run into Hansel, Gretel, or the wolf in Grandmother’s clothes. There is an old castle ruins from the 12th Century I walked around as well, not having to work hard to let the imagination go. I also took a ride out to a site even more in the countryside where David has purchased the land and is planning to build a house there, very beautiful.


Oh, the bottom pictures here are of the pond at sunset, and on my walk through the forest...

Czech curiousity

One of the fun things about going to any country is reading up on its history, current politics, some key language terms, and of course culture and anthropology (one of the very funny things is that yes is ano and no is ne—and of course in Japanese, ano ne means something like ummm or geeeez…). My family had a bit more time on their hands than I did prior to coming here, and they digested a steady stream of books and movies. One of the more interesting things I’ve found out here is how connected Czech is to Western Europe. Many of its castles—zameks at least—were founded by French barons fleeing the French Revolution. In many ways it seemed like an accident in history that such a country would end up east of the wall and thus be associated as belonging to Eastern Europe. I mentioned this to a Czech friend steeped in history and he agreed, saying it was the decision of a few very high-level administrators sitting around a table after WWII.

I’ve heard so many fascinating stories about the changes the country went through under the Communist years and then again coming out from them, and it’s tempting to write them all. My friends say they really had no conception what existed just west of their borders outside of the occasionally smuggled magazine or reverse-James Bond films. Not even any juice! But as hard as the times were, they also describe a society where unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, among other things, flat out didn’t exist. In everything I have seen in my lifetime, I realized that this is totally inconceivable to me. They described the poet and future president Vaclav Havel shoveling coal and one woman’s father, a doctor, being assigned far from his home. They were laughing as they said this, and I asked if they meant this as a positive thing or negative—“it just was the way it was,” they said. Such a different world before 1989…! We can’t even imagine now. Another time I happened to mention to a friend that it seemed I’d been seeing so many babies around Prague. He said it was funny, because this was actually at an all time low. I asked why, and he said it is kind of like a thing which must be fitted in with the modern life—with two parents having a career, needing to make enough money, etc., and the more kids, the harder it is to support. While before, their lives were pretty much set, and the bigger the family, the more support the kids would offer. Not only were families having less children and doing so at older ages, many were simply never becoming parents. It was kind of sad to hear about the kind of sacrifices as the society moves into “modernity”…

Just the other day David was telling me about a very traditional way a family would kill a pig at a special holiday, by slowly slitting its throat and stirring its blood for soup. They carefully took out the intestines and washed them in a special laundry machine the grandmother had for this purpose only. They then cut the organs into very tiny pieces and separated the fat, then put these small meat pieces back in the intestines and fried and cooked them. Today no one has time to do this, so they just buy pork from the big grocery store in town. Don’t know exactly how I feel about all this as one who abstains from meat, but interesting nonetheless.

Oh, of these two photos... one is of a couple pigs being roasted at a fair we walked through. They cut its flesh off it directly to make the sausages below. The other is a meal a friend got... raw beef with a raw egg in the middle surrounded by a variety of spices. You mix this all together, and then are served bread fried in oil. You scrape a garlic clove against it and a pinch of salt, and spoon the meat onto it....

Transition....

We spent the next two days in a city that greeted us with scorching humid weather and loads of tourists, visiting the Jewish Quarter and seeking out last souvenirs. We took a walk to a local park that featured the largest equestrian statue in the world, a stunning behemoth example of Soviet realism using the traditional Czech hero Zizkov to apply in its own glorification of peasantry. Then I left for the train station and took a very scenic (and noisy) ride south to Humpolec, to visit my friend David Festa, while my family prepared to leave the following day. David lives with his wife and two young sons who I communicate to in a jumbled mess of English, Czech, tickling, and incomprehensible sounds, and even have them repeating some Japanese words from time to time such as “konnichiwa” and “genki”, though they really need some work with “sayonara.” Maybe minimal pairs, or…

David lives in a house built by his grandparents, who both live downstairs, and his parents live around the corner, so it is an area rich in Festas, or as they say in Czech, Festoves (the plural name form has a different ending, as does the female—for example, newspapers refer to Sharon Stoneova or Julia Robertsova). I have been eating some great food here the past couple days! I’ll be here through the week and then will visit my friend Cathrin who lives outside of Munich. I’ll then serve a ten day Vipassana meditation course in Switzerland and sit a Satipattana course in Italy before returning home via England.

