Exactly one month to the day after our return from Italy, the photographic documentation is ready for viewing. We took over 300 pictures, and I have painstakingly winnowed that count down to a hundred or so that really capture the essence of the trip. I diligently cropped and edited them. I hope you appreciate all the work that has gone into the presentation.

1. I bought the newest version of Photoshop Elements, since my old version won't run in Leopard.
2. I cropped, edited, improved contrast and saturation, corrected camera distortion, rotated, fill-flashed, and otherwise improved the pictures for your viewing pleasure. But they still maintain that in-the-moment rawness that you crave.
3. I installed Gallery (open source photo gallery software) on the website to add new functionality (but an inferior aesthetic) to the photo page. However, this is a tradeoff for the greatly reduced amount of time I have to spend manually editing HTML and tweaking CSS code. And you can view the pictures in multiple resolutions.
4. I have painstakingly written terse and cursory captions for over half of the photos.

So I hope you enjoy the presentation. It is here: Paul, Corinne, and Thea's Italian Adventure 2008.

I would like to think that I’m a pretty smart guy. I feel smart. I know a lot of things, when I can remember what they are. I come up with clever solutions to complicated problems. I have read a lot of books.

But no amount of being smart seems to help me with my most profound shortcoming: I’m kind of dumb. You might say absent minded, or forgetful. There is a “special place,” whose whereabouts I know not, that beckons me with a siren’s call whenever my conscious attention is not needed here and now. I just disappear.

Often it happens in my down time, when my mind gets all wandery. Or when I’m driving, especially when I’m listening to music. I’m justing singing along, playing air drums, and suddenly notice I’ve missed my exit. Or that I’m driving my standard route to work even though it’s Saturday and I meant to go to Trader Joe’s, which is in the opposite direction.

Today, for instance, I was driving to the airport to catch a flight to Albuquerque. I’m going out to visit C., who is studying the Navajo language on the reservation in Arizona. I put on Blood on the Tracks, and was so busy trying to decipher the lyrics to “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” that I missed my exit. And it’s not just that I missed my exit. I forgot that Interstate 66 doesn’t actually go the airport. You have to take the Dulles toll road, the exit for which is several miles before you hit 66 when you’re on the outer loop of the beltway.

Heading west on 66, and having an inkling that I had made a mistake, I called C. to ask.

“Hi, hon. I miss you, can’t wait to see you tonight when I land. By the way, does 66 go to Dulles?”

“No, you have to take the Dulles toll road. That goes to Dulles. That’s why they call it the Dulles toll road.”

“Crap.”

I’ve only lived here for 4 years, and I’ve only driven to Dulles nine or ten times, so I can be excused for forgetting that, especially since I was so busy trying to figure out how Big Jim and the Hangin’ Judge figured into the plot of the song.

So I dug out the map and consulted it while sitting in motionless traffic on 66. I found an off-ramp which led to a side street which would in turn merge into some road which connected to something that met up with the Dulles toll road. Still an hour to go before my flight, no problem.

Well, I met up with the toll road, sped wildly to long term parking, found a spot, and ran to the airport shuttle stop, only to wait for 15 minutes for a shuttle. The driver was doing slow loops to help out a really huge, friendly woman with a southern accent who couldn’t find her car. Things went smoothly at the terminal, where I made a bee-line for security. The line was no longer than usual, and then I ran to find a departures screen to find my gate. 15 minutes to go.

Of course, it turned out that my flight left from the terminal that requires a shuttle to get to. I ran to the shuttle, and boarded the one that said it was leaving in “0:00 minutes.” But that was a bit optimistic, as it didn’t actually pull out for ten minutes. It dumped me off at the far end of the other terminal, whereupon I threw all my bags onto my back and ran to my gate, only to find that I had missed the plane by two minutes and, no, it would not come back to the gate. I looked down at my cell phone clock. 5:43. I looked at my boarding pass. Departure: 5:43. Crap.

Of course, last time I flew to Albuquerque alone, it was for a friend’s wedding. And that time, too, I missed my flight. That time, the particular cause was that I had my flight time imprinted in my mind from double- and triple-checking my itinerary so many times so I wouldn’t get it wrong. Only the itinerary I was memorizing was C.’s, not mine, and she flew out on a different day because, as a student, she’s not bound by this whole “vacation time” constraint that I have. I knew what day I was flying, and I knew my name, so my speed-skimming skills took my eyes directly to the important information in the email—the times and flight numbers—and skipped right over the unimportant information, such as the passenger’s name and the date.

Luckily, that time my flight was early in the day, so I headed to the airport and got a standby seat on a flight two hours after my original. No big deal.

Of course, each of those incidents had a completely different cause. The circumstances had almost nothing to do with each other. But, of course, to the people at the other end who were waiting for me—who on two separate occasions received phone calls from me to say that I had missed my flight and that they would have to change their plans to accommodate my mistake—it appeared a little different. There was one common cause for the two incidents: the basic incompetence of me.

So the question remains . . . Am I incapable of successfully getting myself to the airport in time to catch a flight? Am I that disorganized? Normally, C. and I travel together, and we keep each other on schedule and focused. And she reminds me how to get where I’m going and when to exit the highway. And to bring my ID. And socks.

So I suspect that, as a result of not having to worry about all the practical details concerning how to get from here to there by car, I have lost the ability to do it. Or at least that ability has atrophied. Which is funny, because really, I’m still a very intelligent and capable guy. I keep all sorts of complicated systems running smoothly as part of my job. I successfully schedule and attend meetings. I plan out projects according to deadlines, and I consistently meet those deadlines. It’s just that, in some ways, I’m a dunderhead. An insightful, clever, and efficient dunderhead.

This year’s international adventure will be in Italy. We leave next week. C’s sister has been there for a semester, and having finished her school obligation, is currently wwoofing in some little village somewhere. We’re flying over next week to join her for two weeks of traveling about.

We have a nice circuitous route planned which gives us ample time for visiting archeological sites, seeing art and architectural what-have-ya’s, not to mention a few days of quality beach time on the Mediterranean (my favorite place so far in the whole world). We’re taking our snorkels. We’re taking advantage of cheap RyanAir flights booked well in advance. We’re spending one night on a ferry from Sardinia to Naples. It’s got everything. The only thing it doesn’t have is a whole summer. Damn this whole “vacation time” thing.

Well, folks, it’s only been a couple of weeks since we returned from Oaxaca, and already the photos are ready for posting. As I mentioned, we took only disposable cameras, so these pictures were all developed from film to CD. You can see graininess and scratches in many of them, and for that I most profusely and humbly apologize. There is very little excuse for appearing analog in this bright new digital world.

So to compensate, I shined them up, cropped a couple of them where appropriate, straightened some of them out just a hair, and otherwise prettified things for the consumption of the larger audience. Then I penned some more or less relevant captions, loaded them up onto this here Internet, and now I’m sharing them with you. I hope you enjoy.

You can find the link over to the right in the Photoblog section, or you can just click this one: Oaxaca Photoblog. There are plenty more travel pic sets from our other adventures in the photoblog, and written stories about many of them in the Travel Stories section of StrPrpn.

We went to Oaxaca for two weeks. Did you miss us? I’ll post the photoblog soon, but writing all those captions can be time consuming and I haven’t had a chance yet. Here’s a teaser, from the tiny village of Chacahua, where we stayed at the tail end of our stint at the beach.

After getting robbed when we were in Guatamala two summers ago, we decided on this trip to pack nothing we cared anything about, including the digital camera. We hauled five disposable cameras around with us, which meant no zoom, no retakes, few clandenstine shots, and no previews to hint at whether the picture had come out at all. We had them developed to CD when we returned home, but you can still see the graininess, dust, and scratches in the digital versions, which irks me.

Oaxaca turns out to be a bustling city with a thriving middle class. Suave guys in name-brand jeans facebooked each other on Macbooks in cafés. Moms drove their daughters to private school in Toyotas. And here we were with nothing: I took a credit card, a debit card, and my passport in a money belt. Everything else was either clothes, books, basic toiletries, or a snorkel. Always learning lessons, we are. Next time, we’ll feel perfectly comfortable taking the digital camera to Oaxaca, and we won’t take anything to Guatemala. (That is, if we ever go back to Guatamala, which is doubtful. It has been decided that vacationing amid real and wrenching poverty is not fun. It makes you feel like a sick voyeur peering into someone else’s private misery. What else can you feel but shame to realize that your shoes probably cost more than some people make in a month. Literally. We’ve decided that, if we head toward poverty again, it will be to volunteer.)

Of course, Oaxaca is in Mexico, so there was plenty of poverty to be found: indigeno children who should have been in school instead begging for pesos on the street, old men in the villages hauling things to and fro on their burros, etc. But nothing we saw was as destitute as what we had seen in Guatemala.

More stories will follow, but for now I’ll just describe the adventurous day we had trying to leave. Dean had just crossed the Yucatan peninsula and was headed across the Gulf toward Veracruz. We arrived at the airport at 7:30 am to get Maris onto her flight to Mexico City, where she’d connect to a flight back to New Mexico. Once we’d seen her off, we took a walk in a park just outside the airport to pass the four hours until our departure. We returned about 10:30 am to find that our 11:55 flight to Houston (the sole daily flight to the U.S. from Oaxaca) had been cancelled due to Dean’s interference with its flight path. The flights for the following two days were full, but the ticket counter lady assured us that we could be on a flight as soon as Saturday (this being Wednesday). We objected to that idea, so she changed our ticket instead to depart from Mexico City the following morning at 6:00 am, but we were on our own to get there (it’s an eight-hour bus ride). On a whim, we stopped at the Mexicana airlines ticket counter, to be told it would cost us $200 per ticket to get on a waiting list, which we declined. Then we hopped over to the Click airlines counter (a JetBlue-like upstart) who had $180 tickets departing in five minutes. Were we ready to depart now? Could we be on that flight? Yes, please. Painfully expensive, and not technically in the budget, but we had little other choice.

So we ran through security (I didn’t even bother to put my belt or shoes back on until we were safely on the plane). They stopped us and made us gate-check our backpacks, which we hate to do because it always costs us precious time at baggage claim. We boarded the plane, they promptly closed the doors behind us, and the plane pulled away from the gate. The nice Oregonian rancher who had been behind us in line and in the same predicament failed to get to the plane in time. We relaxed on the one-hour flight to Mexico City and plotted how we would get to Houston the same day.

The Oregonian rancher, a thin guy with a big bushy beard, wearing a plaid shirt and boot-cut jeans secured by a belt with a big rancher belt buckle, was actually a transplant. He’d just started building a house in Oaxaca, he explained, and used his home here as a hub for his travels. Apparently he’d done well in the ranching business, or his ranch land had appreciated enough that selling it had set him up for life. He’d just returned from a five-month trip to southern Argentina, Chile, and Antarctica, where he said he’d taken 10,000 photos and had swum with penguins. Being a horseman, he said, he had a knack for animals, and he’d formed a bond with the penguins that most other people could not. I never got his name, but I really enjoyed meeting him, in part because his story was so intriguing, but also because hearing it encouraged me that setting foot on Antarctica sometime during my life is actually an achievable dream, and actually not really that difficult, if you can make it to the very southern tip of Argentina.

Once we landed in Mexico City, we retrieved our bags and headed straight to the Continental airlines ticket counter. We explained what had happened, and asked if there were any flights to DC leaving that day. The woman at first said she couldn’t change our tickets because the cancelled flight had been on an affiliate airline and their cancellation was not Continental’s problem. We insisted that it had been a Continental Express flight, but she wouldn’t believe us until I was able to dig up our printed Travelocity itinerary that I’d shoved into some flap of my backpack before leaving the US, an iterinary that clearly showed the Continental logo and flight number. She put us on a plane to DC departing in half an hour, with a layover in Houston. We thanked her kindly and ran to the gate.

We boarded without incident and settled in. It was then we noticed that we had only an hour to get through customs and security in Houston and make it to our next flight. This made us slightly tense.

We became more tense when we landed and saw the snaking line at the passport counters. We slowly resigned ourselves to shuffling through the maddeningly slow maze amid the frat boys and fat Texans returning from their vacations in Cancun and Acapulco. 30 minutes later we had the Homeland Security stamps in our passports and ran to security to find yet another serpentine line of aggravated souls. At this point, we had 15 minutes until departure. We began to sweat. Someone convinced the Houston TSA people that some of us were in a crunch and perhaps could be granted some special treatment to make our flights on time. They let us all into the Elite First-class Members-only Silver-spoon security line (which pissed off the Elite quite a bit), but we removed our shoes and our belts and our coins and got through quickly. Five minutes to go. We ran to the gate . . .

. . . only to find that the gate had been changed. Our flight to DC now departed from a different terminal on the opposite side of the airport in four minutes. Corinne asked if maybe they’d be kind enough to ask the plane to wait. The woman told us to take a cart. So we took a cart.

The first cart we saw was being held up because an indignant, fat Texan tourist was yelling at the driver about how he had wronged her. This was the same woman who I’d seen yelling at a fellow line-waiter back in security as they put their shoes back on. “If you don’t start treating me with a little more respect, mister, you’re going to regret it,” I’d heard her saying at the time. (In general, I believe that if one finds oneself encountering multiple completely unreasonable assholes within a very short span of time, perhaps it best to stop and consider if oneself might instead be the asshole.) So we took the second cart we saw, which was fortunate, because it was driven by a guy who had no regard for pedestrians, almost running several of them down to get us to the gate on time.

For the second time in a day, we were the last people on board the plane. At the gate, they gave us the emergency exit row seats, we climbed on board, they shut the doors, and then the plane sat at the gate for 30 minutes waiting for the go-ahead from air traffic control to take off.

We finally took off, and we watched Shrek 3 (unfunny and disappointing) to pass the time, landing in DC at 11:00 pm. We got to the Metro and caught the yellow line train, making it to Fort Totten just in time to catch the last red line train of the night. We got home, dumped our backpacks on the living room floor, and headed to bed. 17 hours from start to finish, but we made it. I was able to be at work the next morning bright eyed and bushy tailed to wade through the couple of hundred emails awaiting my reply.

We’ve been back from our Southwest Adventure ’07™ for nigh a week now, but I’m only just getting around to posting the travelogue. You can find the photos and witty commentary here: http://www.strangeproportion.com/personal/sw07/.

Pictures from the Thanksgiving trip to New Mexico, but I'm just getting around to posting them now. These are from a place called White Canyon, near Abiquiu (rhymes with barbeque). The third picture helps to explain why this canyon has been a popular spot to film scenes that are supposed to take place on the moon. The really low gravity around Abiquiu makes it look all the more realistic. The last picture is of an adobe mosque built by a community of hippies who converted to Islam in the ’60s and settled in Abiquiu. Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch is not far off.

Notice the blue of the sky. You just don't see that anywhere else.

Here it is, only 9:30 p.m. and I’ve finished everything on my to-do list for the evening. It feels like it’s been months since I’ve had this luxury, and perhaps it has. Planning a wedding, as I’m sure any veteran of the affair will say, is a bitch. To plan one long distance is doubly so. We spent most evenings for the first part of the year with a list of vendors to call and decisions to make. It was to be a simple affair—and largely it was, though it came in about 60% over our original and naively optimistic budget—but it was nonetheless sisyphusean in scope.

But there it is. Done. And everything happened exactly as we planned. More or less. Except for the DJ, who deviated from our painstakingly selected playlist. I use deviated in the most generous sense, because really, he barely touched our playlist. In fact, had we made a list of songs that definitely, definitely, under no circumstances would we want played at our wedding—well, those are the ones he put on the turntable. If you made a top 10 list of the worst, most clichéd songs to play at wedding receptions, you’ve probably got the second half of our reception covered. Bust a Move, for God’s sake. One More Night by Phil effing Collins. MC effing Hammer. My God. I feel like I should send out postcards to all the guests emphasizing that I did NOT tell the DJ to play Phil Collins, just to save whatever face I can.

But Jesus Bas, the flamenco guitar player, was exquisite. He strummed all Spanish sweetness during the ceremony and then hammered it home slightly electrified during the cocktail hour. He somehow worked it out with pedals to sing his own backing harmonies. It wasn’t the too-familiar-these-days guy with the sampling delay petal playing along with himself as a metronome. This guy was actually doing harmonies, and I (who used to co-own a recording studio, remember) have no idea how he pulled it off.

So here we are now, back from the honeymoon. We’re tanned, well-rested, and well-fed. In fact, I came back with an interesting and wholly inexplicable case of stripes, which at first I attributed to a possible tropical fungal infestation or insect by-product. My friend Chris postulated that they were caused by subdermal Carribean microleeches. It turns out (should I admit this?) that they were in fact due to a slight mishap with some lime juice and the sun, though I worry that those unfamiliar with my nocturnal habits might think they’re claw marks from my battles with were-beasts.

With all this time to kill nowadays (at least until my linear algebra class start on Monday), expect more updates than you know what to do with.

Confirmed it now is that the Star Wars mythology is apparently deeply embedded in my psyche, which only makes sense given the number of times I watched all of those movies when I was growing up and how much the adventures in my no-friends cerebral pretendland revolved around those characters. I never had the action figures, because they were too expensive, my mom said, but my rich cousin John had them all, including the ships and the Darth Vader action-figure carrying case, and I was infinitely jealous. But that's not the point. My off-the-cuff comparison of Tikal to Endor turned out to be half-right: It wasn’t Endor, but the fourth moon of Yavin, the scene of the celebration at the end of Episode IV.

Of course, when we booked our tickets to Guatemala, everything seemed hunky-dory down there (according to the State Department, anyway). Upon our return, for curiosity’s sake, we checked again and found this:

This Public Announcement is being issued to remind U.S. citizens of the continuing serious security situation in Guatemala. This Public Announcement expires on November 3, 2005.

U.S. citizens are urged to be especially aware of safety and security concerns when traveling in Guatemala. Although the majority of travelers visit Guatemala without mishap, violent criminal activity on the highways in Guatemala continues, and the number of armed robberies on city streets and in private homes is increasing. Crimes against foreigners have included murder, rape, and armed robbery. Criminals in Guatemala are extremely opportunistic; all travelers should remain vigilant and take appropriate measures to limit risk and losses. Assailants often respond violently if they perceive resistance from their victims.

Although fewer highway robberies have been reported recently, violent criminal activity on the highways in Guatemala continues and tourists, among others, have been targeted. Buses of all categories, tour vans and private vehicles have been stopped, with drivers and passengers robbed, sometimes violently. Armed robbers have intercepted vehicles on main roads in broad daylight. Highway bandits have committed rape in the commission of robberies.

The most common highway robberies involve pickup trucks pulling up next to the victims' moving vehicle with occupants brandishing weapons, or impromptu blockades on isolated roads forcing vehicles to stop. Travel on secondary roads increases the risk of encountering a criminal roadblock; robbers have used mountain roads advantageously to stop buses, vans and cars in a variety of ways. The roads around Lake Atitlán that connect the neighboring towns have little security and visitors have been stopped and robbed.

Gangs are a growing concern, both in Guatemala City and in rural Guatemala. Gang members are often well-armed and prone to unprovoked violence. Gangs are believed to be responsible for a substantial increase in violent robberies on inter- and intra-city buses; U.S. Mission personnel are not permitted to travel on these buses. Mission personnel continue to observe heightened security precautions in Guatemala City and on the roads outside the capital city.

There is little evidence of effective investigation of these crimes or arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators. The police suffer from corruption, inexperience and lack of funds, and the judicial system is weak, overworked, and inefficient. Criminals, at times armed with an impressive array of weapons, know there is little chance they will be caught and punished. In some cases, assailants have been wearing full or partial police uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles, indicating some elements of the police might be involved.

