In praise of butlers and crumpets for tea

Although I am not by any means posessed of a butler, I am posessed of a grandfather who is posessed of an inordinately large amount of Agatha Christie novels. I've been occupying some of my time reading said Agatha Christie novels while drinking Earl Gray tea and eating bread with honey. (When left to my own devices, I eat only bread with honey, which leads to interesting energy crashes at inopportune moments.) When I get to an English-speaking country, I plan on saying "rubbish!" "balderdash!" and "poppycock!" at every possible moment. I must say that it's so refreshing to read something that used to be major entertainment before the digital age. Everything seems charmingly removed and otherworldly. Murders are solved because the detective spots the chalk on the sleeve of the suspect - no forensic science necessary, and people speak with a propriety that belies their sinister intent. Next time it rains, pick up something by her. It's not quality literature, which is why it's so fun. Or get a butler. I want a butler. I also want to live in a yurt when I grow up and be a bike messenger in Stockholm. Something tells me something's gotta give.

On a related(?) note, I think I'm giving up on Ulysses for now. I'm not getting enough out of it. James Joyce: 1. Me: 0.

the green ferry

Shortened version of actual conversation on the twenty-two tram (yes, the twenty-two tram is both my second flat and surrogate mother, what of it?):

College Kid (all-american attractive, Abercrombie polo and cocky but friendly demeanor, clutching a bottle of luridly green liquid): Hey, excuse me, but do you know if this stuff makes you go cRaZzYy?(the intonation suggests the capitalization)
Me, laughing: Uh, no, that's actually a common American misconception, you'll just get really drunk and the morning after might not be fun.
College Kid: Oh, so no green fairy and all? Is there anything that DOES make you go crazy?
Me: Well yeah, but that's, well, illegal.
College Kid: *slightly crestfallen, then brightens* But like this amount should be enough to get two people pretty messed up right?
Me, noting the "half-liter" label on the absinth bottle: Yeah, I think you're good.
College Kid: Where are you from?
Me: Here.
College Kid: We're from Tennessee, our team is playing lacrosse here *makes lacrosse motion in case European girl doesn't get what lacrosse is*. Can you tell us where the clubs are?
Me: (I do my best to explain where the centre is and where most of the clubs are)
College Kid: Wanna come clubbing?

I continued laughing for a good three stops. The kid was really nice but so perfectly adorably touristy-clueless that it made me happy. The whole green fairy thing is a purely Eurotrip idea I think. The green ferry, however, is a purely my-coworker-was-hanging-out-with-some-Americans-in-Netherlands idea. Europe is a place of many accents and someone told her about the fairy and she responded, "haha! FERRY! let's take a trip on the canal! Awesome!"

Since for the most part I leave the mind-altering substances to Ken Kesey and co., I will probably never forget the time someone asked me where to get hallucinogens on public transit. Loves it.

The above is an illustrative photo of a green ferry. In case you were wondering.

insert lyric with the word "street" in it here

I'm in Prague. I have a digital camera and too much time on my hands.


You know, I'm almost glad I didn't go. It would have broken my fragile little heart.


This giant grafitti has been on this wall for years. "We were watching each other on the 22 tram, call me". Despite evidence that it may just be a smart advertising campaign, I keep hoping it's not, because it's kind of beautiful.


Someone has a Sharpie and a simple sense of humour. Chuckle.


Deep and narrow alleys are Prague's trademark.


Hamas armistice notwithstanding, I think we've forgotten.


Yeah, me too. Why they're not illegal and why they're occasionally given seats in Parliament completely confounds me. Anyone remember 1968? I don't, but still...


Well, I wouldn't. But since neither of us are US citizens, my feline friends and I are irrelevant. For shame.

In the past few days, I've gone to the United Islands of Prague festival, which was great, and the World Cup of Slalom Canoe and Kayak, which is a scene that I guess only interests the people in it or connected to it, but still great. I saw an old friend from camp, which was hands down the best three hours of this week. I did another shift in the coffeehousebar, much more laid back and fun, my coworker was a very nice person and we had all of five patrons. On Friday I ran ten miles and ran to the watchtower that overlooks the city. Today I rotted on the couch and read books and ran barely three miles. Such is life.

Seven hours of espresso and tap

Yesterday marked the start of my second job, which involves serving various beverages at a cafebar type thing. It was a seven-hour accelerated course in hotel management and rather stressful to say the least - every time I made a mistake it seemed rather dire, and there were two of us (my boss, ie the owner and myself) serving six tables and a bar. I felt like I was expected to know how to do everything already, and I kind of wanted to vehemently explain, "I'm seventeen! I don't know how to serve beer on tap, ok? In the country where I live most of the time they don't allow seventeenyearolds to serve beer on tap and thus I haven't had much practice! Please be patient with me!"