Poland

We boarded the train at 11 am and then arrived in Oswecim (the Polish name for Auschwitz) about 8 pm. We had a neat train compartment that conjured up images of European train travel, and had a neat European train delay for about an hour. A young Czech man traveling in our compartment was headed to his hometown Ostrava, and told us this almost never happened with Czech trains, but the one ahead of ours was delayed as well. I figured it was a good time to go back to that classic in Czech literature, Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains. I missed the drug-sniffing Polish dogs because I was fighting sleep while listening to Goenkaji’s chanting on my walkman, but later opened my eyes to see an entirely different countryside passing before us. It was more industrial and somehow something about it looked poorer as well. At our transfer in Katowice, we found out that Poland had their version of the heselbaba as well, and not having any Polish slotzy or even grotzy I was turned away with a pleasant shrug of the shoulders (we were quite pleased by the Polish service industry, as it turned out). So I ventured outside and used the facilities at KFC, in a state of awe at how different this place across the border was. People, their clothes, the buildings and streets, and just overall energy made it clear that this was a totally different culture. We found our hotel, named the HOTEL GLOB with the image of a globe beside it, just a few steps from the train station, and ventured to the nearby Restaurant Skorpian to seek out veggie cuisine yet again.

The next day we walked along the street to go to the first of three Auschwitz camps. My mom and I had spent our second day in Prague visiting the nearby Terezin concentration camp, and that did much to prepare me for this. In some ways it was more terrifying, because entire parts of the camp remain as they must have been 60 years ago, and there are far less tourists around to distract from the horror. The tourists at Auschwitz—especially this first camp— were beyond anything I could have ever imagined. There were entire buildings you couldn’t even enter because of the sheer amount of people inside, speaking every language you could think of and even some you couldn’t. We walked past the old railway tracks that brought so many millions to their deaths, and under the Arbeit Makt Frei (Work Makes Free) arch-post. Many of the barracks had been turned into exhibitions that showed different aspects of the Holocaust—entire buildings devoted to the Jews of a single country: France, Italy, Czech, Slovakia, Belgium, Holland, Poland, etc. Others talked about different aspects of the camp itself. There was one small courtyard that was infamous for the tens of thousands of people killed by firing squads. After lunch, we took a bus to the nearby second camp, which is 25 times larger. This was instantly identifiable by the main set of train tracks running under the guard tower that we have all seen from so many WWII photos. There were a couple dozen very large barrack buildings still standing, and a literally uncountable number of others that had collapsed and left only the brick chimneys in their wake. At the end of the camp were the destructed gas chambers and crematorium. It was a sickening and wordless thing to take in these Nazi ruins, and the sheer amount of industry and heavy metal that had gone into creating them. To see that twisted iron, broken and warped cement, and the moss growing upon it and bugs crawling through the moss… what can be said?

We took a sobering walk from one end to the other, crisscrossing length and width, and several thoughts came to me. The first was my surprise at how lush and green this area was. I never would have expected it—I’d have thought it would all be an industrial wasteland. Trees were actually planted and spaced out, and the surrounding areas were beautiful forest. Taking a photo in color and then the same shot in black and white was almost an unbelievable difference. I also was surprised how much these camps resembled something like a photo negative from a meditation course— everything is turned around almost perfectly 180 degrees, even though the bare image has a similarity. The solitude in the meditation courses is fostered in an atmosphere of the serving staff providing an environment of loving-kindness that permeates into the very food and ground you walk on, and the entire operation is based on the idea of helping others to come out of their misery. Here in Poland, the only motivation was to create suffering, and the rules existed only to terrorize the prisoners. The whole place was filled with a deep pain that permeated everything. I was amazed at the amount of work, energy, time, commitment, thought, and planning that went into something so evil. It wasn’t like a very cruel action that just blinds one in a moment and they don’t know what they’re doing. It was a coordinated series of steps that involved work from doctors, food service people, architects, engineers, to say nothing of the guards themselves. How such a madness can sweep over so many people for such a period of time was baffling to me. Remembering this, I tried to have compassion not only for the suffering the prisoners went through, but also for the madness of this evil and inhumanity that the guards themselves must have suffered from.

