22/9/01
1) Mullets - an obvious place to start but one, nethertheless that needs to be pointed out. It is the curse of a particular form of Czech male to adopt the Mullet as a form of collective belonging. The usual wearer of said mullet will be perhaps 30 plus and is the equivalent of the British male football lad. But whereas the latter sports the Beckham skinhead, the Czech counterpart, for some reason, sports a Keegan circa 1980. Apparently, if you go into the Czech countryside, they are everywhere. Very bizarre. However, the most bizarre sight of all is the female Czech mullet or (FCM) - not perhaps a common sight, but you’ll come across one eventually.
2) The language - the language is beautiful but extremely difficult to learn. I think there are seven cases, where we have one. The pronunciation is phonetic, which actually means it is not that difficult to pronounce some of the words, but they are so damn tricky to remember, because they bare no resemblance to any English counterpart. At least in French, if you’re stuck you just try and use the English word with a French accent and often you can get away with it. No such joy here. I’ve also learnt that where, for example, we have maybe one or two words for the same meaning, the Czech language has at least 10. Veronica was saying how sometimes just choosing the right word makes speaking in Czech so difficult. If you thought too much about it, you’d be permanently stuck in inertia, unable to say anything at all because of all the possible choices of words you could say and your inability to choose between any of them. Yeah, it’s a good job I’m not Czech.
3) To say hello or goodbye in Czech you can interchange the words Ahoy and Cau (pronounced like the Italian word “Ciao”). Both foreign. You can say things like “Cau Ahoy” or “Ahoy Cau” or even “Cau Cau” or “Ahoy Ahoy” and still be none the wiser if your saying goodbye or hello. It doesn’t seem to matter, though; people just nod, regardless. Peculiarly Czech, for sure.
4) Czech history is interesting. It seems that there was a very famous battle back in the 1600’s and the Czech’s didn’t have any real taste for fighting it themselves, so they hired a bunch of Germans to fight it for them. It’s very famous and yet a little known fact that the Czech’s never actually fought in their most famous battle. They lost it, because the Germans never showed up for them; they hadn’t been paid, apparently. Again, peculiarly Czech.
5) Here’s a good example of the Czech character. When consumerism hit the highways, one of the things the Czechs took on board was a national lottery. But certain members of the population found a way to cheat at it. Remember, they had never had one before and didn’t really know anything about them, but the Czech character is one of resourcefulness; somehow they found a way. The punchline to this gag - they shut down the lottery in the end ‘cos so many were cheating at it.
6) I still can’t quite figure out how Czech’s can afford all the consumer goods they seem to possess. They earn stuff all, as a norm, and public sector workers, in particular, have a real tough time of it. However, stuff like new clothes, CDs, hi-fi equipment, mobile phones, computers, cars and just about any other consumer product you can think of is exactly the same price as in England. So, they are earning on average maybe four or five times less than we do and yet they have to pay the same prices for these things. How do they manage? It’s a mystery to me. Particularly when you see everyone, and I mean everyone, with a mobile phone. When I asked this question to Jan he replied, “I told you - the Czech’s are resourceful”. There you are.
1/11/01
But more things that are peculiarly Czech:
1) They beat women with sticks at Easter - hard. According to the locals, it is deemed good luck to be beaten. The sticks to beat women with can be bought at most decent retail outlets.
2) On December the 5th, adults dress up as a demon or an angel, depending, and go round houses scarring chidden.
3) I saw a rat-tailed mullet (RTM) the other day. Quite rare. Certainly a 25 pointer. Still looking for my first female rat-tailed mullet (FRTM). That would be something.
4) Classic errors from Czech students:
-“Seven years ago I got rid of my mother”, “No, Clara, you left your mother, you did not kill her, did you?” Pause. “No, not then”. End of lesson.
-“I slept with a lot of people in the Hostel. Both men and women. They were all friendly. No one minded”. Didn’t have the heart to correct that one. It would have taken to long. Just sat there with an inane grin on my face.
-“Is there a problem with violins in your country”, “No, Tomas, the word is violence”, “Ah”.
How to confuse a Czech: ask him to say the word “world”. You will then get ten minutes of “whirring” or “virring” sounds, depending on pronunciation skills, but you will essentially get the same word, over and over.
I don’t mean to take the mick, though, ‘cos I like the Czechs a lot. They are really good people – very friendly. However, they are a sceptical bunch. This is something of the Czech character. They know it, too. At least they laugh at my joke about this. If you asked a Czech if the glass is half-full or half-empty they will reply, “what are you on about, there’s f*** all in that”.