Lessons learned:
-Serving beer on tap is complicated as there are high standards of presentation and thus it is woth taking the time to do properly.
-Don't ask whether capuccino is served with milk. It's not. There's already milk in it and things like "extra milk" are not de rigeur and you look extremely stupid.
-You get interesting types in any sort of establishment. We had a lady (evidently a local) who looked like a Hell's Angel (I actually couldn't tell she was female initially), ran some sort of international magazine publishing and during the four hours in which she was there drank an entire liter of white wine and various whiskeys and suchlike. Totally fascinating character.
-When the customer simply orders "red wine", don't just grab any red wine. Ask. (Ok, this was one of my rather weaker moments, but shouldn't the customer know better when she is sitting next to a full glass case of red wines?)
-Don't calculate tabs until the customer has paid, otherwise you cause panic and disorder backstage.
-When your kitchen is three feet by three feet and there's a giant black dog standing in it, simply shove the dog out of the way. The dog isn't paying you.

Actually, the owner hasn't paid me yet either.

After that job I handled two separate distant relatives, neither of which was pleasant, so at about eleven after everyone had left I collapsed in a corner and called my mommy. Very independent of me. Here's to hoping I don't get kicked out and do eventually get paid.

The Bohemian Atelier

My place of employment while in the Czech Republic is an atelier whose name is the French equivalent of "The Bohemian" which sells handmade clothes. It's mostly aimed at older well-heeled "ladies of fashion", and most of the customers are women with an interest in handmade and suchlike. My task consists of doing everything that doesn't take skill (ie everything except the sewing of the clothes). So I mostly talk with customers, act much more bubbly and cheery than my normal cynical self would, catalog the clothes, do shop finances, dress up the mannequins, etc. For having only been there three days, I have rather a large amount of responsibility. The store owner routinely leaves me there to man the store by myself, and after the second day, I was told to lock up the store for the night, basically putting me in charge of the security of thousands of dollars worth of clothing and shop materials. This was rather daunting, but I managed ok, and only got slightly told off for leaving the potted plant outside where someone could have stolen it. Why someone would steal a giant potted mass of leaves I'm not really sure, but duly noted.

Anyhow, photographic evidence of my hard work:

It's an incredibly pleasant workspace, filled with various colorful objects and such and a very nice, non-corporate atmosphere.

We have a chandelier. I spend large mounts of time staring at it when I have nothing better to do, which is often, because customers are scant.

A dressmaker's dummy, painstakingly dressed by me. Have you ever tried to dress a dressmaker's dummy? To me it's an incredibly awkward experience. It's like a dead person going through rigor mortis, and I constantly feel as though I'm feeling it up or intruding on its privacy.

I have no idea what this is. It could be one of those avant-garde headpieces for Prada which make the model look as though she has a donut on her head (which she in fact does), a kinky pair of handcuffs, or something else. I have affectionately dubbed it the UFO (unidentified fashionable object) and continue to wonder why it sells for the equivalent of 61 dollars.

Fotbal!

I've never really been a sports-watching person - I don't know the rules to football (in gym when I scored a touchdown someone had to inform me of this after the fact), I've never seen a baseball game, and despite running ridiculous amounts and beinginvolved in various such physical endeavours, the whole TV-and chips thing has no interest for me. That said, fotbal (soccer) is impossible to ignore. It's Eurocup season here in Europe, and the excitement is palpable - or was, until recently. But more on that later.

On Sunday night I went to watch the CzechRepublic/Turkey match in Old Town Square, dressed in sturdy pants, running shoes, a hoodie and carrying a conspicuous lack of valuables (I learned earlier on that wearing a skirt of any length in Prague after six PM is not necessarily a good idea). Attire-wise I felt as though I was going to a punk concert, but the tendency of fotbal fans to brawl after beer is not to be underestimated. The scene was crowded and drunk and energetic. I tend to get high off crowd energy, so that was the positive aspect to the night. The negative aspects were present too, however - ignorant drunken comments, the "sponsored" feel to it (hyundai logos were everywhere and Staropramen had a monopoly on beer, selling it for about twice the normal price - hence guess who didn't buy any?). Wanting to avoid the post-match crowds, I left a bit early so I didn't get to see us lose spectacularly (we were winning for 3/4 of the game and then got 3 goals in about the last 15 minutes, which is allthemore heartbreaking). Anyhow, it was a good experience and one that I'm glad I lived through but maybe not one I'd go to again.

I'm adding some photos from the previous day's match (Greece-Russia), but it doesn't really capture the feel because it was during the day, not at night, and everyone was sitting down because there's no reason to get up and jump around if it's not even your country, right?



Thr crowd is seated and boring...

It's a giant footballer!

Ummm, hey, sorry, but would you mind not waving your flag around my city's town square? I have nothing against it and all, but like see the last time you did that it had a hammer and a sickle on it and there was a tank under it, and we kind of weren't cool with that, but I guess it's ok as long as you don't try to take anyone over again and don't mind the US radar that we're going to install. Kthanks! (To be fair, they were drunk - I'm not sure if this would be done when sober)

...and this is the backdrop to all of this.

I've started my "selling handmade clothes to rich artsy people" job. Will post about it soon. It's quite something.