“Why you no choose Antigua? All the gringos study Spanish in Xela. Is better in Antigua.”

So spoke the middle-aged man at the filthy Guatemala City street corner where we were trying to find the next bus to Antigua. The Spanish had already been studied, though not by me, and we three gringos were on the leisure portion of our vacation. This was, in fact, the only part of my vacation. M. and C. had gone down two weeks prior to study Spanish in the mountain town of Quetzaltenango (more easily referred to by its Mayan name, Xela [shay-la]). We met up for one week of traveling around Guatemala before returning home. We’d been doing a lot of traveling around the country, and Antigua was to be the last stop before we headed to the airport the next day.

“You are from Nuevo México, eh? I have been there. I know Taos.” He pronounced this last word with a laboriously rounded vowel sound, obviously practiced but never quite mastered. “I lived there. I did, you know, whatever I could. Anything.”

We chatted for a couple of minutes about Nuevo México, about Antigua, about gringos, as a large bus—referred to here as a ‘chicken bus’ because of the wide variety of typical passenger species—backed into position near us. Most chicken buses are actually American school buses from the ’70s and ’80s with stern warnings still intact about not throwing gum at your neighbor.

“This is the next bus to Antigua, my friends.”

We hand our big backpacks to the guy standing on the roof of the bus, as is typical, keeping our most valuable possessions in a small pack we carry on to the bus with us to keep close at hand. We confirm with the driver that this bus goes to Antigua, and the driver’s assistant guides us to our seats and places the pack on the rack above our heads. The bus is already growing crowded, and we’re tired. We stayed last night in a bare-bones hostel in the mountains near Semuc Champey, three hours by unpaved precipitous mountain road from a small town called Cobán. We’d been awoken at 4:55 a.m. for our 5:00 a.m. minibus by some Spanish-speaking voice with a flashlight in the dark. The journey was too bumpy for sleep, and when we arrived in Cobán at 8:30 with empty stomachs and sagging eyes, the bus to Guatemala City, another four hours further away, was already loading. We hopped on board and continued the journey. When we arrived in Guatemala City, it was just a four or five block walk to the place where the bus to Antigua loaded, and the last leg would be an hour and a half at most. Almost there.

It seems strange that the assistant is so forceful, putting M. into a seat in the row in front of us, when she’d been heading to the row behind. When I realize our broken umbrella is still in my lap, I put it on top of the backpack on the rack above my head, and notice as I lower my eyes the hands of the assistant repositioning it next to the pack. He is behind us, helping other people into their seats and packing three adults and their belongings into every two-adult-width seat. A large man squeezing past me drops some coins loudly on the floor. C. and I moved our feet and help him locate a coin that has rolled under our seat. He thanks us and brushes past. I close my eyes for a moment. The bus starts up and begins rolling forward around the corner as C. starts shouting.

“Where’s our bag!?” I look up at the empty rack. Shit. I stand up, spinning around to scan the blank brown faces in the seats behind us. The two men, the assistant and the coin dropper, have already disappeared out the back door. They were so well-practiced, so by-the-book, but at the same time so obvious—after the fact, that is. Of course they were thieves. Why else so much attention to the bag? Why else seat M. in front of us? The bus is moving faster now. C. runs out the front door, explaining what’s happened in Spanish to the driver as she passes him. I follow, but the driver only slows, and we have only seconds to scan the crowd at the corner. They’re already gone. I grab the ladder on the back of the bus that leads to the roof, climb up to make sure our big packs are still there, and am ushered in the back door of the bus by the real driver’s assistant.

By the time we reach Antigua an hour later and find a phone to call the credit card companies, they’ve rung up $500 in charges. Once we get back to the States and all the charges appear, it will turn out to be over $1000. Fortunately, we won’t be held liable for the charges, but C. is out a backpack, a hundred in cash, inexpensive but irreplaceable jewelry, a phone card, subway passes, her driver’s license, and so on. During the ensuing days, at random moments, she will remember something else that was in the bag. The emergency rain ponchos. We’re driving down city streets on the way to the store when her eyes drop. The earrings were in there too.

But now the photos are back from the lab and I am reminded of all the transcendental, ephemeral beauty I witnessed. It began the day after I arrived. As soon as I got out of Guatemala City’s filthy crime-ridden slums, my overcrowded bus took me up along narrow mountain roads weaving amid volcanoes draped in fog. Peasants led burros along the side of the highways. Crews of itinerant machete-wielding men walked from field to field. Short barefoot women with toddlers slung in blankets over their backs and enormous bowls of food or cloth balanced on their heads waited on the shoulder for someone to stop and take them where they were going.

M., C., and I met up in Panajachel the day after I arrived, spending a couple of days exploring that town and some of the villages that line the volcano-encircled lake there, Lago Atitlan. We then caught an overpriced ten-hour bus to a town called Florés, which put us within a couple of hours of Tikal, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in the middle of thousands of square miles of protected rain forest that spans northern Guatemala, western Belize, and southern Mexico. We spent a day in Florés debating whether or not our digestive trouble was caused by amoebas, but still took some time to eat good food (relatively good, when compared to the desayuno típico of eggs, clumpy refried black beans, and a little sliver of salty cheese) and swim in the lake. From there we hit Cobán, toured a coffee plantation, staying in a hotel that claimed to have hot water (a real luxury), but in fact the hot water just turned out to be less cold than usual. Stopping in Cobán broke up the return to the South into bearable pieces, and put us near Semuc Champey, with flooded caves we explored by candlelight and its serene cascading pools of mountain spring water. A little thievery amid all that? So be it.

Then again, it wasn’t my stuff that got stolen.

Alright, folks. Photos from our trip to Guatemala are now up. It’s been just over a year since my last trip worthy of a photoblog page. This whole working for a living thing is highly overrated, as far as life as an intrepid traveler goes. And I get 50% more paid vacation than most American adults. Call me spoiled. I don’t know how people can be expected to subsist on two weeks of vacation a year. That’s barely enough to make the rounds to see family and friends, let alone explore this cool huge orbiting sphere we inhabit. At least the money’s good. What a novel change not to be broke all the time.

Oh yeah, the Guatemala pictures. I almost forgot. They’re here: Guatphot.

(Otherwise entitled, "Go east, young man!") I’ve arrived in Santa Fe just in time for monsoon season. Every morning I wake up to the unadulterated blue sky outside the window of whichever friend’s house I’ve chosen to crash at the night before, and when I stumble outside in my shorts into the clear dry air, squinting and scratching the sleep off my bare chest, I can see the tops of the clouds looming over the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) mountains to the east.

The clouds continue piling up behind the mountains, turning grayer and more ominous as the day progresses. Finally in the mid-afternoon they spill over the mountaintops and begin spreading out and dropping succinct downpours over various widely-dispersed parts of the valley. Since I’m reliant on my bicycle for transportation, these periodic storms disrupt my plans from time to time, but New Mexico needs rain as much as a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, so I put my personal preferences on hold and wish the rain-starved hills well while I park under the nearest awning or portale to wait it out.

After riding my bike around town for a few days, I decided to rent my moving truck a day early and use it as an oversized and inconvenient rental car. My jaw dropped when I phoned around town to ask about rates. The cheapest one-way truck I could find to the east coast was U-Haul’s $718 plus taxes and insurance. I was, however, able to garner one unforeseen advantage out of the deal, as a result of the U-Haul clerk’s Santa Fe public school education. The deal included 2043 free miles, just enough to get me to my destination, but not enough to allow any detours or errands. When I asked if she could bump it up just a bit, she said she could give me an extra 50 miles, and heck, she’d throw in the extra seven and round it up to 3000. Due to basic math incompetence, I now have a buffer of 900 free miles, just in case I get lost several times for days at a time along the way. If you know me, you know that when my mind gets a-wanderin’, such things are in fact more likely than not. I plan not to take advantage of these free miles—high gas prices and all, not to mention basic honesty—but it’s nice to know I have them just in case.

So during my days here I have visited the folks who need visiting, trying my best to mend the places in the net that have frayed from inattention during the past year. I have also eaten the burritos, enchiladas, carne adovada, green chiles, and sopapillas necessary to quench my appetite and widen my gut. I have sunned myself on patios and ridden my bike dry-mouthed down the gravel roads among the hummingbirds and goats, chamisa and piñon. Today after meeting my friend Roland for huevos and posole at Tecolote, I headed to the bike shop to buy my second inner tube in three days and ended up chatting for a while with a drunk Blackfoot Indian who hit me up for spare change. He liked me because I stopped to talk to him, he said, explaining that I wasn’t like most white people who always rush from place to place. He saw my Euclid 3:16 shirt and asked me if I’d ever read Kahlil Gibran (I failed to see the connection), then mentioned that he was an American just like I am, that he’d just gotten out of the army two years ago and figured that was his admission ticket. He had a hard time pronouncing all his words, most likely related to the 40 of Bud Light in the bag at his feet, but was mostly lucid. He gave me a name in his language, which I promptly forgot, but it might have been Lapi, and he taught me how to say "This day is a good day," which I repeated once pretty accurately and then promptly forgot as well. Overall, things have been good, and I’m just about ready to throw my many boxes of crap into the truck and spend three or four days geeked out on truckstop coffee and AM country radio, cruising on slick air-smooth highways to the next destination, my home for the next three to ten years, give or take. I’ll drop you a line when I get there.

Some places are not meant to be lingering places. They are designed to be passed through quickly, to disappear from memory as soon as you have gone from point A to point B. When it happens for some reason that you linger in one, it takes on a completely different character. For instance, near Gate A2 in Chicago’s Midway airport, a placid-sounding valium-soothed woman repeats her warning every six seconds to prevent daydreaming people in the long white echoing high-ceilinged corridor from falling like felled trees when they run into the stationary ground at the end of the horizontal escalator. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” The people waiting at Gate A2 for their flight, which has been delayed for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm in Denver, must nonetheless listen to this warning every six seconds until its interminably slow repetitive rhythm supplants their thoughts one by one. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.”

In this way, there’s something very purgatorial about the long white waxed corridors, the thick wet receding echoes of the woman’s voice, and the smooth infinitesimal creeping of time. When our return flight from Croatia landed in Prague, the man below was engaged in his own version of the purgatory dance. He was doing this for 45 minutes, but that much video takes up a lot of bandwidth.

I was warned by the completely unapologetic ticket agent when I checked my bags at Midway that, due to the delay, I would miss my connection to Albuquerque tonight. I finally landed in Denver after eleven o’clock, and rather than drag my 130 pounds of baggage by cab to an overpriced hotel near the airport to sleep for four hours at most before dragging it back to the airport, I’ve decided to pass the nether-hours of the night with you, Gentle Reader, waiting for the Frontier ticket counter to reopen at five a.m. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” I’ve set up base camp with my laptop near the closed aluminum security gates of the food court, listening to the Beta Band on the headphones I stole from my Alitalia flight from Prague to Chicago. I couldn’t have known at the time that they would turn out to be so useful. The only source of food open at this hour is Burger King, so I had to give in and eat fast food for the first time in over a year. It tasted just like I remember it, that is, pretty fast and a bit like food. Thankfully, the Beta Band drowns out this particular corner’s repeating manta for travellers: “Please do not leave baggage unattended for any reason. Unattended items will be confiscated and may be destroyed.”

I promised Mike, our friend and colleague in Brno, that I’d share with him my first impressions upon returning to America after a year away, and these extra few hours I need to kill somehow seem like a wonderful opportunity to meander my way through those impressions. How does it seem different? What stands out now that I’ve been immersed in other cultural norms for long enough to become accustomed to them? In what ways do I feel like I’m returning to something absolutely familiar, and in what ways do I feel like I’m encountering something new? It’s tricky because a year isn’t really such a long time in the grand scheme. Mike has been living in the Czech Republic for 12 years, so he has probably been separated from his Americanness far more than C. or I have.

The change in scenery hasn’t surprised me. My brother picked me up at O’hare and had some errands to run in the city. I wasn’t surprised by the skyline or the traffic, both of which dwarf their respective analogues in the Czech Republic. Having been in a car five times at most during the past year, I was surprised that cruising on the Kennedy in my brother’s van into the city didn’t feel at all strange. Rather, it was completely familiar. I accompanied him on his rounds, chatting a bit with a couple of his customers. As we left the city, to satisfy my longing for a carne asada burrito and an [h]orchata, he stopped at one of the three restaurants called La Pasadita that lie on a one-block stretch of Ashland just south of Division. I’ve never understood why the same restaurant has three branches on the same block, but I have long understood that it is (they are?) my favorite burrito place(s) in Chicago. The burrito tasted just like I remembered it, that is, rich and spicy and delicious, with plenty of cilantro.

The observations worth mentioning number two so far. The first concerns the diner breakfast my sister and brother and I enjoyed yesterday morning at the Olde North Pancake House. The American diner ritual—a ritual with which I have a long and intimate acquaintance, dating back to the days in high school when I sometimes hit Denny’s with my friends twice a day, when I knew every diner within a fifteen-mile radius of my house and considered myself a connoisseur of the institution, able to recognize subtleties in the brownness of the decor, the bitterness of the coffee, or the “warm ya up, hon?” of the waitresses that escaped most casual observers—was strangely surreal because of my familiarity with it, combined with how different the Czech restaurant ritual is, both in itself and due to our limited command of the Czech language. C. and I managed to learn restaurant Czech pretty well, to the point where we could usually communicate our wishes to waiters and waitresses without confusion or miscommunication. Occasionally, we could even ask for certain basic substitutions (such as “without ham, please”). But almost all of our restaurant interactions consisted of repeating memorized phrases in various combinations; we were never able to carry on even the most basic conversation with the waitress. We sometimes take for granted being able to crack a joke or make friendly conversation with the people whose jobs bring them into contact with us on a daily basis. Being unable to stray at all from naming the desired item on the menu and replying to basic questions about our wishes caused us both some sadness.

So it was that I recalled the details of the American restaurant ritual as our meal progressed: The ease with which I could communicate with the waitress in English, her frequent visits to refill my weak diner coffee as often as, or perhaps even more often than I wished, the strangely familiar but exotic practice of leaving the tip on the table. It all came back to me like an old friend who I hadn’t seen since childhood but with whom I immediately felt at ease, the years since our last meeting melting away into the unaffected and uninhibited conversation that only lifelong friends can enjoy; like an old friend who, nonetheless, has met the intervening years in a surprising and just slightly unflattering way. He is so familiar, and I know before even opening my mouth what his response will be to certain questions, the way his mouth will turn down slightly and tense at the corners when he tries to keep a straight face at one of my jokes. But his skin is so pale—was it always this way?—and he has put on so much weight and carries himself with such an ingratiating hunch—has he always been so hunched? or is this new?

The second observation is the ease with which my fellow travellers chatted with each other while we waited at Gate A2 at Midway or, after landing in Denver, while we waited in line at the customer service desk to reschedule our outbound flights, or while we waited in line at Burger King for a late night meal to hold us over until breakfast. I’ve mentioned the notion of the fractured society that Mike talked about in relation to Czech society in the aftermath of communism. Such casual openness with strangers is almost completely absent.

I’ve never been one to make conversation with people in line at the grocery store or while waiting to cross the street, casually while passing in a park, or in any similar circumstance, but I am aware that many people do so and even enjoy it. As a result of my own reticence, I think it was particularly easy for me to adapt to the Czech methods of social interactions, which is simply not to interact with people you don’t know. Czechs waiting for trams and buses rarely, if ever, chat to pass the time. Czechs in elevators rarely say a word during the whole ride (though, in an odd sort of retroactive politeness they frequently bid each other na shledanou [good-bye] as they disembark at their respective floors after having not acknowledged each other’s presence for the whole of the trip). These Americans around me, on the other hand, were constantly engaging one another, whether to complain about the unapologetic ticket agent, to ask for clarification about their new connections, to ask why the wireless network in the airport seems not to exist despite numerous signs indicating its usefulness. How much simpler strange situations must be when you can simply ask the people around you for a bit of help. Yet how foreign it all is: Americans will just start talking to each other with little provocation! Imagine how strange they must seem.

In a bus heading up the Croatian coast on the narrow looping highway from Dubrovnik to Split, the Croatian equivalent to California’s Highway 1, C., M., and I are settling in for our five-hour ride. I’m on the left side of the bus, so I have a beautiful view of the steep hillsides stretching down to the coast, the mountainous islands jutting up out of the water, and the deep blue Adriatic stretching out to the horizon.

We took this trip in precisely the opposite order we should have. Upon arrival at the airport, we hopped onto a waiting bus to Split, caught a ferry immediately to Jelsa, a port town on the first island we wanted to see, and then a bus to a more remote, smaller, and less visited town. Thus, within a few hours of landing, we were at our most remote location, and we slowly worked our way to more populated, more touristy, and less authentic places as the days passed. Already in Dubrovnik I found myself pining for the idyllic Mediterranean meadows and unpopulated coastlines of the islands, as though I’d been booted from paradise into the harsh glare from the unflattering light of the temporal world. There would be no wine, olive, and cheese picnics on the rocky beaches of Dubrovnik.

Europeans seem to have known about Croatia for a long time. Even under communism, the former Yugoslavian coast thrived on tourism. After all, we only came here because so many Czechs recommended it as a holiday destination. We did, in fact, overhear many Czechs in all the nooks and crannies we visited. But most Americans seem not to have heard of this place. Perhaps, as I used to before I came here, they hear the name of the country and think, “Aren’t they having a war there?” But no. The war in Croatia ended eight years ago. Even Dubrovnik, which was 70% bombed out, has been almost completely repaired. Since Croatia’s economy depends heavily on tourism, the government started repairing anything even remotely interesting to tourists before the war was even over. (They cleaned up most of the minefields too.) Countless travel memoirs have been written about southern France, Italy, and all sorts of better known Mediterranean destinations, but not much has appeared about Croatia, which is their equal is almost every way save crowds.

Dubrovnik is distinctive because of the completely intact city wall that surrounds it. All the other walled cities of Europe seem to have demolished their walls at some point. Perhaps they’re too expensive to maintain. Perhaps, as Dubrovnik illustrates, walls have been obsolete as a protective measure since the invention of the airplane. Many towns will make a big deal about the small piece of the town wall still standing here or there near a river or built into the side of a building. Tour guides will drag groups of tourists with sun-reddened necks and sunglasses past the non-descript patchwork structures, pointing out the ten stones at the bottom that date from the thirteenth century. But in Dubrovnik, the entire wall—with all its gates, towers, and ramparts—is still standing. It lends a very medieval feel to the whole place.

The hostel industry has had trouble finding its niche here because of all the grandmothers and their sobes—private rooms—which they rent to tourists for a fair sum. They line up at the ferry landings and bus stations holding up signs that read, in five or six languages, “rooms for rent.” It’s actually a funny sight. While some are younger women and others are men, the majority are gray-haired grandmothers loudly hawking their spare rooms for $15 a night, forceful women who haggle loudly and refuse to listen when you say “no.”

Our sobe was on the side of the cliff that overlooks Dubrovnik; 371 steps up the side of the hill, to be specific. I know because I counted them. The cliff has a couple of roads that cut switchbacks up the cliff face, but most of the houses are only accessible by stairs—rough-hewn and uneven sets of stairs set at random angles. The stairs are given street names, and the houses that adjoin the stairs have addresses that ascend as the stairs ascend. The word for one of these staircase roads, put, is the same as is used for “journey,” and the daily march up the narrow stairs to our sobe was precisely that.

