First Day Of Spring?

I spoke too soon about Spring. Last week was really warm and sunny, but the weather turned colder over the weekend and this week temperatures are a few degrees above freezing with a few flakes of snow around.

I had a cancelled class this morning and decided to visit the Cubist Museum, rather than just the cafe. It has an interesting collection of paintings and drawings as well as pieces of furniture, photographs and architectural models of buildings designed in the Cubist style. Czech Cubism was an interesting style which tried to relate all of the above forms into a common style. The architectural period was essentially over once the First World War ended, and architecture moved on to Modernism and Functionalism. This is a pity in my view as Czech Cubist architecture is simple and fairly minimal without the starkness of later Modernism.

The exhibition includes a drawing of a design for the Czech National Monument in Žižkov in the Cubist style. If this had been selected it would have been an improvement on the actual winner in my view, because it would have used a uniquely Czech style and would have been easier on the eye than the Functionalist block which was actually built.

Spring In The Air

It really feels like Spring today. As I left for the tram at 7:00 this morning the sun was just about rising, and as I crossed the river the castle was lit with a wonderful atmospheric light.

My early lesson went really well, the students took part very enthusiastically in a role-play of a business meeting. After the lesson I had a few hours of free time (one of the benefits of the early starts and late finishes) so I decided to make the most of it.

I took the tram to the castle area and walked over Letna plain to the metronome which stands on the site of the former Stalin monument. From there I crossed the river into Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, and walked through the old town. After passing the square I popped into the Grand Cafe Orient for elevenses before getting the tram home to work on my preparation for my next lesson.

It's a wonderful day here and life feels really good.

Places To Go - Grand Cafe Orient

When I first visited Prague in 1991 all the guidebooks said that the place to go for coffee was the Slavia cafe overlooking the river near the National Theatre. Sadly in 1991 Slavia was closed for refurbishment. I have been there a few times since I came out here this year, but for me it no longer has the combination of elegance and relaxation which I associated with it. It seems busy and touristy and the staff aren't really attentive enough.

A few months ago one of Sue's work colleagues asked if we had been to the coffee house at the Cubist Museum. We hadn't, but checked it out based on his recommendation. The museum is near the Old Town Square, and the Grand Cafe Orient is on the first floor of the museum. The building itself is a prime example of Czech Cubist architecture, and the cafe and its furnishings reflect that.

In addition to the visual splendour, the service is excellent, and although it gets busy at weekends it feels quite relaxed on weekdays. Sandwiches and salads are available for lunch, but for me it is best for light breakfasts or afternoon coffee and cakes.

Another Storming Gig By Alasdair

Alasdair played Noel's again on Saturday. Again he went down a storm. We had some friends visiting for the weekend and they enjoyed the gig, too. I confused Katia, the barmaid, by switching to Staropramen rather than my usual Budvar.

I like Budvar, and always ordered it at Noel's because it is less commonly available than either Staropramen or Prazdroi Plzensky (Pilsner Urquell). Sadly Budvar seems to give me more-severe hangovers than the other two. Saturday's experience with Staropramen bears this out. I'll probably stick to Budvar if I'm just going to have a couple of beers, but I don't think I should drink it for a long session.

Places To Go - Pivnice U Švejků, Újezd 22

U Švejků is one of a multitude of bars and restaurants in this city named after Jaroslav Hašek's comic anti-hero The Good Soldier Švejk. This particular pivnice, or beer hall, is located across the road from the Petřin funicular railway, near the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, on the far side of the river from the National Theatre.

The restaurant looks like a bit of a tourist trap with a rather garish paint scheme outside, announcing itself in English, German and Czech, and it claims to date from 1618. Inside it looks a lot more homely. There are basic wooden tables and murals depicting scenes from the illustrations to the Švejk book. The staff are very friendly and the beer is good, but the best part is the game menu. This has a selection of dishes from boar, roe deer and fallow deer. We first tried U Švejků in some desperation one lunchtime. We were hungry and most nearby places were busy. Since then we have been back several times.

We have never eaten there in the evening so we have no idea how crowded it gets then, but the menu says that they have an accordian player in the evenings from 6pm. Treat that news as an advertisement or a warning as you see fit.

Alasdair's Gig

Alasdair's gig on Wednesday went down a storm, helped by the fact that a lot of his friends, colleagues, and also students came along to support him. He has a great voice and is a very accomplanished musician. The sets were a good mixture of classic Blues, soul and some folky pieces, including some of his own songs. There were many songs which were new to me, as well as some real crowd-pleasers.

I hope that Noel and Barry were pleased with the turnout, the joint was really jumping for a Wednesday. Hopefully Alasdair will get further gigs there.

Tomorrow at The Metropole (Soon to be Noel's)

My fellow teacher, Alasdair Bouch, has been booked to play a gig at Noel's tomorrow night.