I had been hesitant to coming here, since I knew these vibrations of cruelty and death were developed over several years, and must surely still inhabit the area, and it wasn’t appealing to put myself in such an environment. But once there, I realized one of the predominant vibrations I felt was that of modernity, and I thought it must be the rather superficial one of all these tourists now coming. This was a kind of welcome distraction for me to not have to be aware the depth this place must carry. There were only two times I was alone, and they were both terrifying. The first, I made myself walk through a deserted barrack that I couldn’t get out fast enough, and I had to fight a very loud irrational thought in my mind that if I didn’t get out soon enough I’d find myself in 1942. The second time, I meditated for a half hour in the hotel room after my family left to wait for the train, and I could feel the fear again, getting stronger so that I eventually had to turn to the chanting tape from Goenkaji. I can’t imagine living in this town, now or then, and I was happy when I finally could get out of Dodge a few minutes later.

We left in the morning and spent the next day in Krakow, which is just a beautiful city. We walked through the old town, past a large walled castle, and through the fascinating streets of the Jewish Quarter. At one museum a young man estimated there were about 200 Jews in Krakow today, and a couple thousand in the entire country. Enjoying our last few sips of the wonderful Polish gazawana, we spent our remaining change and boarded the night train back to Prague at 11 pm. I had six to seven solid hours of train sleep, minus a few minutes of being woken in the early morning hours at the border crossing, and we arrived in Prague at 7 am.

The Road to the North

Wasting no time, the next day we went with Misha and her Russian boyfriend Sergei to rent two cars. We certainly weren’t going to sneak up on anyone, because the cars were an identical color of bright blue with large advertising all over the vehicle giving the web address of the company and the rental rates. We were all happy to soon find ourselves in a lush green countryside, and passing by gigantic fields of corn, barley, and other crops. Our first stop was in the small town of Zelezny Brod, where my mom had a special appointment to tour a small glass bead factory. She goes wild for beads, and northern Czech lands are world-famous for the beads they produce, so it was a good match. We enjoyed walking through the town and admiring its old church on a hill, and then found a restaurant to see the different ways they could fry cheese and cook potatoes. We also enjoyed a small museum that showed old Czech scenes, and which reminded us in many ways of Puritan America. Later in the day we found a great hotel in Male Strana (Little Rock) that looked to be a peaceful and quiet stay until the German invasion. They first secured the outside balcony, then challenged our desire to sleep with loud talking and drumming well into the night, and later carried away the morning breakfast buffet.

Thus fortified with a vegetable plate and sugar water, we went to see two castles before returning to Prague. The first, I later found out, was called a Hrad, which refers to a medieval fortress, and the second, a Zamek, is more like the large mansions that came about around the time of the Renaissance. The first was really impressive. It was perched on a hill and had a very high tower (with a precarious narrow stairway) that gave views of the entire valley—perfect for spotting oncoming invaders. The second was interesting but didn’t seem to feed into that whole Lord of the Rings imagination. And after about half the tour, as we were pointed out larger-than-life portraits and leather-engraved walls, you just start thinking about at whose expense caused this monolith to be created. So, maybe there’ll be guided tours through the Bush family home after this era has passed… J

Our next day in Prague was an exhausting one, our trip having caught up with us. We did some more sightseeing and Jeff planned to leave the next day to relocate from LA to Atlanta, while the rest of us prepared for Poland, and Misha invited us to a very nice garden party with a fresh vegetarian spread that didn’t include cheese or potatoes!

The Event at Slany

The first of our real emotional days, the real reason for the five of us making our way here to begin with, was the ceremony in Slany honoring the fallen American plane. The five of us wore our Sunday clothes and were taken by bus to the small town about an hour from Prague, not really having any idea what exactly was going to happen. My family had been trying to ask the day’s schedule for months in advance, but somehow it never quite made the trans-Atlantic flight. Don, Jeff, and Jake had actually gone to Slany the day before for what they hoped would be a quiet moment to appreciate the memorial in their own time, but turned into a major pre-ceremony day that included being chauffeured by a Czech man clothed in an American GI uniform and driving an authentic Sherman Jeep (like the kind on MASH) left after WWII, visits to the mayor’s office and town museum (where Don was able to hold the actual propeller blade from his father’s aircraft), and even a flight over the town in a small plane to see the crash site from 60 years ago.