In Korčula, the church bells chime the quarter hours all through the night. This is not helpful when one is unable to sleep. But tonight, other things are conspiring to keep me awake as well. The heat is one. Although I am writing this by candlelight on a small balcony at the back of the building in the cool night air (relative to the daytime temperatures, tonight’s breezeless seventy-two degrees is blissfully cool), in the bedroom I was sweating even with the sheet thrown off. Another is the painful itching from the sunburn I acquired on our first day in Stari Grad. Right now, I’m shirtless and covered in more baby powder than an unclever kid trying to be a Halloween ghoul. It seems to help the itching. The sky is beginning to lighten at the horizon, so I think I’ll have to give up on getting more than the two hours of sleep that I’ve already had tonight.

We’re staying in a third-floor bedroom in a house across the street from the bay and about 150 meters from the old town. Korčula claims to be the birthplace of Marco Polo, though of course no one knows for sure. It’s the main town on an island that has alternatively been inhabited by Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, and Croats throughout its long history. Everything is made of limestone—the streets, the buildings, everything—and is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Here, in Croatia, it seems most appropriate to clarify one lingering Czech question. When we were in Prague a few days ago, both my brother and Marcel had to endure C. and I bitching incessantly about the glut of stupid tourists being stupid and buying stupid things, posing stupidly in front of the stupidest, most uninteresting statues merely because they’re older than America, for example. I know we must have across as entirely more-expat-than-thou, but that wasn’t really the intent. It’s taken me a couple of days to put my finger on why I hate Prague, and I think I’m closer to being able to spell it out. Being a stupid tourist in Croatia has given me the necessary contrast.

Don’t get me wrong—architecturally, artistically, historically, Prague is an unparalleled place. It’s pretty much the only city in Europe that wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War. As a result, visiting the city center is a trip to another era, a living monument to a part of history that, if it exists elsewhere, has most likely been reconstructed from blueprints. But now, 15 years after the revolution in 1989, Prague is a whore, seductively displaying her wares to people who travel from all corners of the Earth to engage in this lurid fantasy. They tell Prague what they want her to be and she becomes it.

It’s not a real city anymore. The center is filled almost exclusively with shops that cater to tourists. A thousand storefronts offer you KGB tee-shirts, shot glasses, bumper stickers, shoddy mass-market folk art knockoffs, nondescript and non-specific stuff that looks vaguely Slavic. The restaurants offer you pizza or non-specific Italian or French food, and even when you are able to find something that purports to be authentic Czech food, it never includes dumplings. They don’t even appear on the menu, presumably because foreigners don’t like them. Having spent a full year in Brno, a town where few tourists have reason to go, I feel like I’ve had a decent introduction to the country and the people. I have a rough idea, albeit from my perspective as an outsider and a note-taker, of what it’s like to be Czech. Well, Moravian, more specifically, since they still differentiate; since Prague is in Bohemia, I have to make some allowances for my naivety.

One small example: For reasons I’ve been unable to determine, Czech waking hours are out of phase with the rest of the world. Many businesses there open at seven in the morning and, as a result, many people are finished with their day’s work by two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Because they are able to shop on the way home, most shops close by five or six in the evening at the latest. A special subspecies of convenience store exists for people who need to buy goods until eight in the evening. After eight, only the pubs are open, and even they close at ten or eleven o’clock, because people need to get home in time to wake up at five-thirty or six to start it all over again. The whole country are disciples of Ben Franklin’s early-to-bed-early-to-rise dictum, though I hear that it actually originated with the Austrian Emperor Rudolph II.

Prague, on the other hand, keeps party hours. Walking through the desolate and unpopulated old town at eight-thirty in the morning to meet my friend Marcel for the first time in eight years, I couldn’t figure out where all the people were. In Brno, the morning bustle would have been long over, the shops would have been open, and people would have been well into their day. In Prague, all the storefront security gates were drawn shut, exposing the work of night graffitists. Scattered early-morning dog walkers were the only other people on the streets beside me and the crews of orange-vested men and women sweeping up the debris and mopping up the puke of the foreign revelers who had been up late into the night, who had been, in fact, the only people out. The only Czechs to be found at the late-night dives amid the Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, and Everclear blaring from the loud bars the previous night were the waitresses and bartenders.

The city has been stolen from the people who live there and has been turned into a generic, blandly international and culturally non-descript place. It is no longer Czech. I’m not even talking about the 40,000 Americans who live there, running the branch offices of international companies or wishing they could have been in Paris in the twenties. Many of the latter are unfortunate enough to have beenduped into thinking that one actually has to go to Bohemia to live that well-hyped bohemian lifestyle they’ve heard so much about. But the tourists don’t deserve all the blame. Every step of the way, Prague is right there, selling them what they want to buy, pretending to be something it’s not (or didn’t use to be). Hence the whore analogy. The tacit don’t-ask-don’t-tell deception barely conceals the real nature of the transaction. More than anything else, though, among all the wonderful experiences I had in the Czech Republic, I’m simply disappointed that the nasty summer tourist glut in Prague is one of my last memories of the place.

Well, the horseflies and mosquitoes are now taking advantage of the early morning light to annoy as many people as possible, including me, before the day’s heat oppresses them into a standstill. The swallows are flying circles overhead. It’s time to walk down and check the ferry times to Mljet island, today’s destination, half of which has been designated national forest, with a pair of lakes up in the mountains surrounded by meadows. The half moon is still visible. A seagull swoons and dives overhead. I kill a mosquito on my calf. I apply more baby powder.

We’re on the island of Hvar, in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. Up the hill from the town of Stari Grad, where we’re staying in a small bungalow at a campground five minutes by foot from the waterfront, we hiked for an hour in the late-morning ninety-degree heat to a tiny village called Rudine. We passed olive groves and small vineyards bordered by piles of small limestone blocks that passed for walls. Fennel, rosemary, and laurel trees grew wild. The wind blowing across the dry scrubby hillsides smelled like God’s spice cupboard. Fig, orange, and pomegranate trees sprouted up everywhere. Enormous spiders lurked at the centers of webs whose support fibers stretched literally fifteen feet at times. We surprised praying mantises a couple of times. The sound of cicadas, near and far, filled the hot wind.

Thirsty from not having saved any of the water we’d packed when we set off, we followed hand-painted signs directing us to the Mini Market Žukova. We arrived to discover some umbrellas and a small white collapsable hut erected in a driveway. When we rang the bell, a woman came running from playing with some toddlers in the back yard. She offered us fresh produce, ice cream, and drinks from a cooler in the hut. When we asked for water without gas, she apologized, but offered to run into her house and fill a bottle with tap water for us, free of charge. We accepted.

Her English was barely passable. She knew enough at least to run her fruit and ice cream stand. When she heard us speaking in English to each other, she asked us where we were from. We answered. She asked, “Why here?” I answered, “Because it’s beautiful.” She made a gesture as if to dismiss the flattery. I tried to clarify. “We lived for a year in the Czech Republic, and everyone there told us that Croatia is paradise. We decided to come and see it for ourselves.” She blushed a bit before replying, “I am so pride.” We knew what she meant.

After the three of us downed the liter of water in a gulp, we found a trail heading back down the hillside to the sea, and after a few minutes we appeared at the mouth of a small cove lined with rocky outcroppings. Three or four sailboats rocked gently in the waves. Five or six families were all we could see in scattered encampments around the cove.

After a heavy application of Nubian brand sun block (SPF 6, our first mistake), we dove into the spectacularly clear blue water. A few minutes later, after one of my freshly-purchased water shoes had slipped off, I watched it floating in gentle circles downward. It was still clearly visible 40 or 50 feet down. I cannot describe the perfectly clean and clear phosphorescent turquoise water adequately. You’ll have to look at photos when I post them. Suffice it to say, this was the most beautiful start I could imagine to our twelve-day Croatian adventure.

We alternated for two or three hours between lazily wading in the cove and sunning ourselves on the rocks until we’d roasted ourselves to a light pink color. Not wanting to endanger our future beach plans, we decided it was high time to remove ourselves from the sun. We hiked back up the hillside, and our increasingly-insistent hunger suggested we look for someplace to buy lunch. We were unable to find anything resembling a downtown among the clusters of low and far-flung stone houses in the village. Eventually, we gave up and returned to the Mini Market Žukova. We asked the woman if the village had a restaurant. She shook her head. Then her face lit up and she rushed out from behind her cart, gesturing and excitedly bubbling in broken English.

“I’m asking. There is woman. I come with you.”

“Pardon?” we asked.

She tried to clarify. “There is woman in village. She is our superwoman. I’m asking. I come with you.”

“We don’t understand.”

“I’m asking. Woman. She cook sometimes.”

We began to understand that a woman in the village sometimes cooked for guests, for some sort of fee, we supposed, and that our guide was going to lead us to her house. Intrigued, we followed the fruit stand woman (whose name we never got) around the corner to a house where two young men were repairing the plaster under a large picture window. Two-foot-high figurines of the seven dwarves, hand-painted with house paint, were evenly spaced along the flat roof and half-height walls that surrounded a tiny courtyard in front of the house. A middle-aged blonde woman in a red and white sundress was overseeing the men. The woman who brought us fired off a couple of questions. The blonde woman shot back some answers. One of the young men looked up from his plasterwork to translate. “We have sausage, and some kind of fish. Grilled. Maybe some potato salad or something. Beer or juice. You want?”

Hungry, tired, and thirsty, our skin continuing to grow pinker, we accepted her offer to sit at a picnic table in the shade under a vine-covered trellis. She brought us beer, two kinds of sausage, round loaves of home-made bread, and two plates of grilled vegetables. We downed the beers at once and asked for seconds. She agreed, but then we saw her walk straight away from the table, down the driveway, and down in the street in the direction of the Mini Market Žukova. She returned a few minutes later with three cold bottles in hand. She kept bringing plates of bread and grilled food until we asked her, please, to stop. The Žukova woman returned a while later and asked if we needed a ride back to Stari Grad. She’d be taking her cousin to the ferry port in an hour, she said, and we were welcome to ride along. We accepted.

“Why would you come to this paltry little village on an island off the coast of nowhere special, you silly Americans?” is what she’d wanted to ask as she’d handed us the bottle of tap water, but all she’d been able to formulate in English was “Why here?” I couldn’t really tell her that the beauty of the hillsides and ocean, the Mediterranean climate and terrain so commonplace and uninteresting to her, was an endlessly exotic fairy tale to me, and that being offered a meal at her friend’s one-table ad hoc bed and breakfast was the perfect end to the perfect day. An hour later, we thanked our hostess and paid the reasonable price she wrote on a napkin. The Žukova woman pulled up with her Bosnian cousin in the front seat. The conversation proceeded between her and C. in German, since her German was far better than her English. We asked her how she enjoyed living in Croatia. The Bosnian woman spoke no English or German and remained silent, but the Žukova woman replied that everything was fine. The war had been over for eight years already, and was history. She asked us if we knew that there were many American soldiers (thousands in fact) still stationed there. We hadn’t known. She said that there was no more fighting anymore, that the Americans were only there to keep the peace, but that their job was done and they probably should have gone home two or three years ago. We could easily imagine that to be true.

When we finally got back to our bungalow and changed our clothes, we discovered that we’d long overstayed our window of safety in the sun. M. and I are redder than raw salmon, and we have crisp white outlines where our swimming suit tags had escaped to the exterior of our suits. C., due to more diligent sunscreen application, escaped mostly unscathed. We’ve all been applying lotion to each other for most of the evening, but I fear the worst: We may have to avoid the sun for the next few days. There are old renaissance chateaux to visit, from when the Venetians ruled the area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and other sights to see from the Habsburg days. We could even track down some old Roman ruins or some fortresses that staved off invading Turks a time or two. But that’s not the point. I’m not particularly interested, at this point in my life, in ancient Croatian history and, honestly, I’m sort of castled-out after the castle bonanza at the end of our Czech adventure. I came for two weeks of beach, swimming, and sun, and my heart will drop if I have to hide in my bungalow in the ninety-degree heat all week. I suppose it serves me right for my solar overconfidence.

I’m posting this from the gleaming stone lobby of Andel’s Hotel in Prague, a hyper-modern ultra-hip launch pad for the international business jet set. How, you might ask, did I—a sweaty, unwashed backpacker with a stinky pair of sandals and a horrible watch-tan—manage to secure accomodations here among the elite? Well, my brother helped. He left this morning in a taxi for the airport, and C., her sister, and I are left in the hotel until noon trying to see how many free services we can take advantage of before we leave. I’ve already enjoyed the luscious breakfast spread, but have yet to visit the solarium, sauna, or steam room. My complimentary copy of FT (The Financial Times, if you have to ask) is waiting for me on top of the DVD player in my room, as are unlimited cappuccinos in the fifth floor lounge.

Yesterday, I was reunited with my old friend Marcel, who is working on his PhD in English. He’s in Prague teaching at a summer institute. We lived together in Champaign, Illinois in 1993 when we were both students at the University of Illinois. It’s been at least eight years since I’ve seen him, though e-mail contact has occasionally happened. It was a beautiful reunion, and we plan to wander the parks and winding streets this afternoon, though we might instead choose to sit in a cafe and down espressos. C. and I are touristed out. Too many sights, too many castle tours, too many “KGB: Still Watching You” and “Praha Drinking Team” tee shirts.

Posting has been intermittent, or perhaps sporadic, and will only become more so. We leave for the Croatian coast tomorrow morning, and I suspect that internet cafes will not be quite as common there. Nor will want to take time out of our heavy beach schedule. I’ve got to even out this farmer’s tan I’ve acquired this week. The back of my neck is ten shades darker than the band under my watch. I’m not even going to talk about my sandal tan.

In 1622, four years after the battle of White Mountain sparked the Thirty Years War, Austrian troops burned down the tiny farming village of Slavošovice while trying to suppress the rebellion in Bohemia. The Herda family, who had lived is Slavošovice for some unknown number of generations prior to 1622 but were displaced by the burning and the years of war, returned home when the village was rebuilt. Since the village was most likely rebuilt in a slightly different location using the stones from the original houses, it is difficult to determine the original location precisely. The Herdas moved into a small house, Slavošovice 14, and farmed the land there throughout the remaining years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the early 1800s, until some great-great-great-grand-descendent of the man and woman who first returned to the newly rebuilt village chose to migrate to a town called Lišov, about 6 kilometers away.

After spending a couple of days in Vienna with my brother, who is visiting from the US, the three of us took a train to southern Bohemia to visit our ancestral homeland. My brother is an avid amateur genealogist and has for the past two or three years been employing a professional Czech genealogical researcher named Jaroslav to visit the Czech archives in South Bohemia to find the birth, marriage, death, and land ownership records that have helped us to sweep a bit of our lineage free from the accumulated dust of history. Jaroslav met us when we arrived in Lišov in our rental car and gave us a guided tour of certain select parts of South Bohemia. He led us through the churchyard graves in Lišov and pointed out our ancestors' headstones. He took us past the house where they lived for some number of generations after leaving Slavošovice. He knocked on one door in town in order to introduce us to Mr. Kovařík, an 82-year-old man with one leg shaped like a waning crescent moon who shares with us the common ancestors who lived in the house at Slavošovice 14. Mr. Kovařík showed us some pictures of his house when it was still a farmhouse, and he shared the old yellow documents that dispersed the possessions of some unknown Herda or another who had died without a will. He then pulled from his cupboard a lovely State of Minnesota baseball hat, obviously unworn, the brim still fresh, flat and rigid, which had been given to him by a member of the Dale Pexa band when they visited Lišov from New Prague, Minnesota (pop. approx. 5100) two years ago. He donned the hat with a mighty and sparsely-toothed grin. "Just like an American," he proclaimed.

The next stop, we were told, would be the small castle that used to protect the villages near Slavošovice before the Thirty Years War. It turned out to be a small two-story stone building, about twenty feet on a side, that the family currently living in the adjoining house used as a storage shed. When we pulled up in our rental car, a young blonde girl, maybe nine years old, stood at the gate with a curious stare. Jaroslav jumped out of the car to introduce himself and us. "Hello, ladies," he called out to the middle-aged women who were enjoying their afternoon tea in the courtyard, one of whom had obviously stopped by while walking with her stroller and a couple of kids of walking age. "I have brought some American tourists to see the castle." We took some pictures, trying not to step on all the chickens in the yard, and stepped inside the castle for a moment to see the boxes and old garden tools kept inside. One of the women, who had stepped into the house, returned with an old laminated pencil sketch of the castle as it had looked a few hundred years ago, namely, exactly the same but without their house attached. A young boy, maybe ten, followed her out wearing only his underwear.

Jaroslav expressed our many thanks, and we returned to the car. Some of the children followed to watch us drive away. We sped on to the next stop, the ornate neogothic crypt that houses the remains of the members of the Schwarzenberg dynasty who ruled the area for hundreds of years and owned several South Bohemian castles and chateaux right up until the last descendant fled the country in 1947.

C. and I usually try to be the kind of travelers who observe silently from the sidelines as inconspicuously as our huge backpacks will allow, but Jaroslav had volunteered to be our tour guide In fact, he hadn't really given us much choice, and since we had so many remote places to visit in such a short span of time, the renting of the car made sense. Nonetheless, pulling up in our shining silver Peugot, interrupting tea-time with the chickens, snapping some digital photos and disappearing in a cloud of gravel dust—all at Jaroslav's arranging—had made us look like the worst kind of culture consumers, swooping down into these villagers' lives for all of ten minutes, to documents in our scrapbooks the quaintness that constitutes their everyday lives before we moved on to the next hurried item on our itinerary.

That next item was the house at Slavošovice 14, where for centuries my Czech ancestors lived life as peasants on lands owned alternately by various barons, monasteries, and princes, ancestors whose names are known now only because of the hours Jaroslav has spent deducing the salient details of their lives from the remnant bureaucratic paperwork of the lost centuries between us. We didn't knock on this door, because Jaroslav has tried before to gather information from the people who now live there. They are not interested in genealogy and do not like foreigners. While taking a couple of token digital pictures of the house, I tried to imagine generations of Herdas being born, growing up, choosing a husband or wife from the eight or ten other teens in the village, bearing children, hoping for a male child so the land would stay in the family, dying and being buried in the same church yard, for hundreds of years on end. The oldest son in each family, Jaroslav tells us, didn't have to worry about choosing a wife, as he was usually constrained to wed the daughter of the neighboring farmer, in order for the families to be able to merge their farming rights—not the ownership of the land, because that belonged to the prince, but merely the right to farm a piece of it. I tried to imagine all these scenes played out a dozen times or more over a dozen lifetimes or more in that house on that piece of land, and the similar scenes played out on every other farm for hundreds of miles around, but I just couldn't manage. It's just too far away.

While packing up the last of my things, after living for almost exactly twelve months in the Czech Republic with very little else in the way of material possessions to speak of (though of course the house in which we lived was furnished) I note for posterity the sum total of my possessions:

I should admit that there are several boxes of my possessions—including but not limited to hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and LPs; two sets of speakers; various digital and analog entertainment devices (though no TV); boxes of dishes, including Pfalzgraff service for eight which is rendered for all intents and purposes unuseable by C.’s violent reaction to the sound of silverware on it; a Juiceman Junior electric juicer; a Braun coffee pot that brews coffee directly into a thermos, which effortlessly keeps it hot for over eight hours; hundreds more books; back issues of various magazines; gardening implements; furniture; a Trek bicycle; a car stereo, amplifier, and speakers; more clothes; and various other things I can’t even remember anymore—awaiting me in an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is clear to see that I am hardly an ascetic. Nonetheless, may I humbly recommend purging your life of possessions periodically, whether it be accidentally or deliberately, as a satisfying way to remind yourself of how disposable most things really are?

