Anyway, since our spring kickball season has started back up, I thought it appropriate to show some pictures of our Little Rock kickball league and what our games tend to look like.  However, these are pictures from back in October, so the weather is a little more pleasant now than it looks like in the pictures.

This is what the field looks like after a good rainstorm

In case you were wondering what that sign on the fence said…

I do not claim any association with these people...

As you can tell, a high-society crowd we are not…

That’s it for now; more pictures will be up later.

WINTER IN ARKANSAS

I’m not sure how you deal with winter weather in Prague (though believe me, I’d like to be over there and learning it right now), but in Arkansas it’s taken on a somewhat comical face.  Right now our state is facing anywhere from .25–1.25 inches (.64-3.18 centimeters) of snow/ice, and yet despite that most Arkansans are panic buying as if we were facing a winter storm more deserving of Scandinavia and the southern United States.

It would be hilarious if not for the problems that inevitably occur; from mobs descending on grocery stores to inept drivers crashing on the road, the biggest threat right now is not the weather at all, it is the people surrounding us.  I’m curious, though, what kind of winter weather does it take to shut down a city like Prague?

…and no, there will be no dueling banjoes tune for site theme music…

So yeah…

I’m not done yet…

…and when I learn some more Czech, I hope there might be room for an English translator on the staff…

Yep, that's most of the team...with our old pal Flat Stanley...

And to Jenne and Pavel, thank you so much for allowing me to stay in your apartment for the summer; I doubt my project would have been nearly as memorable without being here right in the heart of the city.  Through all the countless times your Czech language skills have saved my rather…limited ones, to the helpful guidance throughout the city and introducing me to the awesomeness that is tango, I wanted to say how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for me.

Jenne, Pavel, and, of course, Nori...with Flat Stanley...

So once again, to everyone in Prague, I wanted to say how thankful I am for the time I got to spend here this summer getting to know and work with all of you.  It’s been three of the best months of my life, and just to let you know…

Once I land in Little Rock tomorrow, you can start counting down the days until I’m back.

One spot on the “Communist Prague” tour that I forgot about is one that I walk past every day, believe it or not (and it took me several weeks to realize that I was walking past it, too…).  This little memorial is hidden away inside a walk-through in a building less than a block from the Tesco building, but due to the lack of lighting during the day it’s hard to see; in November 1989, this was the spot where Communist police forces stopped a small student march (heading to Wenceslaus Square) by force, but it backfired on the ruling regime, snowballing from a relatively small march into the Velvet Revolution.  Now there is a small, simple plaque to mark where it all began.  Truly humbling stuff.

This is where it all started...

And after the tour last weekend, I also left out the massive Zizkov TV tower that is either one of the most stunning things you’ll see in Prague or one of the downright ugliest eyesores in an otherwise picture-perfect skyline (it’s very much like politics in the US; you either love it or hate it with a passion, really odd).  It was originally constructed in 1989 by the Soviet authorities ostensibly for broadcast TV, but there is the urban legend that it was really meant to jam the BBC and Radio Free Europe, but nobody knows for sure…  In the decades since, it, like most of the other areas of Prague, has fallen prey to prankster artist David Cerny; for an exhibition he put giant iron crawling babies all over the building, and people were so struck by it that they got the local authorities to keep the babies in place.

...yeah...I'm really not sure what to say about it...

While I was doing that, I was also wandering around several parts of Mala Strana on the western side of town (also close to where I work at the Czech Development Agency).  Like when I found the embassy for Belize several weeks ago, I came across even more different embassies that can relate back to some classmates…

On Nerudova Street there’s the Italian embassy (actually in a nicer-looking building than the US one, but not with as nice a backyard), so a shoutout to Yuriy working in Rome and Ashley and Josh currently pinballing through Milan and the rest of the country.

Yep, that's the Italian Embassy

...and that's one impressive front entrance...

While I was wandering around the area, I also found an embassy that I think belongs to Poland…or at least the sign said what I think translated into “Republic of Poland.”  Anyway, the flag also looked a little…different from what I thought the Polish flag looked like…so Joanna, I’m deferring this question to you…

Like I said, I'm assuming that's Polish...