Here's how Barry from Noel's is pitching Alasdair's act.

London-born multi-instrumentalist Alasdair Bouch has wowed crowds with his intoxicating blend of folk, blues and soul for some eighteen years. His barnstorming floorfillers and intricately-wrought ballads have held audiences spellbound from New Zealand to Nové Mìsto. The British newspaper 'The Guardian' favourably likened his vocal delivery to Otis Redding, and if recent performances are anything to go by, Alasdair's star is destined to rise. Catch him in the intimate venue Metropole (soon to be Noel's), strumming a solo set of self-penned ditties and choice covers. Prepare yourself for tales of love, heartbreak, booze, and low-down dirty sinners.

There are a few colleagues planning to be there in the audience to cheer him on, it should be a good night.

Places to go - Noel's Lounge, Anny Letenské 18, Prague 2

This is my first recommendation for somewhere to go in Prague. Noel's Lounge is a very friendly bar run by British Expats. I like to go to Czech bars but as I don't speak the language it doesn't have the same relaxed feeling - I can't pick up much from the conversation around me, and I can't just chat with the staff. The atmosphere at Noel's is very relaxing and the staff there are friendly. They serve Staropramen and Budvar beers and a selection of light meals - nothing with dumplings, but the nachos are quite good. A bookshop called Anagram is attached and is accessed from inside Noel's.

I first found out about the place by accident. I was walking home from the school about 2 weeks ago down a street I hadn't visited before when I saw a blackboard outside a bar advertising a Blues gig coming soon. I didn't pay much attention, but the name of the artiste - Stan the Man - stuck in my mind. That evening I had been invited to join a group of people at another bar, The Globe, which had a musician, too. At the Globe I started talking to a cheery cockney called Barry who told me that he was a partner in a bar called Noel's. He described where it was, and mentioned that he had booked Stan the Man for the following week. Noel's was the bar I had passed earlier that day.

If you look for Noel's right now you may have trouble finding it, as it is called Metropole. Barry and his partners took it over just recently and they haven't replaced the sign yet. As Barry explained it to me "the bar is called Noel's, or Metropole, soon to be Noel's but we sometimes just call it Soon".

I have been there now for two gigs - Stan the Man and Jamie Marston and they were both good nights. Katia, one of the barmaids recognised me on my second visit. Some of my colleagues also went there on Wednesday for the Open Mic gig and one of them may actually have a booking after wowing the audience and schmoozing the proprieters. I think Noel's may become a regular haunt for me and some of my colleagues.

The Czech Calendar

Unlike most European languages, including Russian and Slovak, Czech does not use the Roman names for the months. The names for the weekdays are different from those in other languages I am familiar with, too. It was a bit difficult at first, but I now know the weekdays and recognise the months we have already had.

The Czech names for the days of the week are:
pondĕlí (after nedĕle [Sunday])
úterý (second)
středa (middle)
čtvertek (fourth)
pátek (fifth)
sobota (sabbath)
nedĕle (no work)

The Czech names for months are:
- leden (ice)
- únor (melting ice, or possibly renewal, depending on which source you believe)
- březen (birch)
- duben (oak)
- květen (blossom)
- červen (red)
- červenec (redder)
- srpen (sickle, connected to harvest)
- září (blazing or glowing, or possibly preparing for rutting, again depending on which source you believe)
- říjen (rutting season)
- listopad (falling leaves)
- prosinec (time to kill pigs)

Snow in Prague

Winter arrived this week. Snow started falling on Tuesday afternoon, and was lying on the ground by the evening. It carried snowing more or less continually for 24 hours so by Wednesday evening we had a fall of about 7 or 8 cm. I'm glad we have had at least one snowfall this winter. It would have been embarrassing this week to have had less snow than the South of England.

The trams ran mostly to time during the snow, although workmen were stationed at some of the points to keep them working and clear the ice. The Metro was busier than usual, possibly because it is more reliable than trams and buses in the snow and ice.

We have had a few short falls of fresh snow since Wednesday but we have had some sun, too, which has melted the snow a little. I was able to get out to take some pictures on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. If it is sunny tomorrow I might take some more.

Useful software - synctoy

Synctoy is a really useful piece of free software from Microsoft, and I never thought I would use all of those words together in the same sentence. I have a laptop here which I use to manage my photographs, music files, Internet access, lesson plans and materials and anything else which needs a PC.

I also have a Linksys NSLU2 which is a tiny Linux-based NAS/fileserver device which takes two external USB disks and can export their filesystems using SAMBA . The server can be configured to perform nightly backups from one hard disk to the other, giving a poor man's RAID. There is a thriving Linux development community for the NSLU2, which has ported all kinds of Linux software, but so far I just use it as a fileserver.