On that note, I hereby sign off for a while. C. and I will be traveling with my brother through Vienna, České Budejovice, Český Krumlov, Prague, Kutna Hora, and various of our ancestral Czech villages for the next 10 days, after which I will be meeting in Prague a very old and dear friend of mine who I haven’t seen in 10 years, and then C. and I will be flying to the Mediterranean coast in Croatia with her sister for 12 days. (I’m not the kind of guy who very often jets down to the coast for some R&R, so this part is actually fairly exotic and exciting for me.) Subsequently, I will fly to the Chicago area to visit my family for three days, then fly to Santa Fe for a week to visit some friends, grab the previously mentioned boxes of crap, throw them into a rental van, and drive them across the country to my new home to start my new job in an undisclosed location on the east coast. Hold all my calls. I will try to post some interesting travel stories in this forum, or I might just unplug and relax in a completely non-digital fashion. There’s no telling, really. I’m like the wind.

That’s it. Time’s up. During the next couple of days I will pack. I will run last-minute errands. I will sell things. I will pick out real Czech souvenirs for folks back home. We’ve already said goodbye to everyone but the closest of our friends. Lucie and I had a lovely bike ride to the lake just north of Brno this afternoon. I didn’t have a crown on me when we left, so she bought me a beer and a fried cheese sandwich at the lakeside beer garden. It was a beautiful and warm sunny day. The wind was calm. The fish were biting at bugs on the surface of the water. People were not wearing shoes.

I will miss fried cheese sandwiches. When C. first visited Prague in 2001, she later told stories of the “heart-attack special.” When I first visited Prague a month or so later, I discovered the deliciousness of which she spoke. It’s a specialty, and at some pubs it’s the only vegetarian option on the menu. It consists of a loaf of cheese which is deep-fried in oil (because cheese is not fatty enough by itself) and served on a roll with tartar sauce, which as far as I can tell is basically a big pile of mayonnaise with pickle relish mixed in. My fried cheese sandwich today also came with french fries, which I ate with a fork, because that’s what you do here, and I don’t like to be stared at while I eat.

When I say that fried cheese is sometimes the only vegetarian option, I actually mean that it’s the only real vegetarian option. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Often there are several items listed in the vegetarian section of the menu, but many of them include ham. From a certain point of view, you are correct when you object that ham is not vegetarian. But try not to think inside the box all the time. Ham can also be a condiment. If you were to beckon to the waitress and inform her that your vegetarian dish had ham in it, she would look at you with a slightly pitying expression. “Oh honey, it’s just a little ham.”

Non-vegetarian dishes, on the other hand, can consist of meat, stuffed with meat, with a side of meat. Maybe a little meat on top for a garnish. One of my favorites is chicken stuffed with ham and leeks with cheese and a slice of ham on top, but I also like dumplings stuffed with ham and creamy sauerkraut. Our friend Petr, the one who saved us from the landlady, likes to make giant trays of hors d’oeuvres when the four of us (Anne, Petr, C., and I) are hanging out. We’re talking about square feet of little sausages and cheeseballs neatly arrayed, accompanied by slices of bread smothered with cream cheese and blue cheese with slices of raw onion on top, and Olomoucký Sýr (which is a kind of stinkier-than-thou cheese whose legal status is in limbo given certain food safety concerns on the part of the EU). I don’t know if feet are involved in its manufacture, but it smells like they might be. Nonetheless, fry up a slab and slap it on some bread with some chunks of raw onion, and you’re on a rocketship straight to heaven. (I should be fair: Only pub food is so notoriously fatty and heavy, but most Czechs don’t eat out very often. At home, they also eat very good bread and a lot of vegetables with their meat and cheese.)

When you are walking down the street and you notice other guys—the kind who don’t already have beautiful girlfriends—watching the 6'2" blonde women with impeccably-toned everything from head to toe walk by, you expect that those guys are probably trying to figure out exactly what those women are doing to keep from showing the effects of the exclusively meat-and-cheese-based diet. It must be hard for those guys, because, well, it’s not just an occasional 6'2" blonde woman who walks by. It’s like every third woman is over six feet tall, and even if she’s not blonde, she has jet black hair and sky-blue eyes, or perhaps the ubiquitous Eurgundy dye and has applied eyeliner inspired by lioness eyes; but the woman’s particular coloring at some point becomes irrelevant for those guys, who in general look far less like a nation of supermodels than their better halves do. It must be somewhat of a curse, I think, to be a woman from this Slavic gene pool, because there are very few alternatives on the menu of prominent noses and foreheads and eyes ever-too-slightly close together. Need I mention the healthy, healthy selection of beer guts in every size and shape?

This is not a nation of anorexic women. It’s a nation of people who don’t own cars. In fact, many of the ones who do own cars now are starting to look a little, well, American. Like me. And I don’t even own a car. I sold my last car for $25, and I figure I got a pretty good deal for it, considering the shape it was in. You should have seen it. It was in worse shape than my van, which I let get towed away because it was cheaper than paying someone to tow it away. I miss my van, and the whole van lifestyle. It used to be that I knew it was time to throw some stuff out when I had more stuff than would fit in the van. One is not as portable as one would like when one owns more than fits in the vehicle that takes one to the next place. Throw all your stuff in your van, fill up your 44 oz. trucker mug with Amoco coffee, and the world is yours for the taking.

Have I mentioned what a fan I am of the Czech menu of disabilities? You’ve heard of dyslexia, I’m sure. I have met a couple of people who suffer from it, and it seems real enough. Though I don’t claim to understand it’s mechanisms, I can easily believe that such a disorder exists. I can even imagine how awful it must be to have the disorder called dysgraphia, which is a physiological or neurogical inability to write properly. I imagine it must be some sort of noise in the feedback loop between brain and hand. Fine so far. But then we have dysorthographia which, if you parse it, could only be a medical diagnosis for people with bad penmanship. And then there’s dyscalculia, for people who have difficulty in math. I actually do believe in dyscalculia: If dyslexics can somehow reverse the letters in a word, as strange as it sounds to someone who is unafflicted, why should it not be possible for others to reverse the digits in a number? Of course, discalculia need not only refer to such a specific condition; I can imagine the term as a blanket diagnosis that refers to people, some of whom I’ve met personally, who have inordinate difficulty with mathematical reasoning. If dyscalculia is simply a label applied to people who are medically sensitive to math, however, I remain skeptical.

What surprises me is the Google ratio for these terms:

In the country where the rigorous study of penmanship begins at age 6, it is not surprising that dysorthographia is almost as commonly mentioned as dyslexia. Of course, I do not claim to have presented an airtight case proving anything except my own surplus of free time, but it is an interesting discovery nonetheless. Thanks, by the way, to Larry and Sergey, who apparently are still keepin’ it real.

I have been orally examining my students all week long.

I’m pretty sure that phrase used to sound naughty to me, but in recent weeks it has come to sound perfectly natural. In fact, it is the most common way in our department to refer to the administration of oral exams. I haven’t yet figured out whether the phrase is proper in British English or if it is a Czechism but, either way, I’ve heard it so often that it no longer sounds strange and only occasionally makes me snicker.

My ability to use my own language has really suffered during the year I’ve lived abroad. My colleagues are for the most part phenomenally fluent, and several speak with impeccable British RP accents, to the point where I cannot tell they are not British by birth except when they switch into the z-zh-s-sh-v-k-rich consonant-fest they call their mother tongue. My students, however, are another matter. Except for C., almost everyone who speaks my native language to me during the course of an average day butchers it to some degree or another. Since language is merely convention, I sometimes find it necessary to butcher it in return to make myself understood. Even when such extreme steps are not necessary, though, I still find that strange phrases have crept into my vocabulary. Most of these are British phrases, which are much more common here than American ones. For instance, I rarely say “lorry‚” instead of “truck,” but it has happened. I’ve even talked about the high petrol prices these days. I have completely switched over to talking about my colleagues, never my co-workers, and I don’t even blink when someone mentions stopping at the store for some nappies (those are diapers in britsky, in case you didn’t know). I don’t even mind anymore when I hear someone say that X is different to Y (this is actually the preferred preposition in British grammar, believe it or not). And those are just the British ones. Czechisms are wrong in any language, yet it no longer sounds wrong to me when someone asks “Can I have a question?” I have grown perfectly happy with people’s discussions of the best way how to do something or another, and anymore I cannot honestly tell you whether it is more correct to say “I don’t usually wear plaid” or “I usually don’t wear plaid.” If you can’t tell the difference, you’re perfectly normal, but consider a similar case (“I probably won’t call her” vs. “I won’t probably call her”): Despite your ignorant bliss, there are rules for these things, which foreign learners of the language you can so glibly mumble even in your sleep have to memorize. The end result? My language has been contaminated, and I fear it will never be pure again.

As far as the orals are concerned, everyone has been doing pretty well for most of the week, although I was offered a direct contrast to what I’ve heard referred to in America as “grade inflation.” My experience in school tells me that an A is to be strived for, a B is acceptable but reveals that you never did the homework, and to receive a C is practically as embarrassing as failure. I won’t even mention the D or the F, because high school weeded out the people who get grades like that; they’re happily spreading tar on some highway these days. We are so intent on making everyone feel special that giving a poor grade hurts us as much as the student. We don’t want to label anyone a failure out of fear that it will hurt his self-esteem, so we give him a C at least for trying, even if he didn’t. I noticed this tendency in myself last week as my students waltzed in pairwise for the round of orals that C. and I administered. We gave As to the good students and Bs to most of the rest, which left Cs for only the really poor ones. We gave nothing lower.

In the Souborná Zkouška (“Qualifying Exam”) committee I’m sitting on this week with three Czechs, however, the scale is noticeably different. There are no unique and delicate snowflakes here. Only the three or four exemplary students received As, a few very good students received Bs, and the bulk of the bell curve received Cs. My Czech colleagues were not afraid to hand out Ds, and their system even has an E to better specify exactly how sub-par some students really are.

The thing that surprised me was how the students took the news. I felt just a little embarrassed for the first student when the head of the committee revealed that she would receive a C, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was content to be average. The D students took it in stride; some even seemed relieved. The eyes of the select few, though, those shining diamonds among the coal-dark masses, lit up to hear that they’d been awarded the much-coveted A; it was as if Don Pardo was announcing that they’d won a BRAAAAND NOOOOO CAAAAR! or that a donor kidney had finally been found for their dying mother.

At one point today, the opinion of the committee was overwhelming and I was forced to fail a student for the first time ever. This girl, who has some sort of disability—perhaps cerebral palsy, though I can’t tell for sure—started sobbing when we called her back into the room to announce her failure. I genuinely felt bad for her, because she had applied herself quite diligently throughout the year and was actually one of the harder-working students I’d had. Her English pronunciation simply sucks, and the committee agreed that she should spend the summer working on it. We failed another girl shortly thereafter. She took it much more stoically than the first, but she still ran out of the room without a word as soon as she could.

I began to enjoy the strange feeling of power I felt surging in my veins. I hadn’t felt such a feeling of power over someone’s life since my mom made a late-night call to the house of a girl I saw briefly during the summer after my freshman year at U of I. I had driven into Chicago to hang out with her one night, and we stayed out until early in the morning. At some point, my mom became worried and called the girl’s house to see if I’d left. The girl’s parents were pretty old school and viewed that phone call as such a public humiliation that they grounded the poor girl for the rest of the summer. That might explain why we had only two dates (though a contributing role may also have been played by my failure to live up to the expectations about my personality engendered in her by the Joy Division tee-shirt I always wore back then). Regardless, in much the same way that poor Eva will curse our names all summer long as she practices softening her final consonants and eliding her word transitions, Jodie must have cursed my name every night she spent watching TV with her iron-fisted parents. This isn’t the kind of power that most people dream of, but it’s more than some people ever get. I have hardened my heart against the suffering of others, and the tears of my students no longer arouse my compassion. I look forward to failing more students tomorrow, just because I can. I am now drunk with power. Nothing can stop me.

Looking for housing in a country where you don't speak a word of the language is not easy. Early last July, when we first arrived in Brno and needed to find an apartment, we had no choice but to enlist the help of Petra, the English department secretary. After making a trip to the bulletin board downtown where landlords post available housing, she made some phone calls and arranged a couple of visits for us. She had to accompany us in order to translate. (Czech is not an easy language to learn. After a year of practicing, we can successfully make our wishes known to waitstaff and shop clerks, and not much more.) So we made a couple of appointments, and Petra took us around to see the places, talking to the owners for us. They would chat for a few minutes, laughing, agreeing, and nodding. Petra would ask a question, they would talk and laugh some more, and then she would turn to us and assume a hushed, official tone. “She says that utilities are included.”

At one place, a shabby little flat on the ground floor of a panelák, one of the countless prefab communist high-rise housing blocks that ring the city, Petra stood listening to and commenting on what must have been the realtor’s detailed description of every misstep her husband had ever taken before she finally kicked his ass to the curb, and then turned to us. “She prefers not to rent to foreigners.”

So we left that place and went to our last stop of the day, a place she warned us was “just a little out of town.” The owner, a woman in her mid-50s, met us at the door in a pink bikini bottom and a bra. She chatted on and on. She really liked to talk. She didn’t stop talking while she went around the corner to put on a shirt. She’s a very lonely woman, we figured, whose children never visit, who’s just dying for someone to talk to. She showed us to the apartment, a basement that had been converted into a little two-room furnished apartment. The far room was the bedroom, with two twin beds pushed together, a free-standing wardrobe, and a little china cabinet. The near one was the everything-else room: kitchen, dining room, guest bed, and shower. Kitchen, in this case, meant a veneered plywood counter atop some utility cabinets, a bathroom sink, and an electric hot plate. The refrigerator was an old 1950s model whose brand name was printed in Russian. It looked like a dorm fridge on steroids, but when we opened the door we could see that it would keep exactly one loaf of bread, and possibly an egg, cozy and cool.

But there were certain advantages to this place, we told each other. There was a huge backyard garden, and we rightly guessed that the pink-bikini-clad grandmother might share with us some of the rows and rows of tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, parsley, and carrots. We might even get to taste the plums, apples, and pears from time to time. We would have our own entrance, Petra said. The place was only about half an hour by bus from the university. It’s at the edge of a small village, with open green spaces and fields all around, much better in this respect than any place in town. That, and you didn’t have to walk all the way to the bathroom to take a shower. To top it off, this place was by far the cheapest of anything we'd hoped to see. We said thank you, and returned with Petra to the university.

We wanted to look at more apartments, knowing that between a room in some obviously crazy lady’s basement and a panelák, we had probably missed some of the other options. We felt bad, knowing that Petra had other work to do, and we didn’t want to take up all of her time. She was, after all, the English department secretary, not our tour guide and translator. C. and I talked about it on the bus on the way back to the university, and by the time we reached our stop, we had decided to take the out-of-town place. We made certain stipulations, however. We told Petra to tell the lady that we wanted a larger refrigerator. We also wanted an oven but we knew that, since there was no gas hookup or a place to put one, we’d probably end up with a glorified toaster oven. This is exactly what we got. We managed to adapt. By December, we were roasting whole chickens (45 minutes at 6) and making pizza (12 minutes at 9, if you like a nice crispy crust). C. even managed to coax several loaves of wonderful bread (35 minutes at 7) from it.

As summer crested and then dwindled, the apartment turned out to be more than we'd hoped. A fifteen minute walk took us into the little red-roofed villages that surround Brno, up the narrow streets past roadside chapels and neighborhood pubs that don’t turn on their signs at night, or out among the wheat and alfalfa fields. The landlady did bring us produce, almost more than we could eat, and she told us to help ourselves to the contents her potato cellar. She kept pet rabbits in a row of cages in the back yard, and the picnic table and the swing strung from the walnut tree kept us entertained in the after-dinner hours during the last summer days before the school year started.

By early October, the evening temperatures had dipped into sweater weather. One evening, I was boiling some pasta water on the hot plate when a knock came on our door. C. was still at work. I could see through the barely frosted glass pane that it was the landlady standing on the other side. Whenever she knocked, I tried out a new word that I thought might indicate the equivalent of what I wanted to say in English, which was simply, “Come in.” Nothing worked, and I always had to walk the ten feet and personally open the door for her. I didn’t mind, but I always hoped to achieve the kind of informality that would allow her simply to enter at my request. After all, she didn’t care if I saw her in her bra, so I thought we might be able to forge a new, more casual relationship, while still strictly adhering to the formal personal pronoun, of course.

She scurried in before I had even removed my hand from the door handle. “May I?” she asked after she had already passed me and headed over to the window, which I now noticed was fogged up from the pasta water steam.

(I must ask for the reader’s patience as I introduce here a brief parenthetical remark about what I consider to be one of the greatest feats of household engineering since the dishwasher: The European Window. This is an ordinary-seeming arrangement of two adjacent glass-paned doors, one of which locks into the frame and to which the other in turn can be fastened. The genius lies in a sort of magical double-action hinge, which allows, when it is in one position, for the door (or optionally, doors) to swing open as one would expect. A turn of the handle, however, simultaneously disconnects the top hinge while sliding a bar into place through the base of the locking door and the bottom hinge of the other, so that it is now anchored at the bottom and opens inward a few degrees at the top, just enough to allow air to circulate without letting in, for instance, rain. If the reader has ever seen these windows before, he or she has surely marveled at them as I have.)

So the landlady was in our apartment, picking up the box of herbs that we kept on the window sill and taking it outside onto the back porch, which really is just a dark room with one small window and a door into the back yard. Then she returned and opened the window in the standard fully-open-door way, indicating to me in simple Czech words and gestures—water, pfff, pfff, [pantomimed billowing motion], water IN THE AIR (though here she substituted luft, the German word for air), pfff, do you understand? water, pfff, pfff, in this luft, it is not good—that there was too much steam in our apartment, and further, that opening the window in the slightly-open-at-the-top way would never be enough to disperse it. Thus the removal of the window box and the fully open window.

I must admit that my Czech is not very good, and that the only reason I could understand her was because she was expressing herself in ludicrously simple words and gestures like this. I was thankful that she had small grandchildren, and that she enjoyed talking at length to her pet bunnies, whose cages were right outside our bedroom window, in the tone of voice whose particular pitch only grandmothers can get away with. It was clear she was well practiced at getting the point across to ignorant creatures. It wasn’t until several minutes had gone by, and she was still rubbing the moisture off the window and showing me her wet finger—wah-ter, it is not good—that it dawned on me that the method and manner of her communication was not calculated to span the language barrier, but simply because it was clear to her that I’m a moron.

Having opened the windows, she stopped on her way out at the shower doors, which we always kept shut to hide the fact that we never cleaned it. She slid them open, which I would normally consider rude behavior in a guest, but then she said some things and gestured down to the floor of the shower, which I could only assume meant that she was worried about the accumulation of hair under the drain. Since I had almost flooded the everything-else room the previous morning, I had in fact recently cleaned all the slimy, stinking, soap-scum-greased hair out of the drain assembly, a process that had made me gag several times. Realizing that I had actually performed the maintenance in question—and actually afraid that she would begin doing it herself—I hurried into the shower, lifted the drain assembly, and proudly showed off my work. “Yes? Clean,” I managed.

“No, no, no,” she replied amidst some other sounds, one of which I’m pretty sure was “stupid.” She stooped down and ran her finger along the floor of the shower.

“Do you know how?” she asked. I had just learned the verb to know how in Czech class the day before, and proudly I showed off not only my understanding of that verb, but my newly acquired ability to put things in the future tense.

“I know how, but not yet it me do. Soon I will it do.” This was enough to satisfy her, I thought, because she nodded and scurried back upstairs. The curtains moved slightly in the breeze. I looked at the dead thyme branch that had fallen down behind where the window box had been, and at the faint rectangular outline in the dust on the wide sill. C. and I had noticed the wide window sills on the day we first came to look at the apartment, and had talked to each other about how nice it would be to have a little box of herbs in the everything-else room. We would put fresh herbs into the meals we cooked in our pot, we said, and it would be like home.