...I thought the Polish flag was just red and white, but this one has a seal on it too...

And there were other interesting monuments that I found along the way as well.  Going back to the communist era stuff from earlier, as I was embassy-searching I came across one of the many World War II memorials that are scattered throughout the city.  This one was located near the Mala Strana (lesser town) tram stop, also not far from the Charles Bridge; it was surprisingly simple, just a metal base with a flag (also metal) with colors symbolizing the Czech flag and the dates of Nazi occupation.  It stands out so well because it’s in the middle of an open park, with almost nothing else to challenge its supremacy…I don’t know who zones these things, but they’re GOOD…

Pretty stirring memorial, actually...

The dates of occupation

And the actual memorial plaque...though I can't make out what it says...

Again there’s the idea of history piling on top of history; that’s one of the main things I’ve found since I’ve started touring for my last few weeks here.  It’s really something to be in one spot and literally see centuries of history all around you; it has to be one of my favorite moments from my time here in Prague.

On the good side, though, I got some extra time after that to wander around Old Town with a good buddy and take a few snapshots on an oddly quiet Saturday; maybe it’s because this is “vacation month” for Czechs, but it didn’t seem nearly as crowded there as it normally does.  I came almost exactly at noon, so the first stop was, of course, the Bohemia Bagel shop near the square (for those of you that missed the last post, they serve pretty authentic American-style food…plus have free refills, so yay for them).  After a nice lunch, it was time for some more pictures at Old Town.

This time around the first stop was the spot outside the Clock Tower where there are markings on the sidewalk that are either plus signs or x’s, depending on how you’re standing…anyway, this is the spot where 30 “heretics” were hanged in 1621 (the date is also marked into the street), engulfing an already-ongoing rebellion that would grow into the Thirty Years’ War.  This war would devastate Europe to an extent never seen before, ravaging entire regions through both combat and armies that moved like waves of locusts, scavenging whatever they could find from the surrounding countryside.   The Czech populations were reduced by a third, but the German territories were reduced by almost HALF.  The sad thing is that nobody knew exactly why they were fighting; religion was a broad cause, and after the war the Peace of Westphalia (1648) governments decided that no longer would states be able to intervene because of religon.  From now on, states were sovereign territories (and it has ostensibly continued to today).  All because of that one action…talk about not realizing the consequences…

There's the date etched into the street...

 And of course, my traveling companion wanted in on some of the photos…

And there are the spots...with Flat Stanley thrown in for good measure...

 Just around the corner from this rather macabre memorial (but nothing compared to that Bone Church at Kutna Hora), there is one of the most famous clocks in the world…I think.  It’s one of the sights that nearly all guide books say people absolutely HAVE to see before they leave Prague…so I thought it only appropriate I show it to you guys.  Prague’s astronomical clock was completed from the period 0f 1410 through 1522, with several additions added on in the centuries since.  The legend goes that when the main part of the clock was constructed in 1490, the heads of the city had the clockmaker’s eyes gouged out so he could never make one as beautiful for another city…proving that keeping up with the Joneses is a LOT older than you think…

Flat Stanley posing with the clock

...no, I don't know which disciples are in the picture...

Vanity and the Miser

Plague and the Turk

Of course, the clock is also attached to the tower itself, rising up several stories above the rest of Old Town Square and allowing for some very nice views of the city…although it would be a bit challenging for anyone with a fear of heights (if you know me, you know where this is going…).

The view from up top is quite nice...the climb, not so much...

 

It was a pretty harrowing climb, but I managed to get up to the top floor without any major trouble.  I’d have gotten some shots looking down the staircase and the elevator shaft, but yeah, that would have been a tad too terrifying for me…so you’ll have to make due with some other shots I got looking out from the tower, and I think you’ll enjoy what I got from there.

Flat Stanley across from the Tyn Church...and some more spires to climb later...

Yet another photo of Prague Castle...cameras are just drawn to it for some reason...