21/11/01
Confessions of an English Teacher in Prague:
The job is settling down into a pattern now. It’s a good job as jobs go. I work for a couple of agencies that send me to places like MaccaD’s (oh, the irony) Czech HQ and Apple’s Czech Distributor, as well as the biggest bank in The Republic, CSOB. Interesting, the conversations I get into, I can tell you. I know about McDonalds’s reach surveys for possible new restaurants, Apple’s European distribution network and the legal ins-and-outs of the Czech banking system. Hell, you never know when you need that kindof shit. It’s actually quite interesting. I also have private clients and that is blossoming quite nicely at the moment. It boosts me dosh considerably. When it comes down to it, teaching privately is being paid for having a chinwag for an hour or two. I am, in essence, a dirty whore prostituting my extremely good fortune of being born British. God knows it can be as much a curse as anything else, so fairplay to me, I say. In truth though, we British ain’t got a clue how lucky we are that it just so happens, by a quirk of birthplace, that a good percentage of Johnny Foreigners speak our lingo. It is a rather strange experience to sit round a table of Czechs and hear them all conversing away in your mother tongue, simply for your benefit. Delusions of grandeur indeed. Of course, there is a certain amount of expediency involved here, ‘cos if they spoke Czech I wouldn’t have one iota what they were on about. But the point I’m making is that they CAN all speak English with you. Imagine the reverse in GB. That just wouldn’t happen; on principle, most Brits would say. You know it’s true if you’re honest with yourself. The teaching of foreign languages in England principally consists of detailing the speed and sound level required when using English. “I would like that one please”. “Yes, like what you’re doing, but maybe just shout “that” a little louder please. And could you slow the whole thing down a notch. I.…..would…...like etc. Right you are, Megan. Again, please.”. The sad thing is, that is all I do here. I try with the language but it’s so damn difficult. It is beautiful, but incredibly complicated. There are, I’ve now found out, 8 cases. We have one. That means, for example, that there are technically 16 ways to say the word friend. I say no more. However, they don’t do articles in Czech, which causes allsorts of problems for them when they start learning English. Very early on they develop a weird yet ruthless skill for completely ignoring “a” and “the”. Even when they read it’s like an invisible mask falls over their eyes that blocks them all out. So, you can spend most of the lesson just interrupting them occasionally with the odd grunt. Don’t much care for prepositions either, the Czechs, which often leads to such statements as “that really drives me on the wall” and “I must go toilet”. “No, up the wall”. “Why up, Gray-ham?”, “because........(20 minutes later)....it’s just f***ing......up, alright. I didn’t make the p***ing rules”. “This p***ing. Is cockney London?” And the truth is, some rules in our language are logical and can be worked out rationally, but the rules are also broken as soon as not, and I find myself in great difficulty trying to explain, for example, exactly why it’s “in” a car and yet “on” a plane, train, bus, bike, in fact, just about every other mode of transport. What makes the car so damned special? That’s my point. I don’t know. And believe me, it has degenerated to the level of having to actually mime getting “on” a bus, but “in” a car: “note how I’m moving my body into something and yet merely stepping onto the bus”. Madness. There are no rules in language just conventions. Ah, the problem of legitimisation. I ain’t getting started on that one. Yeah but who decides what are the conventions? No, leave me alone. Who says it’s “in” but not…. I said leave me alone. Where’s the source of leg…….? GO AWAY. It’s all whack. Everything’s whack. Whack I tell u…..