We had run out of cereal, so the next morning when we woke up before the slightest hint of daylight to finish our last minute preparations for the school day, I fried a couple of eggs for breakfast. We were seated at the table eating and talking, C. still in her pajamas, my hair plastered to the side of my head, my mouth still tasting like yesterday's potatoes, when I heard the knock at the door behind me. For a moment I considered running to the bedroom to brush my hair, and C. thought about running in to change into pants, but then we noticed the landlady's clear silhouette through the barely frosted glass, and we realized that she could see us just as well. I tried to consider it a pre-dawn opportunity to forge a new, more casual relationship. I walked over and opened the door.

“Good morning,” she said. “May I?” she asked, pushing past me and heading straight for the window, which I noticed was becoming fogged up. After the dissipation of the prior day's steam, I had returned the herb box to the window sill, so once again she carried it outside. She again opened the window, rubbing the glass with her finger, showing us both this time the moisture on her fingertip and explaining all over again that this—water, pfff, pfff, in the luft—was not good. She talked as if we had never discussed it previously, as if I were a poor animal, as stupid as a rabbit whose memories were lovingly erased each night by blissful dreams of alfalfa and hopping. She patiently explained to us that all this steam was nothing but tiny drops—very small pieces—of water in the air, that it collects on the windows when it is cold outside, that it is not good. We agreed with her, and demonstrated our understanding by pointing to the open window and saying, “Yes, we understand—open is good—no water—air.” She opened the shower doors for us on her way out.

Our interactions with the landlady centered around steam for a span of several days, and we began to dread hearing her footsteps in the hallway. Since she only visited us when the windows fogged up, the fear of moisture on the windows soon became our guiding principle. We began to check for the presence of moisture on the windows whenever we moved in the kitchen. We washed dishes in lukewarm water, removed the teapot from the hot plate well before boil. We developed carefully choreographed operations to minimize the moisture. When one of us showered, the other spearheaded the ventilation responsibilities, throwing open both sets of windows, even the one without a screen, as well as opening the door to the dark room with one small window. While one cooked, the other dutifully wiped away the translucent patches from the glass as soon as they appeared. We soon kept a dedicated window-wiping rag stationed near the bedroom window.

Opening the screenless window hurt the most. For a couple of weeks we had been plagued in the pre-dawn hours by mosquitoes in the bedroom. We couldn't figure out how they were getting in. After checking the screen for holes and gaps a few times, never finding anything, we noticed that the gaps under the doors were large enough for insects to slip through. Like dorm room bong aficionados, we began stuffing a towel into the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door at night, but still the mosquitoes came. Then we noticed a gap at the top of the bedroom door and introduced the nightly ritual of stuffing a dishrag into that, but still the mosquitoes came.

Even one was enough to ruin the night. We often stayed awake far too late into the night, planning the next day's lessons and working on the seemingly endless stream of paperwork for the school year. C. and I were both fresh out of college, first year teachers who had no training but who, by some fluke and a little luck, had found jobs teaching English at the same Czech university. As a result, we were learning the ins and outs of teaching university students by making daily mistakes and trying to learn from them before we had to face the same group again. This task took an embarrassing amount of time, which we tried to hide from our students and colleagues by attending to it at home. Not until the wee hours of the night would we finally climb into bed, stick out our thumbs, and immediately hitch a ride on that most seductive of highways, craving the five or six hour hour ride into the next morning. And then, but a couple of hours into the journey, the sound would appear, the buzz of such specific frequency that it is both directionless and omnipresent, rising in pitch and volume as it approaches until it fills the room, subsumes even the darkness, and then—silence. What can the victim do, freshly awake in the silence, eyes still closed, room still dark, but begin slapping blindly at his own exposed cheek and ear and neck in hopes of seeing the tiny telltale smear of blood black on his palm in the night?

Mosquitoes are smarter than you think. The self-slapping session rarely succeeded. The buzzing, the silence, a perfectly timed pause . . . and then the slapping. My drowsy mind would be convinced by the ensuing silence that it had succeeded in outwitting the insect, that it could drop its defenses and relax again into sleep. I'd brush my cheek a couple of times with the back of my hand. But invariably, soon after I had settled back into my pillow, that insistent buzzing would return.

After a few nights of this torture we adopted the experimental methodology of the most rigorous scientists. We had sealed off their only means of entering the room at night, so we began to suspect that they were coming in during the day and hiding, perhaps in the folds of our clothes in the closet, perhaps elsewhere. We began keeping the door to the bedroom and the door to the back porch closed at all times, turning the everything-else room into an effective airlock. We made rounds before we went to sleep, slapping the clothes in the closet, sneaking up and ripping the sheets off the bed, examining the lace curtains, peering at the walls from various angles to make sure the shadows in the stucco offered no asylum. We developed mental checklists of possible entry points, augmenting and decreasing the factors in our various hypotheses in hopes of stumbling upon anything statistically significant.

After a few nights, knowing at the first distant buzzing that the damn thing would keep at it until the alarm went off, I began leaping out of bed and turning on the lights. Had any of our neighbors been watching, they would have been witness to my systematic naked movements around the bedroom, blindly slapping the walls and ceiling, bending indecently to slap the pile of laundry in the corner, then returning upright to peer at the walls and ceiling from all angles. What’s the crazy foreigner doing now? they would wonder.

Luckily, when the lights went on the mosquitoes almost always landed immediately on the nearest white wall, where they were quite visible. Often it happened that one or two would settle on the wall, and we would grab the dedicated mosquito-thwacking map and set to work. Sometimes, though, it was three or four, and the killing of the first couple would send the others up into the air against various dark backgrounds, where they were quickly lost. No matter how diligently we studied their behavior, we could not penetrate the depths of mosquito psychology. But in the end we gained at least a rough ability to predict their behavior. Without necessarily understanding their operating principles, we were able to draw correlations between our actions and their responses. We compared our observations of the sample population and discussed our latest theories over our bleary-eyed breakfast. Through our untiring efforts, the mosquito problem was eventually downgraded from intolerable to manageable.

That was when the landlady began her daily visits to insist that we open the screenless window too, and we knew if we buckled now, all our work would be lost. We tried to explain, looking up the words for fear and mosquito in our pocket dictionary, and coupling them with a carefully developed pantomime: we mimicked the two-thumbs-and-a-finger hand posture used to grasp a needle, flying it around in the air near our heads while making a high pitched buzzing sound. Then, ensuring through eye contact that she was with us so far, we would bring the needle-grasp hand into contact with the forearm slightly below the elbow, abruptly ceasing the buzzing sound at the precise moment of contact. Surely she would understand, we thought. And she did. “But, silly foreigners, you need not worry,” she gestured. “In the wintertime, it will become cold and the mosquitoes will die—winter, outside, yes? Winter, frozen, do you understand? No mosquito—no buzz-buzz—in winter.”

We were defeated. We opened the screenless window, bared our flesh, and beseeched our unseen assailants at least to make it painless. The weather was in fact cooling down, she was right about that, but the network of green algae-filled ponds not far from our neighborhood, in combination with the unseasonably warm weather that autumn (the first snow finally fell a couple of days before Christmas), meant that lone mosquitoes would occasionally infiltrate our bedroom even in late November.

For weeks we tried to figure out why moisture was such a problem in the first place, but it wasn't until months later, when we put the landlady on the phone with our friend Petr, that we learned her fear of moisture was in fact a fear of a rare type of toxic mold which she was convinced would start growing on the walls of the basement. The communication breakdown that led us eventually to put her on the phone with Petr happened one day when a crew of men in royal blue overalls were working with various high-wattage power tools around the exterior of the house. At some point we suffered a house-wide electrical outage and, instead of investigating the actions of the men with power tools, she rushed in a panic into our apartment, unplugged our hot plate, and took it away. She explained, through simple words and elaborate hand gestures, that month after month of all that pernicious steam, pfff pfff, had corroded the circuitry inside the hot plate and caused a very dangerous short circuit. She wrote down the address of the shop where she'd bought the hot plate, and told us that we would have to pay for the repairs. The technician at the shop kept the hot plate for two weeks, but couldn't find anything wrong with it. After bringing it back home, we called Petr so he could try to explain to her, in as many ways as he could think of, that it was very unlikely that steam had caused this problem.

Time has passed, and both the mosquitoes and the steam are now a distant and scarcely-mentioned memory. We have came to an unspoken arragement with our landlady, wherein she continues to bring us fresh produce from the garden, but she leaves it on the kitchen table when we are not home. She even does our laundry now (in fact, we are forbidden to touch the washing machine). When we are away, she takes our laundry hamper, washes the clothes, hangs them on the line outside, and returns them folded to our table. We live parallel and unconnected lives, interacting in this way because we have both learned that it is best if we don't try to communicate except through the evidence of our actions in each other's absence. In a family, of course, this would be a textbook example of disfunctionality; in our present circumstances, however, we like to call it, at least for the next week or so, “home.”

Anne, who has been living in the Czech Republic for about 10 years, has some more ideas about the differences between Czech and American views of alcohol consumption at Lost in Transit, a blog by and about being a foreigner in foreign lands.

It surprises me how quickly our year in this strange land is coming to an end. With less than three weeks left, we’ve already started making the rounds to say our good-byes. Our colleagues at the university took us out for lunch and a couple of beers yesterday. Today, the head of the English department and her husband had us over to their flat for lunch. Světlana prepared the “Czech national dish,” which consists of a pork cutlet, creamy sauerkraut, and dumplings. It was delicious as usual. Perhaps my preference reveals my origins and inclinations, but I’d take peasant food over nouvelle cuisine almost any day.

As we approach the end of our stay, it is natural to look back over the past year to take advantage of the abrupt discontinuities in the past and future—which normally form such a smooth continuum that it is difficult to make out the more remote moments distinctly—to catch a glimpse of how our Czech adventure has changed us. I’m a virtual voyeur trying to spy on my memory without being noticed—peering in through the train window to watch C. and I on the day we first enter the country, on a train from Dresden after a failed attempt to secure our work visas, speeding through a narrow river valley on a clear blue day, the names of the tiny villages abruptly switching from German to Czech—trying to listen to the naïve conversations in which we try to figure out what we’re getting ourselves into, how long we might stay, what our jobs will be like, what kind of friends we’ll make, how well we’ll manage to learn the language. The trouble is that I can only imagine what the topics of conversation must have been, and since I know the answers to the questions I am writing into the little white word bubbles next to our heads, I am unable to capture the very real sense of not knowing by which we were overwhelmed at the time.

Today we stopped at the store to buy flowers on the way to Světlana and Jiři’s flat, because we have become used to the custom by which a guest always brings flowers when invited to someone’s home. I call it a flat because they do, and that’s the word my mind now sometimes grabs when it needs the next word in the sentence I’m in the middle of. It happens to be advantageous as well, because I find that word much easier and faster to say than apartment and it sounds completely normal to speak of someone owning a flat, whereas it sounds strange to talk about someone owning an apartment (and the only other choice I have, condominium, surely misrepresents what it’s like to live in a panelák), but I will have to remember that it will sound strange and will perhaps even sound like an affectation when I return to the US. Regardless of what you call it, though, they live in one of the paneláks at the far northern end of town, and although their gray building is one of several tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings in a long straight row of tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings which in turn constitute a parallel series of such rows, their apartment itself is very nice.

When we first arrived in town last year, they were renovating their flat (though even Světlana, who has been studying English for more than 20 years, spoke of “reconstructing” it, under the influence of the Czech noun rekonstrukce, in much the same way our students have sometimes mentioned the ticket “controllers” on the trams because the Czech verb kontrolovat means “to inspect.” Of course, I should be calling the trams by their American name, but I haven’t heard that word once since we’ve arrived. I have noticed, however, the good fortune Tennessee Williams had in being born an American, because I have a hard time imagining anyone on any continent lining up to see “A Tram Named Desire”). They had just bought it, though the nature of the transaction was closer to a swap-plus-cash, which is somewhat common in the housing market here but so uncommon where I’m from that we don’t even have a word for it. They had formerly lived in a smaller flat on a different floor of the same building, and their current flat had been occupied by the buyers of their former flat, who needed a smaller place. They simply swapped, with some amount of cash thrown in to compensate for the difference in size. Most panelák flats 15 years ago probably looked a lot like cinder block dorm rooms, but many, like this one, have benefitted from the installation of new hardwood floors, bathroom fixtures, and kitchen appliances.

When we walked into the apartment this afternoon, we immediately removed our shoes at the door, and Světlana provided each of us with a pair of slippers, because we have become used to the custom in which it is inconceivably rude to wear shoes indoors. It now seems perfectly normal to change into an anonymous pair of guest slippers which have been worn by who-knows-how-many other guests who have also removed their shoes at the door, though I remember that it was a bit disturbing at first to share foot-sweat with strangers in that way.

It turns out—although I didn’t know it until a few months into our stay—that Světlana and Jiři are both devout Catholics. Jiři is a historian whose specialization is the underground Catholic church that sprang up during the communist years, the membership of which was so secretive and so paltry that women were ordained as priests. There is now quite a controversy about it, because the Catholic church in Rome refuses to recognize the official existence of the underground church, largely because accepting the ordination of women, even under extreme political conditions, would threaten and undermine the official church tradition, even though those women and all the rest risked their lives and sacrificed unimaginably to keep the church alive during those 40 years.

I must admit that I do not know many Catholics in the US, but I grew up in the socially conservative bastion of Wheaton, Illinois—where the religiously-affiliated college erected an enormous center dedicated to the history of evangelical missionary work and named it after televangelist Billy Graham; where students of the college were made to sign a pledge upon acceptance that they would refrain from drinking, smoking, dancing, and all public displays of affection. It was a completely dry town, where alcohol could not be bought or sold in any establishment until just a few years ago, and even then bars were strictly forbidden in favor of restaurants that, coincidentally, as if by oversight, also happened to serve alcohol. Cable TV was banned for several years after it became available elsewhere in the area because of its tendency to arouse prurient interest in viewers of certain channels (such as Satan’s own MTV). According to the original genus edition of Trivial Pursuits, there are more churches per capita in Wheaton than in any other town in America.

As a result, I have known many evangelical protestants of various colors in my life, and I had always thought that one fundamental tenet of devout religion was temperance. It seemed perfectly natural that intoxicating substances interfered somehow with moral virtue by weakening and obscuring man’s godliness and making it more difficult to withstand the temptation of, for example, the long-legged, long-lashed, loose-bloused lady blinking and posing provocatively at the other end of the bar. But perhaps that is but one more example of America’s famous puritanical streak showing its colors.

For instance, our devoutly Catholic hosts served bottled beer with lunch today. It is as integral a part of the traditional Czech meal as any other. Perhaps, however, it is an unfounded leap to assume that temperance is strictly an American trait simply because our Czech hosts poured us a couple of tall cold ones. Beer drinking is, after all, a defining Czech cultural trait. They are as proud of their beer as they are of their national hockey team.

When the students in several of my classes asked me what I enjoyed most about the country, I gave various answers about the character of the people, the history, or the free education and medical care; inevitably someone would raise her eyebrows hopefully and ask, “And what about the beer? Don’t you like Czech beer?” Here it is not inappropriate to have a beer at almost any time of the day. I’ve seen businessmen stop for a half-liter as early as ten o’clock a.m. At our hotel in Olomouc in January, a perfectly nice and respectable-looking grandmother in her mid-60s was having a glass with her breakfast at just past nine. Today, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, I saw a group of guys down at the pub in our neighborhood hard at work on what I’m sure was not the first glass of the day.

In fact, it underlines the cultural difference that some of the Americans in the audience right now may be squirming a bit in their seats, objecting silently that these are clearly alcoholics we’re talking about. But that’s the curious thing. This country certainly has its share of alcoholics; many spend their days hanging around near the train station, belligerantly and unapologetically trying to stand upright and insult one another coherently. I wouldn’t venture to make guesses about the proportion of alcoholics in the population here versus in the US without access to some statistics, and even then, the criteria by which alcoholism should be defined may very well turn out to be culture-dependent.

For instance, I have heard it said in the US that drinking to excess, even if it only happens once a year (say, on New Year’s Eve), equals alcoholism, period. While it may be true that alcoholics will drink to excess even if they drink only once a year, it is not at all valid to deduce that everyone who drinks to excess once a year is therefore an alcoholic. In fact, it might well be argued that there is no point to drinking at all unless it is just a bit excessive. After all, it is in the nature of a drug to be administered until it has an effect; there’s no point for a dentist to use novacaine unless he actually uses enough to stop the pain.

It would be difficult to convince me, and much more difficult to convince most folks here, that there is anything flagrant about having a couple of beers now and then. In fact, there is something about the Czech approach to alcohol that in some ways seems much healthier than the American one. In America, we have declared it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to imbibe intoxicating liquors, but no one is silly enough to believe that this law is actually obeyed. Our legislators have fallen under the same misconception that leads religious conservatives to prescribe abstinence until marriage as the only acceptable way to convince horny teenagers to control their roving hands, leaving those teenagers with absolutely no tools to deal responsibly with the consequences should they accidentally lose control. This is the same misconception that led Nancy Reagan to believe that the “Just Say No” campaign would do anything other than leave children unprepared to exercise any kind of restraint or responsibility once giving into a very natural temptation as a result of a very natural curiosity. One simply cannot legislate human nature to be how we wish it to be, no matter how badly we wish it. And so it is in our underage temperance laws: Despite our best wishes to be able to mould human nature through moral imperatives, we are simply telling our teenagers not to get caught.

In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, the legal drinking age is 18, but most kids enter a pub for the first time when they are 13 or 14. This is in line with most of the rest of Europe. With parents or without, it is apparently very difficult to get turned down for a beer at any age. As a result, kids who are inclined to go through the drinking-til-you-puke stage do so when they are young teenagers. They soon realize that it is not very fun, and they stop. (If we are being honest about American culture, we realize that many people go through such a stage, regardless of the law. The laws we have at best delay it for a couple of years, and our unspoken imperative not to get caught is actually a command to drink unsupervised, whether by waiting until John’s parents go to Lake Tahoe for a week, or by driving to the woods behind the Gas’n’Sip. In fact, we make it illegal for responsible parents to try to supervise their children’s drinking.)

Drinking is a very natural part of Czech life, and teens are initiated into a society of responsible alcohol consumption at a very young age. When the group of Americans showed up in Pilsen last summer for the TEFL program, and adults 21 or 22 years old ended up puking in the dorms on Friday nights after spending the night in a pub, the Czechs were absolutely incredulous! How on Earth can a 21-year old not know his or her limits, they wondered. They should have learned ten years ago! Public drunkenness is largely taboo, and there is a 0% legal tolerance for drunk driving; the social tolerance is not much higher. It’s quite simple: one sip of beer, and you don’t drive. Period. How much sense does this make? If it turned out that the rate of alcoholism here is lower than in the US, I would attribute it directly to the fact that it’s not taboo for young people to drink. As a result, they learn to assimilate moderation into their lifestyles while their lifestyles are still evolving.

This week, having no responsibilities at the university, we went with our friend and officemate Lucie to her cousin’s cottage in northern Moravia, a three-hour-long series of rides on two trains and a bus from Brno, in a tiny village called Suchá Rudna which lies a half-hour walk from the tiny village called Andělská Hora (Angel Mountain), where the bus line ended.

(In Czech, a cottage like this is called a chalupa, but it has nothing to do with the Taco Bell entrée of the same name: the ch at the beginning is pronounced like ultralingual precisionists say the sound at the end of Bach. I should mention that ch is actually a letter unto itself in Czech. It comes after h in the alphabet, like this:

and when shops print their name descendingly down signs by the door, those letters refuse to separate, like this:

which means “showers.”)