And in the bottom right-hand corner is the place where the whole uprising began...

Also, I’d like to say thanks to the Frommer’s Guidebook people for having very helpful sections in the Prague book about this…it was quite the time-saver.

Today I set out searching for the monuments left over from the communist era in Prague; the sad thing was a lot of them were easy to find simply because they were so damned ugly (honestly, the architecture is named “brutalist” for a reason, it’s extremely painful to look at). 

First on the list was the Tesco building that’s barely two blocks from my apartment.  It was built in the mid-1970s and it pretty much epitomized the “Brutalist” style of architecture (namely, having all the ducts, pipes, and other inner parts of the building on the outside), and it’s gotten a LOT of flak from people over the decades for its rather hideous design (perhaps most famously by Prince Charles of Britain).  However, since there are so few Communist-era buildings remaining in central Prague, a number of architectural enthusiasts had it registered as a nationally-protected cultural landmark after Tesco announced plans to knock it down and build something better-looking.

See, even the weather wanted to show how horrific this building is...

Next I walked east towards perhaps the most famous Czech landmark during the 1989 Velvet Revolution (the peaceful overthrow of the Communist regime), Wenceslas Square.  On a normal day you might see several thousand people walking along the square for any and all manner of reasons, but during the fall of 1989 there were over HALF A MILLION people crammed into that relatively small space, and that’s in a city of maybe 1.2 million people at the time!  So yeah…this was the event to be at during that time.  A lot has changed since then, no doubt about it; most of the square has fallen prey to capitalism (the balcony where then-dissident and future president Vaclav Havel addressed the protesters is now part of a British clothing store chain), but the sense of scale there is still bewildering.  Standing at the top of the square, it’s hard to believe that over half of the city crowded into there…

...that's one big square...but still, mind-boggling how to fit over 500,000 in there...

Over to the side of the square, though, is another monument to “brutalist” architecture.  The former parliament building sits right next to the museum at the top of the square, and like the Tesco building before it, it’s design is rather hideous to the extreme.  If the architects were planning function without any beauty, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Definitely not the prettiest building in the world...

Of course, by this time I was starting to get hungry, so I headed over to a bagel place in Old Town that served food American style (and with free refills too, who can argue with that?).  On the way there I passed yet another communist era landmark, though it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wenceslas Square.  In the same building that served as Franz Kafka’s grammar school, close to the spot where the Thirty Years War began, and near an apartment once where Einstein once lived, there is the Kinsky Palace where, in 1948, the leader of the Czech Communist Party announced what was essentially a coup d’etat, greeted with cheers by the population below (who naively believed that, after World War II, the Communists would bring the peace and prosperity they promised).  It’s quite eerie, honestly; seeing Old Town Square crowded on a Saturday, it’s not hard to see what it would have been like on that day…scary stuff.

Seriously, the place looks too cheerful to be the scene of a coup d'etat...

Speaking of scary, the next sight on my list of places to see is the site that once held the world’s largest statue of Iosef  Dzhugashvili (better known as Stalin, literally meaning “Man of Steel”).  Built during the height of his cult of personality, when it was finished in 1955 (two years after the man himself had died), said personality cult was already starting to die off, so the opening ceremony was probably more than a little awkward… 

After several years of wondering what the heck to do with this rather lavish statue of a man that was now officially reviled as a monster, in 1962 the state authorities finally decided to dynamite the thing and get rid of it (unfortunately for the city residents, though, they had to use enough dynamite to blow out most of the windows in Prague to demolish the statue).  For almost the next three decades the site remained empty and something of an eyesore for the city, so in 1991 the government allowed a certain artist to recycle the site with a new structure, but since the artist was David Cerny (the prankster artist of Prague, if you recall), what they got was a giant metronome that is supposedly “counting the time since the Velvet Revolution.”  It’s quite surreal being up there, watching the metronome sway quitely back and forth while the rest of the city goes about their lives down below, watching over everything and just keeping time…

That thing is HUGE!

I was surprised by the kind of view this site had over the rest of Prague.