29/11/01
This country has a funny thing about dogs. In Prague, they’re all f***ing wiener dogs. I reckon the first dog ever brought into this country was a wiener dog. All dogs in Prague have descended from this dog. There are variations on it, granted. You’ve got short-haired ones, long-haired ones, shaggy-permed ones, brown ones, black ones, brown/black ones, particularly long ones, slightly less long ones, hell, I saw one yesterday that I swear was a cross with a Doberman. I’m not sure if that is logistically possible, but that’s what it looked like. Horrible flipping wiener dogs. And the most stupid thing of all is that people carry these…..things around in bags. Dogs in bags! Lazy sods. You see these stupid dogs all the time being carried around like kings in carriages, peeping their heads out, looking smug as f***. Everytime I see a dog in a bag I get really mad. “Get that f***ing dog out of that bag and make the f***ing thing walk. It’s got four legs, hasn’t it? Well make the bloody thing use them”. Dogs in Bags! Dogs in Cars - fine. No problem. But bags? F*** off. It might just be me, of course. My friends tell me it is. They point them out to me now just ‘cos they know I’m gonna get all wound up. I can’t help it. It infuriates me. Dogs in Bags, for f**** sake. The wiener dog is a half dog. It’s like someone has rolled it out of pastry, but maybe just a bit to long, so it sags in the middle. I’ll leave it now, I think, with the dogs thing. I could go on, believe me. I really could, they get so under my……seeing their little f***ing heads…..poking out of the stupid…….Aghhhhh
……They’ve gone big time on the consumerism shtick here. My native mate Jan says this is at the expense of any kind of memory of the past. They appear to have drawn a line under their history. It now starts from 1989. Jan pointed out that this is something of a tragedy, because the community aspect that communism did bring has been discarded for the philosophy of the self, which of course capitalism celebrates. It’s worth emphasising the role of the self in both communism and capitalism, whilst I’m on one. In communism, Marx believed that the self could be overcome and thus the universal could be achieved. This is essentially attempting to bring a spiritual reality (the idea/concept of complete one-ness and unity) to this (material, i.e. physical) world. There are many people with a spiritual faith of some form or other who would accept that this is the ultimate aim. Except Marx’s mistake was to stay in the material realm, through his recourse to a material ideology. Merely replacing one system (capitalism underpinned by a liberal democracy) with another (communism) would achieve this, he believed. What he failed to take into account was that we are not intrinsically good; we are intrinsically self-ish; this is human nature. As Orwell said - all men are equal but some are more equal than others. So, in communism, the role of the self is vastly underestimated and, as a result, is doomed to failure. However, in capitalism, everything is reversed. Here, the self is not only acknowledged as the basis of the human condition, it is positively encouraged. The self is given free reign in capitalism to pursue itself unfettered. Again, this is where the problem arises, because then we have the situation that Hobbes said characterized human existence. It is open war between each individual, because we are all after the same thing: serving the self. And in this battle there will be winners and losers, because there is not enough of what we all want. There is only so much money, wealth, jobs, partners, etc; some will win, some will lose; some will be poor, some will be rich etc. Therefore, capitalism celebrates and encourages the self at the expense of community, whilst communism subjugates the self for the good of the community. However, neither is technically speaking any better than the other, because neither can solve the dichotomy of the human condition: we are individuals, we are, in our human nature, our self and yet we must live with other selves in as much harmony as we can, even though to do so means at some point literally acting against who we are – self-ish bastards! I know it sounds a bit whack, but that’s the point. It’s a vicious circle. In other words, it’s as the existentialists say - our problem is, in an ideal world, we should be alone and yet we are not. What do we do then? How do we live? That is a very good question. Particularly since ideology has become useless. Ideology is now dead. More on this later – I’m now very confused.
5/12/01
Today is interesting. It’s St.Nicholas day. Here are the nuts and bolts of it: someone dresses up as the devil, another as an angel and they knock on strangers doors, ask if the kids are home, then proceed to hold a kangaroo court on the unsuspecting child, ascertaining whether the kid has been good or not. If good, then the kid gets some sweets, chocolate, you know the score. But if found bad, then he/she will receive the warning that anymore mischief and it will be straight to hell with them. Whereupon, according to the enthusiasm of the angel and the devil, gratuitous tales are told of their possible fate, God rest their soul. They’ll also get a potato. A last kick in the teeth. “It’s for the children”, apparently, though one Czech I spoke to said, “but it does seem to scare a few of them” It would scare the hell out of me at 5, I know that much. Peculiarly Czech, then no.4566890. They certainly get into it. I was working in Namesti Miru this evening, one of the biggest squares in the city, and the place was overrun by families. I also noticed the odd devil and angel milling about as though it was perfectly normal to be dressed as one of Satan’s nymphs or the archangel Gabriel, on a cold winter’s evening.
10/12/01
It snowed today. It was bollock-numbingly cold and it snowed today. Around -20, I was told. About the same the day before. Hmmmm. My boss looked at me this afternoon, when I went to see her, and the first thing she said was “get coat”. “A coat, Ella, always the article”, “just get coat”. Right. From the words of a native - one must listen to such things, methinks. It rains in England, sure, and it gets cold and wet, yeah, yeah, but rarely have my bollocks turned quite the shade of blue that they presently resemble, as I sit here with an elaborate bollock heating system in my crutch. It was most definitely a bollock-numbingly cold day.
