Legally Robbed and Other Stories

Magazines are organized in general sections: features and editorials make up the brunt of it, with a few other oddball installments particular to each magazine, like "Advice from Joe the bartender" in Esquire. My blog has taken on its own pattern: site-seeing, updates on work, ups and downs of life abroad, and comical anecdotes about whichever language barrier I ran into that week. The last is usually the funniest, depending on what's at stake.

Lost in Translation.

After having coffee and playing gammon (our new game which an older man taught us) for a couple of hours last Saturday, we were walking to the tram when she tried teaching me a Czech phrase, though I had no idea what she was doing at the time.

"Nezim."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

"What?" I said, puzzled. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know."

Why the hell is she telling me this, I thought. We kept going at it like that another five times round: "what does it mean?; "I don't' know"; "what does it mean!"; "I don't know!". I'm sure you already see where this is going. "Who's on first?" "Second."

Ups and Downs of Life Abroad.

To ride the tram or metro you need a ticket, purchased at any of the machines in the entrance or located at a few select tram stops. I always buy a ticket, and have been meaning to get a three month pass for sometime, but it's a hassle because you need to get a passport photo and then go to the main office where you fill out a form and pay the bill. You can imagine how stressing the DMV in the States can be; now multiply that by "tree" (3). So I put it off. Sometimes, if I wasn't going far, I wouldn't buy a ticket.

Riding up the escalator of the metro--the green line, the deepest of the metros, about two or three minutes from bottom to top-- I came up the last few feet, no ticket in my pocket, to see two metro guards slowly appearing as I ascended, dressed in blue, checking ticekts. There's no place you can go. You sure as hell can't go back, try to walk down an upward moving escalator. Trapped. Two days later, I took the tram one stop, one stop I didn't feel like paying a dollar for, could've walked but was late, and got busted by undercover metro cops. Together, the fines, which you have to pay on the spot, totaled one-fourth of my rent. On the second bust, I had planned on running, but the distance to the next tram stop was too long; by the time the doors opened, I'd lost the nerve to dash. I did, however, ask him for all his information--picture, ID, receipt. And then told him I didn't have any money; well then, he says, we'll have to go to the police station. Police station, Czech Republic, an American...thinking...pull my wallet out, here's your money. Of Experience, Oscar Wilde said it "is simply the name we give our mistakes." Pam, who I was rushing to meet for coffee, wasn't any more forgiving. "What did you think would happen?" "A little more consolation, Pam, less criticism." "Well, if I tell you differently, you'll just do it again." True enough. Needless to say, I got the month pass the next day.

My tram stop for work

As for the ups, I'm meeting tons of people. Shane, Johnny, and I played pool last Thursday (Friday was a holiday) till the hall closed at 4am. I told Shane I wasn't too bad, growing up with a pool table basically in my room. He'd, after moving from Belfast, Ireland, lived in Holland and managed a bar, at which he and his friends would regularly play pool to eight in the morning. He got to break: one ball off the break, then another, then one more down, till finally he was shooting for the eight ball and I hadn't even had a turn. He missed. I fowled my one and only shot, and then he sunk the eight. Damn.

The next night I went with my roommate to a bar in a houseboat on the river Vltava.

Saturday I went to Duplex, supposedly one of the top 50 clubs in the world, with Tom and Janza, the guys I play squash with. It's a really nice place, on the top floor of a building downtown, overlooking all of Prague. Cover was expensive, but Tom had free passes. It was a nice place. Drinks were outrageous. The women were beautiful, paid to be there, but beautiful all the same. The DJ, Tom says, was the best in Prague. I haven't picked up on House/techno craze that infects all Europeans, and Australians as well I've learned. Nobody listens to hip-hop. Not like I really do either, but if you go to a club in the States, nine times out of ten they'll be playing hip-hop, so you get used to it as the norm.

Yesterday I went to an exhibition with my flatmate and Johana, a friend of a friend whom I introduced to my flatmate because he needed someone to hire to work at his bookstore. (The universe and stars aligned when I stumbled upon a flatmate who works at a bookstore; that's like a dope fiend wandering into a marijuana patch). The exhibition, held in the Municipal House, a beautiful Art Nouveau building opened in 1912 for the King's Court, was titled "Dekadence." There was a portrait of Oscar Wilde I really liked; I think he was part of the Decadent movement in literature. The collection was very dark: vampires, death, skulls, gross caricatures. All made in the early twentieth century, before 1920. I kept being drawn to certain pictures--a series which turned out to be Hamlet, one of a boat crossing the river Sticks, and the portrait of Oscar Wilde--after which I noticed the artist was the same for all three. I had my flatmate write his name down. Then we went on a goose-hunt for the Museum of Band Books, but couldn't find it.

Later that night we went to an exhibition in a warehouse. All new stuff; I'm sure the artists were actually there. It was a similar experience to when Dave and I walked into a building, squatted by artists, in Berlin: art, a projector screen, a bar, a bed in one room. Candles and old chairs were spread out on the first floor. The cartoon-looking horse, the size of a small pony, carved out of Styrofoam, was my favorite. Pam was hoping for dancing and a more mainstream scene, so her, Johana, and I left after awhile, and went to M1 where they play hip-hop and rap--to no surprise it was filled with Americans. I would've liked to stay at the exhibition, but the club was fun and the Mexican food we had after, at around 3, was good at the time, but a rock in my stomach the next morning. I actually have found one good Mexican restaurant in Prague, down the street from where I live, called "Barracudas."

Pam

Work.

The first day at my new school was difficult: eighteen year-olds are much harder to keep entertained than the thirty to forty year-old students I'm used to. But after the adjustment, and creating a game incorporating verb tenses and listening practice, they were reluctant to leave on friday, when usually they get out early. The rules of the game go like this: I draw a football (soccer) field on the board: at your own goal you have to conjugate a verb to pass to midfield; at midfield you have to spell a word of my choosing to pass it to your offensive player; at your opponents goal you have to come up to the board and write a sentence I say aloud, an exercise incorporating listening, grammar, and spelling, to score a goal. If you mess up, the other team's closest player gets the ball and then they try to make it down the field to score. If a student's team helps them while they're trying to write a sentence or spell a word, I throw a yellow card at them, and the other team gets a penalty kick. I love throwing that yellow card.

My morning class on Wednesday, seven women and one guy, got a kick out of American English terminology for hair. In a story we were reading (the text book is British), the word "plaits" appeared, the meaning of which I had no idea. After consulting the dictionary, I found out it means braids. I don't know how I got to drawing on the board and naming the different styles of hair for girls, but when I told them that we call a girl's hair pulled back a "pony tail." They couldn't contain themselves. "Like a horse tail," one said. "Pig tails" brought the house down. It never occurred to me other cultures would call them different names, and it also made me think why Americans are so obsessed with animals. The one guy was growing restless and wanted to move on. But I was having too much fun. I drew a picture of a man's face on the board with a small beard. "This is a goatee." Another animal. Barn-yard lexicon for hair. Weird.
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Site-seeing

I plan to do more tourist stuff. Right now, I just take pictures if I happen to walk past some piece of interesting architecture. These photos are of the Catholic Church down the road from me and a sinister looking church.