So we took a bus with a number of retired Czech military personnel, including one very distinguished-looking man who immediately caught my attention. I later found out that he is the most renowned Czech fighter pilot of the war, who is common knowledge for any Czech person—a Captain Fitel. He flew for the Royal Air Force after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and once after his plane was shot down, snuck across enemy lines all the way back the England to continue flying missions. When we arrived at the ceremony, we also met American and Czech representatives from the military, the town’s Vice Mayor, and an attaché from the US Embassy, who told me about jobs teaching English to the Czech Army and offered to take us on a tour of the Ambassador’s residence, “but you’d better be big Bush supporters.” He later made a comment connecting the Czech/American effort to combat tyranny in 1945 with their cooperation today in 2005 that infuriated some of the Czech audience, including our friend Misha.

The event started with an official ceremony that played both countries’ national anthems, and had Don, the Embassy man, the Vice Mayor, and the Czech military officer presenting flowers to the memorial and giving speeches. Don’s speech was translated, and I saw more than a couple of the men wiping their eyes. We then had Turkish coffee (a kind translation for mud) and a full meal in the airplane hanger, with a surprising amount of vegetarian options—you notice and remember these kinds of things! We went outside for an amazing air show that must have lasted over 90 minutes, and featured these incredible fly-bys. I also was treated to two Russian MIGs, probably the first and last time I’ll ever get to see these as the Czech military is fazing them out. Anyone who knows my infatuation with Top Gun must know what an unexpected treat this was!!!

Don, Jeff, and Jake were driven to what they believe to be the crash site as an enthusiastic Czech brass band began playing Big Band music from the era. When they returned, Don was officially presented with an array of gifts and emotionally thanked for his father giving his life to ensure freedom of the Czech lands. The entire day’s celebration was done to the accompaniment of about a dozen photographers, who must have taken over 10,000 pictures between them! Literally not a moment was undocumented, and even when our family was together, eating or talking or whatnot, we had to pretend not to notice the photographers crowding in to get their best shot. Don even sat at a table with Captain Fitel and several other military names as dozens of people brought past posters and books for them to sign, or to get their pictures with them. One even had their baby pose with him, and several people actually came to get my autograph as well!

Adjusting to Czech

If I had to survive without cheese for over three years in Japan, I was able to more than make up for it with the plethora of it here. Especially abstaining from meat and fish products, my only option was often a dish of cheese and potatoes, with the menu sometimes offering up to ten different ways to prepare each! One of the best was a potato cake with fried camembert inside.

Speaking of the restaurants, that was one of the greatest cultural clashes we had. As Americans, my family had a definite idea when we were to be given the menus upon sitting down, when the food should be ordered, when the bill must come, and the Czech serving staff rarely conformed to their hopes and dreams. It always strikes me as so interesting a contrast that Americans seem to see restaurants as places to go to—as comfortably and efficiently as possible—replace hunger with food, while Europeans put more emphasis on the process. Or, to carry it further, one of the things I’ve noticed throughout the time I’ve spent in Asia and Europe is that Americans (and I include myself in this) have got to be the most impatient people I’ve ever met!
But to be fair, coupled with this is the fact that Czech seems to boast some of the worst service people the world over. As I was telling my friend David yesterday, rude encounter after rude encounter I was very careful not to judge by my own values and lenses, because maybe there was something I didn’t totally understand that would come later. But after two weeks, it seemed hard not to reach the aforementioned conclusion—and David was in complete agreement! The stories of snarls and grunts from the waiters, attendants, staff people, etc. lose something in the translations, but one that may not are what David told us are affectionately called heisel-babas, the first word meaning unpleasant or rude and the second old woman. These are older ladies who Don likes to think had some wonderful bureaucratic position taken away from them after the fall of Communism, and are now reassigned to collect 3-5 koruna coins (about a quarter) for use of train station lavatories—toilet paper or towels cost extra. They exact their job with a vengeance and cruelty that seems scarcely related to whether you pay the full amount or try to sneak by (not suggested by any wise person). Once I was followed out of the restroom and yelled at (even though I had indeed parted ways with two 2 koruna coins), and then the woman hoped to shame me by yelling something about me to the passer-bys as well. “You must pay” one lady told me in Czech. “I did!” I said back, to which she shrugged her shoulders and quickly turned away.