Had a day off, so I sat and had a few drinkies with me good mate Richie from Hull, down the Clown & Baird, which is my local. Interesting place, for sure, the C & B. It’s a backpackers hostel in Zizkov, (which is kinda' like Camden). I like it there a lot. It’s where I hang out the most. Full of casualties and dreamers, chancers and schemers, and lots of beat freaks. Then again, a lot of places in Prague are interesting. You know, I sat in the Smoking Bar in Namesti Miru yesterday, round this table, and there was a Czech, completely off his nuts doing baboon impressions, but in Czech, a Peruvian passing coca leaves to everybody and three Ruskis, talking to themselves as usual, but at least attempting to join in from time to time. And then there was me. The Angliski. You do meet all sorts around town. And then tonight at the C and B, met up with my international crew, who all work at the place. There’s the Slovakian beat freaks, Miru, Jozef and the youngblood Gabko, his two brothers Tomas and Michael, Hippy Zaz from Brazil and Boban, from Serbia. Richie and me are the British arm of the operation. We’re all quite tight. Miru and Gabko call me the Scottish Jesus for reasons I ain’t quite sure of. I think my surname may have something to do with it, but I keep telling them I was born near and raised near London. That don’t stop ‘em, though. “You and your crazy Scottish accent, you mad Scottish mofo”, they say to me. They’re a couple of wind-up merchants, but we have a good laugh. We’re either listening to electro and Daft Punk on the hostel’s sound system or having impromptu English lessons along the lines of “what does for f***’s sick mean, Gray-ham?”. “No, its Sake, Miru, S-A-K-E”. Jozef’s the new kid on the block. He’s a real talented photographer and he used to live in London for a bit, so his English is pretty good. Top chap is J; always puts on wicked music when he’s working on reception, which makes me get on the old Joanna in the corner and play like a loon over the top of it. He’s switched me onto St.Germain lately and we had the place jumping the other night. Zaz works behind the bar, which is useful, and is the life and soul of the place really – he’s always got a huge smile on his face when I come in. “Ah, Gray-ham, I’ve missed u”. He says this even when I’ve only been away for a day. His smile is infectious – u can’t help but be happy around him, in spite of yourself, sometimes. As for Boban, well, he’s the quiet one, who sits at reception just watching and listening. There’s a serenity to him that belies the fact that the guy’s been through some serious shit – he told me recently about some of his experiences in the war with Croatia. We just don’t have a clue in Britain about any of that. I like Boban a lot. He’s got a beautiful spirit. And finally, there’s Richie lad. He lives at the C & B, so we’re the only two resident brits who are always around. We look out for each other, for sure, me and Richie. Comfort in numbers. He’s the same age as me and we’ve been through some similar stuff – both just a couple of casualties, at the end of the day. As a result, we talk about a few things. He’s a bit down at the moment - just needs some vali, that’s all, ‘cos it helps stop you thinking too much, and sometimes that’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Trouble is, it’s like moondust round these parts. Then again, the Czech’s are a resourceful bunch….
So, I’m now back at the flat and am about to crash out listening to the world service just confirm what I already knew: the sanest place to be right now is in a hostel in Zizkov, Prague. It’s always the last place you expect.
27/12/01
4) Had a good Christmas. Had two good Christmas’s in fact. 'cos they celebrate the 24th out here, as I said. On Monday me, Richie and Miru were invited round someone’s house for an ex-pat Christmas dinner, where there were Canadians, Americans and a couple of other Brits. All rather pleasant and quite a good laugh. We even had the traditional Czech Christmas meal of carp. Yes, carp. Whenever I told my friends back home that I was going to have carp for Christmas they were, like, “you sick b***tard”. But there you go. Peculiarly Czech, example number 134. Richie wasn’t having any of it, but I liked it. A slightly more poky salmon, I’d say. But I couldn’t bring myself to eat the carp head soup. Not when I found out that the entire head had dissolved in it. Jen, the chef, and me, were trying desperately to find it, but there was just a fin left. The soup had corroded the head. Eyes and all. I spent the entire first course complaining of loose bowels and hid in the loo. But it was a white Christmas, which was nice. Flipping freezing, mind, around -15, but it snowed most of the day and night and the city was covered with a thick layer of wonderful powdered snow. Cool. I can’t remember the last time it snowed for Christmas back home. One has to take these things in - a white Christmas in Prague. I can honestly say that this time last year I would have had no idea that this is where I would be in a year’s time. Life is bizarre if you’re prepared to step out the boat from time to time. But you got to be a strong swimmer, ‘cos the drag is a bitch sometimes. Whatever. We know about that shit.