Of course, it’s that time to update about some more interesting cultural diferences that I’ve noticed during my time here in the Czech Republic. This time, though, it’s more about the matters that are less interesting of a culture shock and more of a culture concern…

Smoking

About the only thing that has really perturbed me during my time over here has been the amount of people smoking that I have to pass through every day and deal with at restaurants; no offense to my friends that like the stuff, but it’s just something I don’t much care for.  That being said, the European styles of cigarettes don’t bother me nearly as much as American-made ones do…maybe it’s how they’re put together, I don’t know.  I guess a good example would be nights at the Flying Saucer versus nights here at The Globe; at the former, I can always smell the smoke in my clothes afterwards and have to wash them immediately, but after a night at the latter I don’t smell anything, even if people were smoking at the table right next to me.  Odd stuff…

BMI Rising

As just about everybody has noticed over the past few years, Americans are being bombarded with images and statistics saying that we are one of the fattest nations in the world.  Contrast that with the image of Europeans as pretty much the opposite, and you have the dueling images I had in mind when I arrived here in May.  Surprisingly, though, the Czech Republic is somewhere around the middle; it’s a nation with BOTH a love of traditionally heavy food and of physical fitness (so they balance each other out), but the growth of new fast food restaurants is starting to tilt that equation just a bit…it’s less prominent in the city than in the countryside, but I guess only time will tell how this develops…

Coupling

One of the more shocking things that come to mind for someone from a traditionally conservative part of the country is the sheer amount of PDA that goes on around here amongst the seemingly endless stream of couples that roam around the city.  I can just see Moral Guardians recoiling in horror from the spectacle, but it actually has an interesting origin during the notorious lack of privacy in the communist era.  When the Soviet apartment blocks went up, one of the biggest problems was the lack of privacy (due to paper thin walls and the like, and I can attest to this, you can hear everyone and everything in those places).  So with staying home not a possibility, young people sought privacy in the form of anonymity in a crowd, since that’s about the most privacy they could get, and the tradition continues to this day.

Vacation Time

Over this week, most of my colleagues have gone on parts of their annual July-August vacations, leaving me in a mostly-empty office.  In the Czech Republic the minimum allowance of vacation time is four weeks, so needless to say I’m jealous and they’re horrified at the American counterpart of two weeks (according to one of them, “that’s inhumane!”).  In the end, though, it balances out; according to reports from a recent conference I went to, European workers are actually more productive than American workers but it balances out due to the lesser amounts of time they work during the year.  One of the panelists theorized that the only way to fix this would be to “do away with all the vacation time and work as much as Americans,” but after several angry looks from most of the audience he also said “I’m NOT advocating it, I’m just saying it’s a possibility…and one that I don’t like…”

As the day goes on I’ll probably be adding more to this…we’ll see.

Given that my metro pass is set to expire this week, I thought it best to start visiting the stuff farther out first, and this weekend it’s starting off with Vyšehrad Castle.  This picturesque former fortress is several miles south of Prague and is also one of the oldest sites around Prague and the Czech Republic; archaeological digs have discovered items dating from around 900 AD, before any Slavs had settled in the area.  In later centuries it was thought to be the original castle in the Prague area, serving as the basis for the mythical origins of Prague and the Czech Republic (albeit with severe embellishment in the nineteenth centuries).

Today the major attractions at Vyšehrad are the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (unfortunately for us they don’t allow pictures inside the church) and walking around the gardens (built on the former armory) and battlements that ring the entire site; walking along the walls, it’s easy to see why this place was fortified so early; you can see for miles around and almost over the entirety of Prague’s central districts, so it was quite impressive in my opinion.

Of course, the trip wouldn’t be complete without bring Flat Stanley along.  Since I don’t much care for having my picture taken, he got to be the photogenic one for the whole afternoon; there were some odd looks from the natives, but several English-speaking tourists seemed to get the idea…

…oh, did I mention there was a medieval-style ax-fight reenacted while we were there?  Awesome way to spend a Sunday, that’s for sure.