Headed for Bohemia...

I was going to send out a mass email to friends and family describing the last several weeks, but seeing as we’re in the CyberAge I decided to discover the world of blogging. I’m staying with my friend David now and his family in a small Czech town south of Prague. We met trekking the Langtang section of the Himalayas in Nepal several years back. He was just called away on business for the day, so I decided to jot a few of my thoughts down until I eat lunch— some traditional Czech sweets served by his grandmother. :)

Why did I end up in the Czech Republic for two weeks plus? Here is an email my mom wrote several months back:

My husband Don's father was a bomber pilot in World War II and killed in action a few months before Don's younger brother was born, and only two months before the war ended in Europe. Don was himself only a toddler at the time. He and his brother discovered last month, just after their mother's death, that there is a memorial to their father, who was the pilot, and to their father's plane, in a small town (named Slany) outside of Prague in the Czech Republic at the site of the plane crash in which only one man of the entire crew survived.

As soon as we got home from the funeral in Utah, with the information Don had acquired, he telephoned three WWII vets, one in Seattle, one in Dallas, and the lone survivor of the crash of his father's plane who now lives in Sacramento...vets who are still alive and who served in the same unit as his father. The lone survivor was the tail gunner who was able to parachute out as the tail separated from the rest of the plane; he was picked up by the Germans and was a POW until the war ended.

This information has us spinning, as one can well imagine. Via the internet, on a Czech site, we could view a photo of the crash (which occurred in March of 1945) and read the witness accounts that were in English. We are trying to get the remainder of the information translated from Czech into English. We are stunned. Don has been searching for years for information and now he has more than he can comprehend. To see his father's name engraved in stone on a memorial is riveting. (A photo of the memorial in the Czech Republic is on the website and we now have received photos of the ceremony at the memorial in the year 2000.) Czechoslovakia apparently could not honor Americans while under communist control. This memorial was initiated in 1996.

In May of this year there are many observances for the 60th anniversary of VE day, and the airfield at the small town of Slany, where the "Christensen Memorial" is located (Don's last name is Christensen) is holding its own celebration in June. Don was told that if he as the son of the pilot were to attend, he would be met at the airport and escorted. So...we are planning to travel to Prague and I want to add train travel to Auschwitz, which will be a most sobering tour. And our sons Jeff and Joah are also trying to make flight arrangements to join us at the memorial celebration.

Time will tell how this all sorts out...

As time sorted it all out, Don, Jeff, my mom, and another family member, Don’s grandson Jake, were to complete the fellowship. For me it has been one wild ride. I finished my studies at the School for International Training in Vermont in May and spent the first two weeks of June at the Vipassana meditation center in Massachusetts. From there I immediately flew to Prague to meet my family, who started their trips in Colorado and California.

Thanks to my Czech friend Michaela (Misha for short) who I met in Mexico, we secured very affordable accommodations in the Zizkov district of the city, on the fourth floor of the dormitory for the University of Economics. It was far from what has become an incredibly touristy and commercial (not to mention expensive) downtown, but accessible by a pleasant 20 minute tram ride. My impression of Prague in June 2005 seemed as the French say tout-a-fait different from my memories of December 1997. I wondered if this could be because the city now had twice as much time to work within a capitalist model, because the season was different, or if I saw things differently due to how I had changed internally. Maybe a combination of the three, but I think the first is quite important. I have distinct memories of restaurants and streets from my earlier visit that I not only never saw this time around, but couldn’t even imagine existing in the city I did experience. Even the places I did revisit, such as the castle, Charles Bridge, and the Astronomical Clock seemed quite different.