Pražská Muzejní Noc/ Prague Museum Night

Last night was museum night in Prague, which operates on the principle that for one night a year all the museums in the city are free and furthermore transportation between them is free as well, which is a rather enlightened notion that makes for a giant happening because the populace of Prague can't resist free things. There were crowds of people at every museum which really heightened the festive atmosphere.


It's a girl dressed up as a dinosaur spinning a hula hoop in the national museum. Any questions?


My country's national museum's wall hanging beats your wall hanging! (I really want a giant mammoth head in my bedroom. Although that might be creepy.)


A whale skeleton. Mostly just added to prove that I saw it, because the last time I was here I managed to miss it. Don't ask me how.


A concert by the Cuban band Son Caliente was a sideshow at one of the branches of the National Museum. They sang a poem by Jose Marti which happens to be the only poem in Spanish that I know. I felt cultured (and or folk revolutionarish).


A photo from the exhibit of Asian, African and American cultures.


Performers at the museum of fine arts. They had several, including a guy in a trash can wrapped in celophane blowing bubbles outside their door.


A piece at the museum of fine arts entitled "Amoeba". There was another which was a cylinder of semi-opaque white glass, entitled "Cylinder". A few art kids were viewing it next to me, staring at it quizzically until one of them finally proclaimed, "Yep, that's a cylinder."

Overall it was quite the experience.

Trams and festivals and irons!

After a long day's journey into night (hehe), I have finally reached my desired destination, as they say - ie, Prague, my birthplace and perennial hometown, despite the fact that I now live in a suburb thousands of miles away. It has been an eventful day - I secured a tramcard, that symbol of the true local (foreigners can't have one and must buy their passes by the day) and proceeded to try to remember not to get run over by the behemoths as they thundered their way down the streets of the Old Town. Due to unpredictable traffic patterns caused by bike messengers, Pegeuots, trams and various other debris that litter the streets in these parts, I also participated in a game of "catch the twentytwo tram" (read: fullon 200 metre sprint across the Moldau that left me gasping for air) and retained the flush of victory for quite some time afterwards.

I have also secured employment at a boutique in Old Town that sells handmade clothes. The minimal pay is more than made up for by the amazing location and great premise of the shop. I start on Monday and I'm very excited. In the afternoon-evening I went to a free folk concert in a park on the other side of town and listened to bluegrass-folk on the hill, Gambrinus in hand. Ah summer.

In an effort to make myself useful, I did some ironing in the evening. Why anyone would invent a steampress iron, or clothes that would require a steampress iron, is beyond me. I am relatively self-sufficient usually and so my laundry often gets done by me, but usually it involves washing, drying, and if I'm feeling ambitious folding and putting away. Irons do not have any stake in the game. They're pointy and hot and make wrinkles while obliterating the original wrinkles and meanwhile I'm standing there going how many freaking panels does this simple buttondown have?! And why are they all different shapes?! Forget Yves Sant Laurent - props to anyone who can put together something as complicated as a buttondown collared shirt.


The 22 tram, about to get in a fight with me. You are going down my dear.

embark on the adventure home

In a few hours, I'm off to the Old Continent. I am surrounded by half-packed suitcases and my thoughts are trivial - where is my battery charger? are suspenders superfluous? why didn't I do my laundry? As blase as my attitude seems, I'm certain that at least subconsciously I am rather excited. Journeys mean new epochs, and I've always assigned them symbolic meaning, whether that's right or not.

I used to be a very goal-oriented person. I'd write out schedules and plans to no end, and while I've mellowed out considerably over the past year, I still take a change in pace as an opportunity to resolve to accomplish something. Hence my plans for this summer:
-read Ulysses
-read the Desolation Angels
-write something useful
-take pictures
-run every morning
-live simply

Hopefully I'll be able to report back from my travels with wild tales of half-crazed gypsy boys.

Well, we'll just have to improvise.

There's a lot to be said for literature - in fact, usually literature speaks for itself, so others don't actually have to say anything for it. There's a lot to be said for plays, and speeches, and dramatic readings, and all that happens when people take it into their minds to organize their thoughts and present it to others in a coherent fashion.

That said, there's also a lot to be said for spontaneity, which is the opposite of organization. What happens when you take spontaneity and present it to others in a coherent fashion? You get improv.

I recently saw my first live improv - at a tiny theatre in New York, for five dollars a show, and I was utterly blown away by the brilliance and wit. The other option was to see a Broadway play for about sixteen times the amount, and I'm certain that I enjoyed myself more this way.

An improv show goes somewhat like this:
-the audience shuffles in.
-the performers shuffle on stage, which is usually bare.
-the performers ask for a word from the audience (in our case, it was "marshmallow" "Rhode Island" and "Prohibition")
-the people on stage start making up random crap, weaving in and out of situations and assuming dozens of roles in the space of an hour, acting out skits, ranting, cracking jokes, and making fools of themselves, without having ever rehearsed any of it before.

I think that if the performers aren't very good, an improv show could get boring rather fast, but we were lucky enough to stumble onto sheer brilliance. Frankly my writing skills do not do any of this justice.

If you're ever in Manhattan, be sure to check out the Magnet Theater at 254 W. 29th Street. It'll be worth it. I promise.