I remember reading about these chalupas while we were still in the US and wondering, if Czechs were as poor as they are described, how nearly every Czech family could afford to have a second home out in the country. The reason actually requires a bit of explanation. First of all, under communism, every family was allowed to own a cottage or an out-of-town garden plot, even though they weren’t actually allowed to own the apartments and houses in which they lived in town; these belonged to a collective. So, given a chance to own a bit of private property, everyone who could do so jumped at the chance. The gardens that people owned are almost exactly like the one in our landlady’s backyard, long narrow meticulously-ordered patches that people spend an inordinate amount of time plowing, weeding, planting, tidying, pruning, and otherwise tending in the long slow evenings and on the weekends, whenever possible. Second only perhaps to beer and hockey, it’s the national pastime.

Secondly, since food was in such short supply under communism, and the variety of available food, from tales we hear now, was often restricted to not much more than potatoes and cabbage, people had little choice but to grow some of their own food. The cottage industry, so to speak, sprang up partly to compensate for the lack. C. and I have at times lamented that the Czech garden aesthetic insists on tiny orderly rows of rectanges with little fences, not to mention the sporadically-placed inverted plastic bottles on steel pipes thrust into the ground which, when the wind rattles the plastic against, the pipe, frighten away moles. C. is especially bothered by this, since her father is a landscape architect who prefers sweeping curves and staggered terraces to right angles, and for good reason.

This rectangular aesthetic is transferred to people’s front-yard gardens as well, which usually consist of nothing but rows of rectangles: a rectangular patch of daisies next to a rectangular patch of tulips next to a rectangular patch of marigolds. Although it is not necessarily attractive to Americans raised in luxury, Americans who have never had to grow their own food, who would spend a couple of years lean on the learning curve if times suddenly forced them to fend for themselves vegetable-wise, this rectangular practicality maximizes the productivity of the small garden plot. Our landlady’s garden could feed a person for months on potatoes, carrots, kohlrabi, leeks, herbs, parsley, celery root, cabbage, peppers, not to mention a few carefully-pruned plum, apple, and apricot trees and, of course, the rabbits. Her neighbor, in addition to such a selection, keeps a few beehives. It is already June, and our landlady’s potato cellar is still half-full from last fall’s harvest. Although she must be fairly affluent now (her monthly rent income from her three tenants alone is more than most people’s salaries), she spends almost every afternoon bent over in the back yard, on hot days wearing a pink bikini bottom and a bra, tending to one area or another of what will be this fall’s harvest. Her love of gardening may well serve also to fill the empty hours her husband and children used to occupy, but nonetheless, it stands as evidence that old habits die hard.

The fact that spending time at one’s cottage in the country is still so popular, half a generation after the fall of the communist regime, attests also to the Czechs’ love of what my students refer to in their essays as “the beautiful green nature.” Although it is changing quickly, Czech village life still seems to encapsulate a part of the national identity that the city never will. People live in the city because, after all, it’s the 21st century now, and they have embraced their new freedom to earn and buy, but a large part of the heart is still reserved for the village.

Lucie’s cousin’s cottage had a kind of rustic luxury that I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting something only slightly larger than the huts in the out-of-town garden plots that line the railroad tracks. (On our first train ride into the country last summer, before we knew better, we wondered if we were passing through a lace-curtained shantytown, if times were so hard that whole families really lived in these little one-room peaked-roof houses along the tracks. Now we know that they serve as a place to sit and sip lemonade while taking a break from gardening). Instead of such a hut, we were led into an old stuccoed farmhouse with a large yard and a quickly flowing creek running along one edge. On the right side of the central low-arched-roof hallway (anyone over 5'6" would have to stoop) were a kitchen heated by an old tile-stove and a couple of bedrooms; on the left, another bedroom and a sitting room with a fireplace, deep leather chairs, and several boar skins on the walls (no, that’s not a typo; think tusks). At the end of the hallway was a knotty-pine-paneled sunroom with an attached jacuzzi/sauna complex. A recent issue of Chalupář (“Chalupa Owner”)—a monthly magazine for young chalupa-owning professionals, dedicated to decorating ideas and simple low-maintenance improvements to modernize your chalupa while maintaining that country feel—revealed the inclinations of Lucie’s cousin.

Some of the wall hangings in the cottage included pictures and maps of the village of Suchá Rudna, back in the days when it had a German name. When I asked Lucie about these, I learned that we were right in the middle of the Sudatenland, the strip along the Polish-Czech border that before the Second World War had been heavily populated by Germans, which fact Hitler used to justify claiming it as a part of Germany and annexing it prior to his invasion of Poland (if my sparse knowledge of history has things in the right order). We spent a while the following day, during our four-hour hike through the beautiful green nature in the mountains, talking about the unfortunate period in the late 1940s when the newly communist government forced almost all of the Germans living in Czechoslovakia to leave, took away their houses, and reassigned them to Czechoslovak families.

When we innocently asked if the German families who had inhabited all these homes, such as the one we were staying in, had ever been compensated in any way, it was clear that we had stumbled upon a sensitive subject. Lucie pointed out that, after the war, Germany had paid war reparations to every country in the region except Czechoslovakia, and that the combined value of what the Czechs owe the Germans in terms of lost real estate is absolutely trivial compared to what the Germans still owe the Czechs in terms of war damages. Further, because there are no longer any Germans living in the area, the children of the people who were evicted cannot possibly want the houses returned to them so that they can move back to the area. They just want the money.

All in all, despite the touchy politics and the unending rain, we had a wonderful time and learned a bit about another aspect of Czech life that we would otherwise have remained ignorant of. It’s funny how many rocks you have to turn over in order to discover the more interesting things.

In August of 1994, after having dropped out of the University of Illinois for the second and last time, I was living with my brother Mike and his family in a small town in northwestern Illinois, working as an apprentice in his one-man furniture-making business. Because I was a half-aloof half-shy burgundy-haired suburban intellectual indie-rocker guy, I had very little in common with the town-folk in my age bracket, many of whom had already gotten married, some of whom had already been divorced, some of whom were missing teeth. As a result, it was difficult for me to make friends, and I filled my free time with daily hours-long bike rides out in the surrounding countryside.

I hadn’t had many opportunities to escape the heartland when I was a teenager, and I longed to see what kind of mysteries lay beyond the corn-encrusted horizon. My first airplane trip was a college visit to Deep Springs in California when I was 17, and that trip was only the second time I’d ever been west of the Mississippi. I’d quit school in part because I felt woefully underexperienced in ways that no amount of schooling could remedy, and as the summer progressed my urge to get out of familiar surroundings and go somewhere new, anywhere, intensified until my bones hummed. Some in my family dismissed it as “wanderlust,” a temporary condition that occasionally afflicts post-adolescents until they get some sense, but from my point of view it simply could not be ignored. I decided to buy a van with my $600 in savings and travel the country a bit in order to figure out just what the hell I should do with my life. A friend of mine had hopped a freight train to New Orleans a year before and was living there with his girlfriend, so I decided it would be a convenient first leg of my open-ended journey to drive down to visit him for a while.

It soon became obvious that $600 was not going to buy me a road-worthy vehicle of any kind, let alone one of the cargo-hauling variety. A fixer-upper was out of the question, as I wouldn’t even have known how to change an air filter at the time. A couple of years later, when I finally was able to buy an old van, I had to ask my girlfriend, who had taken auto shop class in high school, how to change the oil.

What’s a young man without a van to do? Having no idea at the time that my character would soon enough come to be dominated by vanhood, I began exploring alternative transportation options. After doing some math, I calculated that with a little training I could ride my bike from northwestern Illinois to New Orleans in just over two weeks. That $600 would be more than enough to buy a tent and a decent bicycle. Suddenly, to my mother’s despair, the plan started coming together. In a nod to her healthy stockpile of tears, I agreed to delay my departure date until after her birthday in September.

One day amid the endless late-August seas of dry shoe-brown corn stalks, however, a gentle old man driving a maroon four-door sedan was a bit too nervous about crossing the yellow line when he passed the cyclist riding back into town near sunset after a long day, and the low loud dull thud with no warning knocked him from his bike and rolled him off the hood, rolled him along the pavement for many more feet in an incomprehensible blur of pain and whirlwinded asphalt and sky until he came to rest on his back blinking silently upward. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, chrome blue with charcoal clouds gliding slowly across it. He turned his head to notice the sedan’s brake lights glowing red in the dusk, and heard the long dry creak of the screen door on the nearest farmhouse opening and shutting and opening again as a group of voices gathered and began to frame the sky in a circle of concerned questions.

The ambulance arrived quickly, and there ensued a cursory interview about the order of events (“Well, . . . I was pedaling and then it hurt a lot and then I was lying on the ground in pretty much this exact position. There was a big blur in the middle somewhere.”) in which it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that right before the thud I had been thinking about how the cyclist sometimes doesn’t even notice that he has hit his ideal cadence, in which his breathing and pedaling slide seamlessly into lockstep gear-like rhythm, and how, when the rhythm of that cadence exactly matches the beat of, in this case, the first Don Caballero record, and in the descending darkness the horizon unrolls itself into the long slick black tongue of asphalt stretching out before him, the cyclist can easily believe that the song and the ride and the dusk and life itself will march endlessly on in this undeviating rhythm until the stars flicker and are snuffed out.

It ended up, after a couple of days in the hospital, several X-rays, and an MRI that I had fractured a vertebra in the middle of my back and ruptured a disk just above where it joins the pelvis. Despite my lack of helmet or padding of any kind, I had not a single external injury but a big scrape on the back of my calf. It obviously could have been a lot worse, but this strange turn of events nonetheless killed my plans for self-discovery by means of transcontinental recklessness. I instead tried my hand at self-discovery by means of lying in bed and being depressed for a couple of months. My brother was nice enough to carve me a cane, and I moped around his house with cane in hand wearing a hospital-white back brace that kept my back hyperextended and my chest thrust out in a mock display of machismo for the next eight weeks.

One year later, when the insurance company finally settled and my lawyer took his third, I bought the 1985 red and silver GMC van with a fully gray-and-green shag-carpeted interior that had belonged to my uncle who had died the previous summer. I spent much more than I should have on installing a stereo and a huge amplifier and speakers, and the first thing I did was to drive with a friend to Glacier National Park in Montana. We parked the van in gas station parking lots and on residential streets and slept on a mattress which fit perfectly between the wheel wells in the back. Throughout the trip we kept a log of all the diners we’d stopped in, how much their coffee had cost, the size of the mugs, and whether the waitress had called us “hon” or not.

A couple of years later, after the new bike I bought to replace the one that had been destroyed in the accident had been stolen out of the back of the van one night and pawned for crack money while it was parked in front of my loft on 23rd Street in Chicago, which forced me to buy yet another bike because my job as a bike messenger, one of the five or more disposable jobs I had that year, made me dependent on that bike for my income, at least for the month or so that I held the job, until riding all day in the September rains, in combination with a sub-par work ethic and a diffused sense of being owed something, made me unable to do it anymore; a couple of years later, like I said, I brushed a gallon of black enamel house paint onto that van and drove straight down the black-tongued highway, stopping neither for sunset nor sunrise nor anything else except coffee and fuel toward my new home in New Mexico. People sometimes glance nervously upward at you when you pull up next to them at a stoplight in a black van. Sometimes it’s obvious that they’re not looking. The wrong kind of girls look at you more steadily and a lot more often, even if you’re not wearing sunglasses.

Eventually, after having served as my band’s tour van, after driving to New Mexico and back a few times and a couple of trips to the Pacific and one to the Atlantic, after acquiring a lot of rust and a few dents and after most of the interior electrical stuff had ceased to function at all, that van also ceased to be a van, in the sense that it would no longer go anywhere, and was towed from the parking lot of a community rec center in Santa Fe, never to be seen by me again.

My back, which healed surprisingly well within a few months of the accident, hurts almost daily now in the place where the disk ruptured. Three mornings before we were supposed to get on a train to go spend three weeks of our Christmas break in Berlin with C.’s entire nuclear family, I felt a certain gooey slipping sensation at the base of my spine while I was tying my shoe, and the accompanying pain grew slowly over the next 24 hours until the following morning, when I found myself completely unable to get out of bed. I remained in bed in fact for three days, except for a trip to the doctor’s office, and I was able to make the trip to Berlin in the end thanks only to prescription pain-killers and anti-inflammatories. The pain is much better now, but I have to be very when I run to catch trams, very careful about what position I sleep in, or else I find it difficult to sit or stand for any length of time the following day without enduring a throbbing ache that says that the fluid-filled sac that used to so devotedly and lovingly cushion my fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebrae from each other has been reduced to the consistency of a medium-rare cheeseburger.

Nonetheless, today I went for a long and glorious two-hour bike ride in the obliquely-angled late-afternoon sun among the soft rolling wheat fields and vineyards of southern Moravia, a ride which in my present state of spinal unhealth is an achievement of which I am proud. Although the seat on this bike is the wrong shape and makes my prostate go numb after half an hour, and although I have to treat my back gingerly now and cannot make the same powerful pedal strokes I used to, and although I now often use the brakes to control my speed when arcing down curving hillside roads between blurred wheat fields and the flickering patchwork shadows of trees because I am nervous about flying out of control and hurting my back in a fall, still: Nothing compares to the cyclist’s joy at breathing the immortal air under the invincible sun.

Today’s ride was on a bike trail that runs from Brno all the way down to the Austrian border. (Actually, it’s called the South Moravian Vineyard Trail, or something similar, which I think is so named because in the summertime you are encouraged to punctuate your ride through the hillsides and small villages with pit stops at pubs featuring locally produced wines.) Today I made it about one-third of the way to the border. Once things calm down at the university and C. goes to Scotland for two weeks, I plan on riding all the way there one day.

It’s silly, I know, but I always feel like a giant when I put in an afternoon on my bicycle and find, after returning home all sweaty and shaky-kneed, that my afternoon’s pedaling traces out a tiny but visible arc on a globe. Find the Czech Republic on one, and find Brno in the southeast. Imagine the line between Brno and Vienna to the south, and picture me pedaling there on roads too tiny to see among the wheat fields in the late afternoon sun. Regardless of whether my desire to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the strip malls and mulch circles of suburban Illinois can be dismissed with anything so simple as an abstract noun, that’s where I am.

The school year is practically over, and classes no longer meet. The only job responsibilities that remain are administering exams, returning essays, and saying good-bye. Since we had no classes to teach, C. and I went exploring earlier this week to an area of the country called Wallachia, which is largely inhabited by the descendents of a migrant group of shepherds who moved to Silesia (in the Czech-Slovak-Polish borderland) about 500 years ago. The town we visited, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, is famed for its open-air museum that features a number of wooden houses that have been relocated from throughout the region and set up to form a working village. I mention wooden houses specifically because they are actually very rare here. Avid readers might recall my previous missive about how love-struck the Czechs are with stucco, and I can only reinforce that idea. Everything I've seen in Brno and elsewhere is brick and stucco, or cinderblock and stucco, so Wallachia rightly makes a big deal of what it likes to call its "Little Wooden Town." And, in fact, due to how love-struck the Czechs also are with diminutives, the makers of the signs and brochures in Rožnov assiduously translated the diminutive of město (městičko) as Little Town. It just served to underscore how quaint the place was anyway.

Not only quaint, but fairly distinctive as well is Rožnov. The way of life of these migrant shepherds with their origins shrouded in mystery was noticeably different from that of their neighboring Slavs. (Past tense because they have modernized just like everyone else and assimilated into the population at large.) While walking through the Little Wooden Town, however, I assumed that these tiny buildings—where 11 children slept in one room and all the cooking for the entire family was done in a closet-sized windowless enclosure—dated from the mid-nineteenth century or earlier, and was very surprised to read on the placard outside one of the typical houses that it was occupied in its original setting until the mid-1950s.

I was also attacked by a dickhead goose while talking to a pig at one of the homesteads, but it doesn't deserve much comment.

On our second day in Rožnov we went hiking in the mountains outside of town, looking for the Little Wooden Church and a stone statue of Radegast, an old pagan god after whom a local brew has affectionately been named. It started raining, and we lost the trail, and we never did find the statue. The tourist brochures in Rožnov had made it sound interesting because of the way they referred to Radegast as an old pagan god who had been replaced by Christ in the middle ages, as though the changing of religions is perhaps as monumental as the changing of long-distance phone companies. "Honey, it looks like the Christians have a deal where we'd get Eternal Salvation and a chance to win a roller-skating date with God in the Kingdom of Heaven, and Radegast, well, he's just got those same old smoky fires and virgin sacrifices and stuff, so do you want to go with Christ, or what?”

Mike, our friend and colleague, used this phrase last night to describe Czech society in the aftermath of communism. As I told him, life under communism is one of the things I was most curious about before coming over here, and one of the things about which I've discovered least since arriving. People simply don't want to talk about it very much, for two reasons. The first is that those 40 years are now a bad memory, and people have been trying to put it behind them ever since. The second reason, the importance of which I had completely neglected in my own thinking, is that so many people were "compromised" under the system. That is, in order to survive under that system, almost everyone had to sacrifice something of themselves; almost everyone was guilty of some degree of complicity in the name of pragmatism. The extent to which people were willing to sacrifice was perhaps greater than one might think, given that, in the pre-revolution mindset, the communist system would last into perpetuity. It never occurred to people simply to "hold out" until 1989, when it would end.

Dr. Charles Hall, our teacher at the TEFL summer school in Pilsen last summer, was in Prague on a Fulbright during the revolution in 1989. He described for us some of the tactics used by the government to turn that complicity to their advantage. Say, for instance, that Mr. Novak wanted to leave the country to travel to England for a week. He was, most likely, denied permission to leave. If for some reason, however, his request was granted, at the last minute a representative of the party might visit his home and give him a package to deliver to someone in England. If he refused, his permission to go was denied. If he accepted, he suddenly found himself acting as an agent of the Communist Party. Were Mr. Novak to cause any trouble later, or were the government later to need Mr. Novak to provide some information about, say, a friend or family member, they had evidence that he had been an agent of the party. "Do you want your wife to know, Mr. Novak, that you work for us? Do you want your children to know? Of course not. . ."

Tactics such as these, and in general the culture of mistrust created by them, conspired to destroy the interpersonal bonds that are necessary for any functional society to exist. "Civil society," Mike called it, quoting an historical Czech figure that he admires. Dr. Douglas Pressman, a sociologist I interviewed last year for the English Department newsletter, had published an article in Vital Speeches of the Day in which he referred to the force that binds together the individuals in a society as "social capital." As Dr. Pressman explains,

. . . Just as businesses need to invest in new factories and equipment and just as people require investments in education and health care, a society runs better when its institutions encourage trust and cooperation. Indeed, an economically developed society requires and operates from a base of robust social norms in combination with vital social networks; formal norms such as those embodied in contract law and government regulations simply cannot be effective and efficient without this base. Voluntary political, civic and religious associations--which are inherently time-consuming--are the warp and weft of what [Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000)], borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, termed "social capital."

It's not the case that every Czechoslovakian citizen was a willing and eager agent of the party. Some were; others, such as Mr. Novak, had no choice but to act as agents of the party; some were completely uninvolved. As a result, in Czechoslovakia under communism, one simply never knew who to trust. Whatever the motivations of the individuals in question, the end result was that the government had largely succeeded in breaking the bonds between individuals. The possible exception to this was family, because the trust that exists between flesh-and-blood relatives is significantly harder to break. Mike posits that people could generally trust their own family not to rat them out even under duress, and further, that the government knew this and rarely tried to force the issue.