26/02/02
Peculiarly Czech no.345756: There is a kind of corner shop a few minutes away from me, which is open late and very handy. But Spar it ain’t. These small grocery stores have this really annoying habit of having all the goods stacked behind the counter, so you have to ask the shopkeeper for what you want. It’s a legacy from the Communist days, where food was “dispensed”, rather than sold. All very well if you speak the language, but as I’ve said before, it’s a real weasel to learn and I’ve only really mastered the necessities like Beer, Fags and Parkys (the Czech word for sausage - but not your normal sausage, a far higher standard of sausage than its British counterpart). So, every time I go in there, me and the various women who work at the place end up playing an interesting game of “find the eggs” or a variation on this theme. The rules are simple. You have a limited amount of time (depending on the queue and the patience of your fellow competitors, who all have the distinctly unfair advantage of speaking the lingo perfectly), to direct the shopkeeper around the store until they find the goods you are after. However, you will require patience as much as skill, as you watch the shopkeeper desperately picking up products next to, above and behind the thing you want. I swear it’s like those machines at fun fairs, where you have a mechanical hook and you have to direct it to pick up a teddy bear with a fiver wrapped around it. It can be just as excruciating. The amount of times I’ve said “for f*** sake, it’s the f***ing red one, you dozy f***ing mare” under my breath. But then, I’m sure they let out a sigh of despair every time I come into the shop, as if to say “Oh no, here we go again”. The other day, I went there to buy some stuff for a Spag Bol and came back with three eggs and a pot of yoghurt, just because I didn’t have the heart to keep making her go back for stuff. All part of the deal of living here, I guess, though the novelty begins to wear thin after the fifth pot. I don’t even like yoghurt. I give the stuff away.
In between riding the rollercoaster, I do from time to time, fit in a few English lessons for the locals. Actually, the job is quite enjoyable, as jobs go, and can be quite rewarding. I’ve been teaching the same people for a while now and you can see the improvement with some of them. Word order is the key really, I reckon. If the words are the right order it does usually make it easier for the listener. “Would go you like to the Cinema?” is probably going to get a “what in the name of Alan did you say?” more often than not. Phrasal verbs are the major headaches for Czechs. They don’t like them, as a rule, because they’re so easy to get wrong. I mean, the difference between “what time did you turn up” and “what time did you turn down?” is quite big for just one misused preposition, so I do sympathise. But the English language is full of phrasal verbs. That’s how we speak to each other half the time. “I got up at 12, crashed out on the sofa, turned on the box, put off all the things I should have done and stayed in all day. Set up perfectly, then”. You try and describe a normal day and look how complicated it can be. They are ever so nice to me, though, the people I teach. I have a kind of private business that I run, along with the agency work I get, and a lot of them are all kind of related in some way, so it’s like I’m part of the family. They treat me very well. The women mother me and the men introduce me to all the local liqueur. All I have to do is show up and have a chinwag for an hour. It works out pretty sweet. They’re good people, for sure, and I find out all sorts of things about life in the Czech Republic. Like I said before, we don’t know how lucky we are to be born speaking the mother tongue. Fairplay indeed. PS They take the mick out of me sometimes though, ‘cos I’m always saying “oh, that’s a lovely word, write that down”. I’ve basically said that about every word I teach them, but words are lovely, you know. The power of words.
Just a quick one on Czech politics. The prime Minister, a chap called Milos Zeman, is another colourful character, like my man Klaus. The other day he caused a bit of a diplomatic stink by seemingly comparing Arafat to Hitler in the Israeli daily Ha’ aretz. He said he’d been misquoted, but it’s not the first time he’s put his foot in it. The best one was when he attacked the quality of Slovakian beer, saying that the Poprad brand was only good for cleaning dentures. This is like Blair saying that Guinness tastes like shoe polish. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go down well. But the best story I’ve heard about him comes from one of my clients, who said that a friend of hers was at a party of some sort and who should be slumped in the corner talking drunken bollocks to himself, but Zeman. She said that people just sort of pretended he wasn’t there. Imagine that: “oh, I don’t believe it, the Prime Minister’s drunk all the vodka. I ain’t voting for him again, the greedy……” They are a different breed out here, the politicians. Cut-throat weasels, who would kill their grandmothers for an extra vote, they seem to make endless mistakes and gaffs and still get away with it. Hold on. Maybe not so different (Stephen Byers being the latest in an endless line). They just do it with a certain ostentatious flair missing from the sanitised version we get back home. Spin is not a concept they have mastered yet and it certainly makes the whole show a little more watchable. Kind of depressing really, ‘cos as they get more used to the vagaries of modern democracy, politics will become less interesting. It will certainly be worth seeing what the turn out for the up-coming election will be.