This explains why family is so important to Czechs. Without examining it too much, I've all along been assuming that family forms such a cornerstone of the society because there was so little else in the way of consumerism and vacuous entertainment for 40 years. The importance of family in Czech society seems similar to how I imagined life was in the '40s and '50s in America, before pop culture beat it up, when the nuclear family was still alive and kicking despite the impending extinction of the extended family. The new information gives a much stronger explanation for the phenomena: Young Czechs live with their parents until their mid-20s or later, basically until they marry (though this is also explained by the shortage of housing and high rents). Children tend to settle in the same town as their parents, allowing the social network of extended family to flourish. Above and beyond anecdotal evidence such as this, however, is the undeniable fact that, for Czechs, relationships among family members are close, and remain so for a lifetime.

These things are changing slowly now that the society is open. New generations that have very little memory of that time are growing up. One of C.'s students, when asked how she would define her generation, said, "We are the first generation that was not affected by communism." They remember it, but a 20-year-old, for instance, was five when the revolution took place. Some of our older students may have been 10 or 15 in 1989. In fact, as Mike pointed out, younger people are more likely than older ones to talk about life under communism precisely because they have some memories of it, but they were too young to be compromised. No one who was compromised will give details.

It will take generations (two, maybe three?) to purge the effects of communism from the psyche of the land. Many in the generation that were young adults in 1989 put on suits, started businesses, and began comparison shopping. Many older people did as well. But changing your economic outlook is a superficial change. We notice when walking around our neighborhood that everyone's curtains are religiously drawn tightly closed at night. It would be anathema for a stranger on the street to be able to see into your house. Tight-lipped people waiting at bus stops rarely make small talk, except in the smallest of villages. There are more examples, but I hope that suffices to illustrate the pattern. On the other hand, children growing up now are increasingly influenced by the west. Left and right, kids in baggy jeans, tee-shirts, hair gel, and bling listen to Eminem at top volume on their walkmans. But these children are still being raised by parents who grew up in a culture of profound mistrust and you can see, despite the outward appearance of Western pop culture, the social norms that differentiate the people in one's close network of friends and family from the anonymous mass of suspicious strangers are still very strong.

So an experimental recasting of the society as a whole has had disastrous side-effects on the psychologies of individuals and the relationships between them. This fact is curious because, from one point of view, a society consists primarily of the web of individual relationships that compose it. A national government--even a regional or municipal one--seems largely to be an arbitrary structure imposed over the organic, self-generating entity underneath. Whether you look at it in terms of Rousseau's social contract, or through Hobbes' eyes, people come together and erect the government that represents them. The difference between the two, in my mind (not having read either one in a couple of years and my memory being notoriously myopic) is the source from which the government is understood to derive its power.

Hobbes gave primary authority to the government, since government is the only means by which order emerges from chaos, the only conceivable tamer of the savage brutes worldwide who constantly war among themselves for precious resources. Government, in his view, bestows certain rights upon the individuals in proportion to its magnanimity. The rights, however, lie first with the government and are doled out to the people on an as-needed basis. Rousseau, on the other hand, gave primary authority to the people who, through the rational principle, sign away certain of their rights in the name of the protections of an orderly society. That's the social contract we all remember from high school social studies.

But wherever you stand in the political philosophy debate, the government does not create the society. Humans being gregarious creatures by nature, the society exists primarily due to the coexistence of individuals. For a harebrained example, think back to summer camp, or imagine how it might have been if you, like me, never got to go. All the kids show up from their various hometowns, and within a few days various orderly networks have emerged: social hierarchies; networks of friends; pairs, triangles, and other elaborate geometries in the pursuit of love and/or lust, and all this despite the best efforts of the camp counselors to stamp their own vision of order onto the whole thing.

Of course, the communist government had a lot more power than camp counselors do, and was able through its policies to sculpt the society in thorough and far-reaching ways. That, in effect, was the noble goal that started the whole thing going back in 1917--social engineering, creating the perfect society out of the raw material of individuals and the forces that bind them together. My question lies in where the transition from noble social engineering to totalitarianism happens. C. has made the point, in a couple of our discussions about the matter, that no government sets out to be evil (certain despots excepted). Governments, ever since our clever little constitution made it hip to create governments with a moral agenda, set out in some document or another the moral structure by which they promise to operate and the moral goals they aim to achieve. Under communism, it was the eradication of the class struggle, the elimination of the established bourgeois aristocracy. It was to reunite the workers with the fruits of their labor. Certainly, there is nothing ignoble or evil in those goals. Thick-headed, perhaps, but not evil.

Lest one think that the rhetoric about the glorious struggle of the proletariat to throw off the shackles of class society was simply a convenient rhetorical shroud for totalitarianism, listen to this:

Last night over beers, Mike's Czech girlfriend, a lawyer who is about to begin a new job in Brussels as the "National Expert" (her real title) to liaise between the Czech Republic and the EU concerning issues of food safety legislation, explained how the communist government made judges. A worker was chosen somehow from the ranks, given a three-month training, and then (poof!) he was a judge. The workers judged the workers. This was possible, Monika said, because Czech law under communism was not a common law system with all those pesky "precedents" and such that muddle the American system and make it impossible for non-lawyers to understand. Instead, it was a system of codal law: everything was written down and quite explicitly delineated. To find the punishment for someone who stole $350 worth of livestock from his neighbor, simply flip to the appropriate page of the legal code, and there it was for all to see. A perfectly fair and just system, right? In theory, is a worker judging workers that different from, say, twelve peers judging a peer? The numbers differ, but the goals are not wholly incommensurate.

More on this topic, and its relation to "social capital" in the US later.

A few months ago, C. and I discovered in downtown Brno a delicious Indian restaurant called Taj (which here is pronounced like ‘Thai’). After giving up on both of Brno’s Mexican restaurants, because of inauthenticity in one case and ridiculously-priced inauthenticity in the other, we needed to find somewhere to go for special occasions. Taj is just that: You can get a beautiful spicy meal there, but a dinner for two’ll cost you 600 crowns (about $30, which is two-and-a-half days’ pay). Thus we leave it for very special occasions, like our third anniversary, which we celebrated in April. Recently, however, we have discovered that Taj has an excellent and affordable lunch special, so we head over there once a week to see what's on offer.

Today we decided to have lunch there, and we walked past St. James Cathedral on our way from the tram to the restaurant. We finally saw with our own eyes the archaeological dig we’ve been hearing about. Apparently, while tearing up the street next to the church to perform some sewer maintenance or some such, city workers stumbled upon an old cemetery from the middle ages. It makes perfect sense, because every other church is surrounded by its own proprietary cemetery, but St. James is surrounded on four sides by city streets. So the real question is, at what point did the city forget about the existence of the cemetery and just pave over it? In any event, regardless of who forgot what when, there have been human bones resting just under the pavement in the middle of Brno for a couple of hundred years, and a bunch of folks are now busy excavating them. Today, the green-overalls city worker guys were sharing their turf with a bunch of student archaeologists, who were gently dusting off the just-exposed skeletons, some with crushed skulls, some fully intact and still in the reverent burial pose. I'm not sure I'd ever seen real human bones before coming to Europe, but I know I've seen a lot of them since. We have the Capuchin Monastery crypts, the bone church in Kutna Hora, the holy relics built into the cathedral in Olomouc, and so on.

I mentioned the green overalls guys because they entertain me so much. Not the guys in particular, because really they're not very entertaining at all, but their colored overalls are. From what I can tell, this is just a European thing. Different trades wear different characteristic colors, though it could very well be that different city departments wear different characteristic colors. In the Czech Republic, there are a couple of shades: green, navy blue, red, maybe some others. I remember the German overalls palette, though, with much respect. Not only did they choose vibrant colors to liven up their workaday jobs (collectors of the recycled glass in fuchsia overalls, rakers of the leaves in sea green, baggers of the leaves in emerald green, sweepers of the streets in orange, and so on around the color wheel), but they wore them with such pride. "I am a member of the orange team," you could practically hear the man thinking to himself as he scrupulously arranged the piles of dirt at the curb for another orange-overalled man to pick up. "We possess skills and efficiency that men in other-colored overalls will never understand."

I'm trying really hard to tie these themes together, but I give up. It's going to have to go like this: Death does not wear vibrant colors. Death wears saltpeter slacks (chimneysweep chinos?). There's something very humbling about seeing all these skeletons, the remains of people who died hundreds of years ago, whose great-grand-children died just slightly less than hundreds of years ago. It's not just that these people receded over time from the memories of their descendents, as almost everyone does within a generation or two. Even though digital photography and modern data storage technology allow us to archive every detail of our lives as they happen, the great-grand-somethings who we will never meet will eventually forget that we ever existed. Eventually, everyone in the city of Brno forgot that the people who had once been worn by those bones had ever lived at all, and they simply paved them over. Above the skeletons of the monks in one room of the Capuchin Crypt, plaques read, "What you are, we were. What we are, you will be." It was meant, perhaps, to be a cryptic rallying call for the afterlife, but it points more directly to the perseverence of dust.

This makes some sense of the tombstone habit, wherein we engrave our names and appropriate dates for all to see, anchor ourselves to a given time and place ("Hey, that guy was alive during the Civil War!"), for the sake of not being wholly forgotten, at least until the wind and the stone come to an agreement about who can last longer. It's strange to realize that my parents, for instance, exist now only as memories of my first-hand experience. When I am gone, they will exist as stories that I have told about my memories, and then they will become stories of stories that my grandson thinks he remembers hearing from his grandpa when he was a kid, though he might have seen it on TV, he can't quite remember. This is how we disappear.

Last night I attended a performance of what I had been told would be a ballet interpretation of Pink Floyd's The Wall. I had no idea what that meant, but our friend Anne had bought us tickets, so we signed on. We took the tram straight from work, so I was wearing jeans and a flannel and C. was in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. When we got off the tram at the stop given in the directions, we realized that we were at Brno's main opera and ballet hall. We walked inside to find the Brnese arrayed in their finest evening wear: ankle-length satin gowns, black suits with black turtlenecks, high heels, hair spray. On a Monday night in Brno, this was the place to be. Suddenly it occurred to me. . . evening wear, opera hall. . . that I might soon be watching an orchestral "interpretation" of The Wall, or even worse.

Although it seems impossible, this sounded worse than anything having to do with synchronized fireworks or the London Philharmonic (who I believe took care of Dark Side of the Moon sometime in the '80s). It conjured up images of the night four years ago I saw Brian Wilson perform the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, live, uncut, and in order. The curtain rose on a full symphony, who busted into an orchestral arrangement of Beach Boys medleys, touching the highlights of all the surf classics. Nearly an hour into the ordeal, we were all wondering if this was what we had paid the $35 for. But no, an MC came out and spoke to us, explaining that Brian was having some doubts about coming out onto the stage, that he was feeling a little vulnerable, and that we needed to be patient for a few minutes and give him a really warm welcome when he finally came out. This we did, and it was gorgeous. While Pet Sounds is not my favorite Beach Boys album (the incomplete and never released Smile takes that prize), I could consider it nothing less than an honor to see the aging Brian Wilson live on stage crooning through a 30-year old album which had made rock history by using Beach Boys surf harmonies as a medium to convey the passionate and intricately structured longings of a neurotic.

Thankfully, we saw no orchestra pit in the theater, and when the curtain went up on the Pink Floyd performance, I heard the opening sounds of the album itself. I used to listen to that album almost every day when I was in junior high, to the point where one of my siblings once sat me down and interrogated me about why it interested me so. I don't even think I was aware of all the angst back then, although I do remember that something in "Comfortably Numb" resonated with me when I was 11. Whenever I would get to the part in the song when Roger Waters sings

When I was a child
I caught a fleeing glimpse
out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
The child is grown, the dream is gone

a little teary-eyed nostalgia would wash over me, and I'd unpack the sepia-toned memories of my own childhood and wonder how much of my humanity I'd sacrificed since leaving the single-digit birthdays.

I haven't really listened to The Wall very much since then. I put it on the back shelf once I became old enough to understand the album as Roger Waters' overblown and somewhat calculated thirtysomething angst and ego parade. As a result, hearing the album again activated vivid and distinct memories of the house where we lived when I was 11, the endless summer days of Legos and D&D, the awful green carpet in my room.

So the set was a po-mo Picassoesque-geometried Parthenon kind of deal, all in white. There were some pretty cool colored-spotlight effects, and some interesting uses of backlit people behind very stretchy semi-translucent gauze to create a larval/purgatory effect. The dancing was amazing, especially that of the guy referred to only as "Him" in the program, by which is meant, you know, a little bit of Syd Barrett, a little bit of Roger Waters, a little bit of Everyman (you know, the guy who was played by Bob Geldoff in the film). I was really impressed by all the choreography at the beginning. At one point, Him (dressed in sanitorium white) and the woman playing his mom, in a long crimson tango dress, were up at the front of the stage doing one of those fighting-yet-embracing push-me-pull-you dances, and another couple--tiny in comparison, sillhouetted at the far back of the stage by a huge turquoise screen--was doing the exact same dance in parallel, but with the dancers' genders switched. It wasn't perfect, though. The characters were maybe a little too cookie-cuttered from the film. From time to time, it seemed that someone had taken notes from the Ron Howard school of directing, and the dancing pantomimed a bit too literally the content of the lyrics (for instance, during "Another Brick in the Wall Part I," when the dancers lay on top of one another in a little wriggling pyramid, as if they were, oh I get it, bricks). Despite the little ache in my side that reminded me I was sitting through a modern ballet set to a prog-rock anthem, the thing was interesting, well-executed overall, and it kept me watching.

By the second half, though, after the ponderous Another Brick in the Wall theme had taken over, all the dancers were dressed in nothing but underwear and hospital gowns, and Him had started cycling a second time through his series of desperate and frightened expressions, it had worn a little thin. The dancing had gone from the stark and elegant two- and three-figure interactions to ghastly white lunatics in hospital gowns marching zombie-like in huge circles in 4/4-time to "Run like Hell." When the patients all brought out giant white pillows and started throwing them at Him, it was time for the album to end. What is it with pillow fights? Why did Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam have to have that slo-mo tears-of-joy-filled pillow fight in Rivendell? We half-expected Gimli to jump in, armor and all.

In the middle of March, having been in the Czech Republic for nine months, I was invited to participate in a traditional springtime procession in a tiny village in southern Moravia. A straw man was to be carried from the village square down to the river, set on fire, and then tossed into the water; green branches would be gathered, decorated with ribbons, and returned to the square. All of this was in the name of dismissing winter and welcoming the return of spring. When we arrived in the middle of the cold gray afternoon, we joined a small group of parents and children and began marching to the river, singing Czech folk songs all the while. But I was misled about this being a traditional procession: At some point it was admitted that Czechs haven’t enacted this ceremony for a hundred years or more. I was part of a re-creation, an attempt to resurrect an old tradition that had died out generations ago. I discovered later that the group of people marching down to the river were Waldorf school moms and dads, and that this was a Waldorf event. Waldorf schools were imported from the West in 1995 or so.

I was tremendously disappointed, but I couldn’t quite say why. Was it just the tourist in me, disappointed by the lack of quaint costumes? I recalled a wine festival I had stumbled upon the previous autumn in the village where I live, when the participants had been dressed in the traditional Moravian lace-and-embroidery-embellished garb. They started performing traditional songs and dances, parading through the streets of the village joined by a small marching band and a group of men pulling a red wagon that held a big decanter of burčak, an enticingly sweet midpoint on the journey from grape juice to wine. They poured glasses for the folks watching along the sidewalk or from their lace-curtained windows. I noticed that I was the only foreigner there, in fact, probably the only person not from the village itself, and this produced a wonderful feeling of satisfaction at the authenticity of it all.

So why the disappointment at those real Czech folks marching down to the river, trying to resurrect some bit of their heritage, even if many could not remember all the words to the songs? The urge to resurrect old traditions is here, as everywhere, a reaction to the ever-accelerating pace of life and the fear that one’s own way of life is being consumed by the global behemoth of instant glitz, pop culture, and convenience. In a country that just 15 years ago was dominated by secret police, closed borders, and banana lines, things are changing quickly and people are in a hurry to make up for lost time.

My disappointment, it turns out, was at being confronted with my own naivety. I had moved to the Czech Republic in hopes that I could learn something from a people who had had no choice for so long but to define themselves by other means than what they could afford to buy. Instead I found many of them eager to acquire as many as possible of the vices of the West. The march down to the river was a response to that, an unglamorous act of real people trying to do something real for themselves, trying to create meaning where meaning is in danger of slipping away.

On my cynical days, the growing Czech hunger for the consumer lifestyle suggests that human nature longs for little more than cool stuff to buy; real and meaningful traditions seem only to survive as long as people are prohibited, whether by circumstance or design, from having enough shopping opportunities.

On other days, however, I catch glimpses of an entire nation rallying to redefine itself after centuries of being ripped apart and re-sewn by the hands of various would-be empire builders. They are hard at work rebuilding their social institutions and public infrastructure, trying to purge the last whiff of totalitarianism from their souls. In effect, they are redesigning their society from the bottom up, and a necessary part of that is to resurrect old traditions. How else to remember who they were? The enthusiasm and success of their effort suggests far more convincingly that the fabric of human nature is truly resilient and durable stuff.

C. is talking more and more these days, and doing a good deal of researching as well, about aiming to go into translation in one way or another. She's been writing to translators and asking how they got started, what kind of education they see as essential, and so on. She's gotten a number of responses, and has I think gotten some good advice, both on the feasibility of the endeavor in general, and of the specifics that are necessary to make it happen.

One of the best schools for translation, says almost everyone who's responded to her email queries, is Georgetown in DC. It's convenient that my plans may take me there as well. While improbable that I'll make contacts in the liberal politics sector of DC while working for the country's biggest mortgage company, who knows what can happen. I would love to keep my eyes open for an opportunity like that. Just a chance to learn some things and occasionally work on my long term project of making liberal goals sound appealing to middle-of-the-road people, instead of just sounding like the rantings of the lunatic fringe. What's so lunatic fringe about a little health care and education? What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

I read an interesting article about George Bush in a magazine that our coworker Mike brought back for us from the States. The magazine was called Texas Monthly (and looked laughable at best) but had at least two interesting articles in it, both of which were written by apparently nonpartisan journalists about how the George Bush who had been governor of Texas had changed so drastically since assuming national power. There was a reference in there to his repealing the estate tax. Did I hear about this? Where was I? It is said to have happened before Sept. 11, 2001, which was when I was at SJC and oblivious to the goings-on in the outside world. It makes sense that I would have missed it. The article was right to point out that the estate tax served as one of the last lines of defense against the rise of an established aristocracy in the US.

I should be sitting down to read the last 50 or so student essays from last semester, but I just can't bring myself to return to the task of being a teacher. This break has been very nice, and I don't at all feel that my life is lacking a thing during the paid break from teaching. If I wasn't sure at the end of the semester, I am definitely sure now that I was not made to be a teacher. I am not looking forward to the return of daily classes and preparation, though I think a number of factors are cooperating, if not conspiring, to make this semester much more bearable than last. For one thing, I am teaching 3 different courses instead of 7. For another, I can from the beginning be putting to use the dos and don'ts I learned last semester. Lastly, I plan to assign only page-long-or-less writing assignments. It'll be doable, and not much more.

It's now 5:00 pm and I should go get dinner started (lox, brie, and roasted garlic on crackers--more of an appetizer than a meal, but we enjoy it immensely) so we can go see 21 Grams, which is playing as part of the film fest in town this week.

I had a wicked cold, but I guess it's mostly better these days, and just in time too, because we finally got our national health insurance cards yesterday. I love this insurance thing. I know that there are many companies in the USA that provide insurance for their employees, and it wouldn't be too difficult for me to hook up with one of those when we come back. But that's not the point. I like that it is a societal value that everyone, regardless of level of education or the careerness of their jobs, or the size of the company they work for, or any other factor—regardless of any external factors, it is a societal value that everyone should have access to a doctor and to medicine. Health lies outside the market economy, and believe me, you can see capitalism in people’s eyes now that they have a taste for it, now that they can finally participate in the good life with the rest of the world after 40 dark years. They are working hard here to get up to speed. It frustrates them to no end that they had been part of the Empire that ran half of Europe for centuries. They were one of the most industrialized nations in the world between the wars, and then they spent 40 years waiting in banana lines while the rest of Europe built itself back up from the ashes of World War II.

It's so strange to be in the place where so much history happened. I am not neglecting American history when I say this, because America has its own interesting patchwork of historical places and moments, but a history much older than I could ever imagine in America marched through these streets, and is still walking around in the shadows today. All that communism stuff that we heard so much about was here, was day-to-day life for everyone. Napoleon is not a funny little man with one hand in his lapel in a painting. He marched right through and conquered Brno on his way to Moscow, in the not so recent past, because really, 1810 was practically yesterday. There is a phrase I have heard a few times since I've been here that really makes the point: In Europe, 100 miles is a long way; in America, 100 years is a long time. A building downtown has a plaque written in Czech near the door: "W. A. Mozart lived here, November 1789 to January 1790." I’m making up the years because I can’t remember exactly. It was only three months, and I can’t help but think that the plaque is is exactly like all those "George Washington slept here" signs you’d see all over New England. But anyway, the Czechs. You can see such fierce pride from them. They are the first to tell you that they live in a small, relatively unimportant country in central Europe. Don’t dare call this eastern Europe. That’s Ukraine and Bulgaria and places like that. Speaking of which, I think Ukrainians here are much like Mexicans in America. Since Ukraine’s economy is only getting worse with time (15% of the national budget every year goes to dealing with the aftermath of Chernobyl, and they’re still having the hardest time getting up to speed with this whole post-communism thing), so the Ukrainians all flood next door to try to find work, sometimes legally, sometimes otherwise. At the foreign police, where we had to go to register after we got our visas, there were six doors: Four for Ukrainians, two for everyone else. The head of the English Department told us that they had a small Ukrainian boy living with them for a while. His mother would call occasionally, mentioning that she’d been paid that month in potatoes rather than cash, and could they please send her some money. Only in the Ukraine would they consider the Czechs rich enough to donate money to anyone. The Czechs know they are not rich. They can afford a modest living, but only if they buy domestically produced things. A pair of Levi’s costs most of a day’s wages for your average worker.

I keep getting sidetracked. I started talking about health care. After communism went the way of the dodo, people wanted to get as far as possible from it. We are told that all of the political science majors and grad students these days are fiercely right-wing, because anything appearing the least bit left is frighteningly close to the c-word (well, here it’s a k-word, but you get the idea). While still very wary of America and American influence and the hyper-consumerism that America represents, they want the free market like nobody’s business. They just want to base it on a European model. And they want nothing to do with political correctness. All my English students know exactly what it is, and they laugh. Americans are not really free, they argue, because they cannot really speak their minds. It seems like Czechs tend to see American left-wing ideas as quaint, because they lived under a hyper left-wing government for so long, and saw the consequences of those ideas taken to their extremes. (See Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron.) You could not own anything, because everything was publicly owned. You paid monthly for your house, but it belonged to the government. If you lived in a high-rise, the residents of the building all owned it as a collective. But that meant that if you moved out, you received nothing for your share. The out-of-town garden plots that I mentioned are so popular precisely because, so I am told, they are the only property that people were allowed to own outright under the old system. Since food was so expensive (many of our coworkers mention the banana lines), people built their little one-room cottages in their garden plot, and planted fruit trees and planted all kinds of not-so-perishable vegetables, and grew their own food because they had to. So now, given the opportunity, and a real taste of the alternative, the free market shines brighter than gold to the Czechs.

And yet, it would be ludicrous to have to pay for health care. That’s not part of the equation. The free market is beautiful because you can finally work hard and make more money. The goal, however, is not the money, but the quality of life it can buy you: a car for the first time in your life, imported produce (cabbage and potatoes must surely get old after a while), a fresh coat of plaster for the outside of your house, a more exciting trip during summer holiday. And while you are pursuing the particular ways in which you want to enjoy high quality of life, one of the government's jobs is to provide you with the means to stay healthy. I thought that, sometime in the late 18th century, we had all agreed that governments are not meant to squander the people's lives. I thought that after WWI and WWII, we had all agreed that diplomacy was surely a better recourse than that most offensive of euphemisms, collateral damage. Apparently I did not get the memo.

The Czechs are a fascinating people, but I guess every foreign culture examined up close like this would be, and mostly because of the contrast provided to your own implicit assumptions about the world, about how it should or does operate. It’s funny, though: the largest barrier to mutual understanding is without doubt the language. If not for that god-damned Tower of Babel, the impediments to world harmony would be a small fraction of what they are now. And granted, I’m only in Europe, of which America by and large is still pretty much but a cultural offshoot. The differences are apparent enough, but it is still not hard to explain yourself to each other, provided you have a common language. Czechs I meet have a lot of stereotypes about Americans (when I say I miss American food, they without fail ask, "oh, hamburgers?"). But with a common language (in this case, mine), you can explain your own cultural values to someone else, and if they don’t agree, they can at least understand. But being able to explain your culture requires a high level of fluency in another language, and if not for their mastery of my language, I would be a mute and incompetent idiot who fails at basic things that everyone knows how to do. For instance, if an elderly or disabled person boards the bus and there is not a free seat, you will get up and offer yours. Often, three or four young men all shoot out of their seats at the same time, each vying to be the one who most quickly demonstrated his respect for his elders. Even rebellious looking teenage boys in black leather jackets jump up, because that’s just what you do. If someone under the age of 15 or so fails to notice the old woman boarding the bus, another passenger will not hesitate to scold him or her. I was scolded the first time this happened, and I only made it worse by failing to understand my admonishment, it being, of course, in a foreign language.

C. and I spent the afternoon learning how to say "my new castle" in Czech. I know, it probably shouldn’t have taken us 3 hours, but it’s harder than it sounds. Allow me to share. There are seven cases in Czech, one each for the seven various grammatical categories a word can fill:

Each of these grammatical roles takes the stem of the word and tacks a characteristic ending onto it. Thus each noun has seven singular and seven plural forms it can assume. But you don’t just put the noun in the appropriate case. All adjectives and other modifiers in the noun clause get put in that case as well. But you can’t forget that Czech has three genders as well (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and every noun falls into one of the three genders. Adjectives and other modifiers must agree in case and gender with the noun they modify, so there are 42 forms (7 cases x 3 genders x 2 for singular/plural) for every adjective. But the 40-letter Czech alphabet is also divided into hard and soft consonants, not to mention hard and soft vowels, and there are different patterns for the case endings for masculine nouns ending in a hard consonant, like hrad (castle) than there are for masculine nouns ending in a soft consonant, like stroj (machine). And you can’t forget about the long and short vowels. These are not like in English, where it’s the difference between the vowel sounds in cat and lake. You actually pronounce a long vowel exactly the same as, but for a longer time than, its short counterpart, and this can have drastic differences in meaning. Mile /me-leh/ means kindly (adv). Milé /me-leh-eh/ means kind (adj). Míle /meee-leh/ means mile. It is quickly becoming clear that a basic tenet of learning Czech is staring at pages and pages of charts until your eyes cross. That’s how we spent the afternoon, and my eyes are in fact crossed.

This is one anniversary I’d completely forgotten about until I typed the date. I have lost all sympathy, as apparently has the rest of the world. I still feel for the families and friends, but not for the country. It’s pretty apparent to everyone, except to about 55% of the Americans (thankfully, down 20% from a few months ago), that those in power have manipulated and squandered the world’s sympathy, turning the events two years ago into an imaginary mandate to strong arm the world at a cost many times greater than the worst estimates.

I didn’t intend to write about politics when I sat down, didn’t really intend to write about anything in particular. I just wanted to allow some time to see what would come out of my fingertips if they were given some exercise. Funny how I consider language to come out of the fingertips and not the mouth, but it’s true: words that come out though the mouth are ephemeral, soon forgotten, not so carefully weighed as those that first see the light of day on paper. C. and I talked about this yesterday, about how statistics show that most people in the world today are visual learners. How far must visual learners have lagged behind the auditory and tactile learners up until a few hundred years ago! Further back in history, before textbooks and computer screens, before diagrams and advertising, people considered brilliant need not have seen something in print to remember it, would have remembered it after one hearing, and the masses of visual learners would have wondered where such crispness of mind originated. Thus the technology of the day decides what sort of person is considered excellent. The only way the future IT guys of the human race could maintain their pasty white pallor was to hang out in the darkness at the back of the cave debating the best arrangements of sticks for various types of fires. Where have all the wicker weavers gone, all the craftsmen of obscure and obsolete trades? Plastering, my friend Chris always said, is a dead art in Chicago, and he meant in the world. His grandfather, a Swedish immigrant, had been a plasterer in Chicago, had plastered half the ceilings in the city, he said in his typically exaggerated manner, but I got the point. Nobody plasters anymore. It’s a craft that the current aesthetic economy simply cannot support, or so I thought. Plastering is alive and well in the Czech Republic, or at least in Brno. All of the buildings around town are brick and stucco. You never see bare brick, except in the scars left on the neighbors when a building is torn down. Granted, the newer ones have much less elaborate ornamentation than the old ones, but when the old ones get renovated all the plasterwork gets reapplied in all its former splendor. Our landlady seems to have been doing quite a bit of renovation lately. We are probably seeing the tail end of the process that split her single-family house into a house with room for two tenants in separate units. The last thing to be attended to is the replastering of the outside. The men in royal blue overalls showed up yesterday with the traditional tools of the trade and began at about 7:15 in the morning to turn the huge pile of sand in the front yard into the outside of a house.

It’s evening here, and the landlady and the television jack installation guy are in our tiny apartment in the basement. We have gotten over the self-consciousness of our horrible Czech with the landlady—pointing madly and gesturing, pantomiming with all sorts of ridiculous gestures—but when new people arrive, especially men for some reason, we become embarrassed again. I really can’t wait for this Czech class to begin. I know that we won’t become that much more fluent in only a year, but I can already feel what little Czech I did know from our three weeks of lessons in Plzen slipping away as we meet more English speakers and spend more time at the faculty with our impressively English-fluent colleagues. The class will be good, because I do want to learn Czech, I do want to be able to conduct basic conversations with folks, talk to them, stumble my way through a conversation by asking in Czech what word would fill in the hole in my vocabulary. It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn this language: studying it while living in the only country in the world where it is spoken. And as distant as my Czech ancestry is—and I especially feel its distance when I am asked by people at the faculty about the details (“Oh, my mother’s grandparents left Bohemia for the States as children in the 1880s, so really I’m more fourth than third generation, and really only a quarter Czech”)—I still feel like I am paying homage to my lineage in the only way I can. What else is my lineage? My dad was adopted into what is now my family name; he never knew his real father, who split when he was six months old. I’m as much Scottish as I am Czech, from my dad’s mother’s side, but I would never call myself Scottish, unless of course I went there, I suppose. My mom’s family, as unenthused as I was about them when I was growing up, are at least the family who stayed close. Hell, my dad only thought once a year or so to call his brother, who lived not three miles from our house the whole time. So where’s my lineage? It flows out from that piece of land in southern Indiana where my mom’s brothers have trailer homes, where they have lived since 1950 after leaving the immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, where my mom lived until she left home at 15 to escape her abusive father, and I must own all of that now with pride. And since my mom’s aunt Rose took the last memories of my grandmother’s generation to the grave with her a couple of years ago, and my mom’s death leaves only four of the seven second-generationers, I can pay homage to my lineage by spending some time here and learning at least some of the language and culture, not to keep it alive in the family, because really it is long dead, but to renew it, to reconnect with whatever we would have called roots, roots which were severed and withered during the twentieth century, when so much was severed and so much withered, when the world was torn apart and re-sewn so many times that the fabric began to fall apart. This is why I was so pissed off when a new acquaintance of ours, upon hearing my explanation for being here, dismissed it by saying ”oh, doin’ the roots thing, huh?” I don’t really care how many other doin’-the-roots-thingers have passed through your life in the ten years you’ve been in Brno, man, but I’m doing something here and I’d appreciate not being interrupted.

Non sequitur: Dave Eggers has aso cued me in on what I think has been my biggest difficulty with writing since I ever first tried it: self-consciousness. He was so in your face about it because he realized what I have long suspected: it’s impossible to escape self-consciousness. Or maybe he only agreed with me, for he is certainly not the first author to address the problem of who the narrator should be. And I agree with him: experience is the only authentic thing. Only the individual and unique sequence of moments is real. Everything else, and I mean everything else, is derivative, muted, matte, a shadow, a fiction, a phantom, nothing. Whenever I put myself in a position to try to describe experience, or a story derived from experience, I immediately run into that problem. The experience is an infinite range of meanings, and all the writing down of it does is remove most of the possibilities. The writing down of it closes it off in time, tells it from the present backward, assumes that enough distance has passed since the events being described that they can now be told and analyzed with enough hindsight to put them in their proper context. It closes off the future possibilities. You cannot write while you are still experiencing the thing, because you have to go home and sit down at your god-damned computer and put the words in sequential order, paint little pictures. So when it’s done, then you go to your computer—or your spiral notebook or microcassette recorder—and then you put the words in the right order like a good boy, and you try to convince someone else of how it was to be there. But if he had been there, just like you were, then you wouldn’t have to tell it, you wouldn’t have to put the words in any order at all, because he would already know. And sure, at that point, go ahead and compare the experience. Clearly not everyone in the same circumstance has the same reaction, pulls the same threads out of the tapestry. It’s the drawing of the experience for one who was not there that I see as the impossible task. And that’s where I have something to learn from the straight-up storyteller, because Andrew Wright, fine fella that he is, made me feel like I had been there. Dave Eggers, despite all the self-consciousness, also made me feel like I was there. It’s not impossible. It just demands patience and diligence.

I’ve just finished reading Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Amazing. A little weak in some parts, a little directionless in some, but hey, he warned me at the beginning that it would be so. Plenty of disclaimers throughout the book. Does that make it alright? It’s funny. As a critic, I read that book and say, “Oh, transparent plot mechanism here. Weak dialogue there. Too much profanity and italics covering up for lack of substance here. Not enough revision there. Etc.” And, hey, he’d reply, it’s non-fiction. What do you want? Yet it still amazed me. All the criticism of thinking too much about thinking too much in the most self-conscious book ever written. C. and I talked about it for a long time at the restaurant the other day while we were waiting for Andrew Wright to speak. He’s a professional storyteller, originally from England, now living in Hungary. He was really good. The interesting thing about that sequence of events—first the talking, almost arguing at times, about what it means for a novel to be absolutely autobiographical, even to a fault, even when it interferes, followed soon thereafter by a storyteller who decides that on that night he will only tell stories from his own life, no old standards, no traditional tales. Just stories about himself and his friends, interesting people he has met, a man with a generator (well, being a Brit, his word was ’dynamo’), for instance, attached to the rear wheel of his bicycle, who rides an out-of-town loop from the park to the top of the hill five times, just long and far enough to hear the Friday evening radio theater productions on his old transistor radio.

C. and I arrived late. We couldn’t find the building at first, realized at the last minute that it was across town from the building where the rest of the TEFL conference was being held. We ran to the tram, got off in a neighborhood we’d never before seen, and wandered up the hill and through the looming 1940s communist postmodern architecture of the university dorms, atop a hill with a view of all the neon in town and the paneláky, rushed in through an echoing hallway that looked like a horrible hospital waiting room and toward a room where, once we arrived, we realized that our loud and echoing footsteps had made listening difficult for the entire audience sitting on collapsible chairs around a man we couldn’t see. The room was illuminated by one gooseneck lamp aimed at the faux wood paneling behind the storytelling man, steadier and less distracting than the fire circle which I’m sure was its model, or at least its inspiration. It looked spur of the moment—he could have spoken, and everyone could have sat more comfortably, in the lecture hall not 20 feet away—but the effect of the light and the togetherness and spontaneity was tangible. We felt his stories, felt that something real and true was filtering into us through the dim light, that we, an audience who had never met, were somehow united by this experience, had been through it together, and we all left smiling, tired and ready for bed. It was not too heavy, no ridiculous irony or melancholy sentiments: just an old guy who had known some interesting folks in his day and knew how to pace his retelling, which words to choose, when to pause in a completely uncalculated way long enough that our minds would start wandering just where he hoped they would.

I don’t remember my dreams. I can’t. They’re simply not there, not to be found when the morning sun and neighbor’s dog’s incessant yapping—a dog intentionally bred, for all I know, to be just the right size for practical folks in small walkups—first make their way, hand in hand, through the bedroom window. The dog’s name is Peggy, or some Czech name that sounds remarkably similar. C. and I are living in Brno, in the basement of a kind and patient woman’s house (widow or divorcée we don’t know, haven’t yet figured out how to ask), who says and re-says her simple sentences, pantomiming all the while, until we understand, or at least pretend that we do. Once she pantomimed a chicken laying an egg, but we didn’t understand, worrying that she graphically meant to indicate some toilet function or another. Only hours after she had taken the eggs from our refrigerator did we finally connect the two.

We have our own entrance in the back, near the door of the woman’s other boarder, Peggy’s owner, a night nurse in her 30s. When we came here to look at the apartment, and again when we returned to sign the lease, we never once heard Peggy, or the huge German shepherd next door. It seemed we had found an ideal place, a place to practice our Czech with someone who only knows Czech, a place away from the street noise that had plagued our sleep at the sublet where we stayed when we first arrived, which had been a fifth floor efficiency without kitchen appliances, only one room really, a block away from a very audible beer garden and much closer to loud traffic and young men with old mufflers. It belonged to a friend of the guy we’ve still not met, the guy whose recommendation got us our jobs teaching English at the university. Our new place, our home, is out of town, a decent bus ride away from anything, but with views of sky and windowsills for growing herbs, on the outskirts of an honest-to-god red-terra-cotta-roofed Czech village called Holásky. We don’t live in Prague, where all the Americans live, where all the tourists go, or even in Brno, the second city. We live in a village, and when I walk through the streets of that village I am the first foreigner they have ever seen. I am exotic, famous and foreign, straight from the pages of National Geographic. But I try to blend in, try not to advertise myself as foreign. A rock star should not wear leather pants in public. Goldie Hawn should wear sweat pants and a baseball hat when she goes jogging on the beach. I get off on the fact that my blond hair and blue eyes often cause people to walk up to me and start chatting away in Czech. I am forced to respond, of course, by saying, “Omlouvam se. Nemluvim cesky,” which means, “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Czech.” I have said it so often, and it contains none of the strange Czech sounds that I can’t say, and it is short enough that I have the intonation and stress of all the syllables down, that I dream that it might almost sound accentless to the people asking. They know better.

Our landlady has a nice backyard, with easily half an acre of functional garden. There is just a small shaded sitting area near our window, which is at ground level. Peggy, finally eye-to-eye with someone, sometimes barks in our window at us, as though we’re intruding. I fantasize about the various ways I could kill her to silence that constant squealing yelp of a sound that comes out of her mouth. C. says it’s horrible to think such things, but secretly I think she agrees that smashing the dog’s head between cinder blocks would make our mornings much more pleasant. We open our door in the morning at least once a week to find a basket of fresh fruits or vegetables waiting there: plums, pears, tomatoes, parsley, pounds and pounds of potatoes. We are waiting for the kohlrabi (quite popular here despite its ugliness) and the peppers (not nearly as hot as those we are used to from New Mexico, but still beautiful to look at) to get harvested, hoping she will make gifts of these to us as well.