I run weekly backups from the laptop to a directory on the fileserver using Norton Ghost, but I also needed to mirror my laptop home directory to a directory on the fileserver. This was the first task which led me to look for file synchronisation software.

So far I have been very pleased with synctoy, it has a preview mode which lets me see the difference in content between two directory trees without modifying them. It also lets me synchronise a directory tree from the fileserver to a directly-attached USB disk on the laptop to give me an additional level of backup of irreplacable files such as pictures and lesson materials which I have created.

Some spare time at last

This morning I finished writing up the last of the mid-year assessments. Since I came back from the Christmas break I have spent a lot of time preparing, conducting and writing up assessments on all my students. Now they are all completed so I will be able to have a bit more spare time in my life.

A touch of frost

Yesterday morning there was a touch of frost. It's January, so why is this remarkable?
I've been checking the weather data for the Czech Republic and the average daily temperature for January is about -2° C. The daily maximum for January is normally about 2° C, but this winter we have had only a handful of frosty mornings since October, and we have had temperatures of over 10°C on many occasions.

Everyone has been telling me that last year the temperature barely rose above freezing from mid-November until April. This winter there is virtually no skiing in the whole country and the resort operators and winter sports fans are most unhappy. I think they're hoping that this winter is an aberration, but I wouldn't invest in winter sports in the long term.

I am indebted to Chris Gerhard for pointing me to the following video of a mountain biker on a ski jump! Maybe this is the way forward!

Who knows where the time goes?

It's mid-January and I haven't written here since November! How did that happen?
Arno's recent comment reminded me that I need to write something here, and I have now managed to make some time to do that.

I spent some of my free time in December looking at the different events which happen here in Advent. There was St Nicholas's Eve, the Christmas Markets, an outdoor ice rink and vendors of live carp in the streets. I took pictures of these activities and have posted them to Flickr.

I went back to the UK for Christmas. Sue and I went to North Wales to spend Christmas, Sue's birthday and my cousin's son's wedding, then we went to the North-East of England for New Year. It was a busy time, but I managed to catch up with quite a few people.

Arriving back in Prague I was pitched straight into classes and mid-year assessments. I have tested the majority of my students, and have just over a week to complete all the reports. This means I have had a busy time so far this year.

After the rush is over I will tell you more about Prague and Czech life.

If you have any questions, post them as comments.

The First Hundred Days

This entry is slightly overdue because I have actually been living and working in Prague for about 111 days now. I have been laid low with a stomach bug for the last two days, but now I am feeling better and am catching up with e-mail and the blog. So here is a summary of the first hundred days.

My application for a "Trade Licence" was finally granted last week as the final pieces of documentation from the UK were translated and accepted. At the beginning of this week one of the office staff from the school came with me to various city offices to help me complete the remaining paperwork to register with the Tax, Social Insurance and Health Insurance agencies, and to open a bank account. I now have a large bill for unpaid Social and Health Insurance fees, but the paperwork is straight.

Two weeks ago it was my turn to have the Director of Studies observe one of my lessons. His feedback was generally positive, but obviously his experience in the profession allowed him to point out the areas where I need to concentrate, improve and grow.

From the beginning of this month my teaching load increased to 22 hours a week. This is enough to feel like a full-time occupation, and is just about enough to meet my living costs here. I have to leave the flat at 7:00 am most days, and usually don't return until about 7:30 pm since most students have their lessons at the beginning or end of their working day. Indeed these are regarded as peak hours by the school, and the period from 10:00 am until 4:00 pm is regarded as off-peak hours.

When you take into account my off-peak classes, travel time to classes, lesson-planning time and adminstrative tasks most of my time is occupied. I do have quite a lot of freedom in how and when I plan my lessons, though, so I can create some blocks of free time during daylight hours, which makes it all feel less of a bind than the routine of office life.

The work itself is very rewarding, the students are keen to participate in their classes and I enjoy working with them. Each class is different, even when two classes are using the same textbook they can respond to the material very differently.

Lesson preparation time can vary a lot, some lessons are a natural follow-on from the previous lesson, or are conversation-based and much of the work is already done. For other lessons more work is required. I may have to listen to audio material to ensure I am familiar with it, prepare for supplementary questions the students may have on grammar points, work through the accompanying exercises in the textbook and model answers in the teacher's book to make sure I know the answer I should be expecting, and prepare supplementary materials.

The Internet is a wonderful resource for supplementary material, of course. Dilbert cartoons are great for warm-up exercises on business vocabulary and modern office culture in Business English lessons. Students are also interested in short articles on contemporary British life, and they are also keen to talk about their own country, both as it is now and as it was before 1989. I am always very interested to hear their views and their experiences.

A Foreign Field

Yesterday Sue and I joined fellow expat Brits, Czech Nationals and Embassy staff from Britain and other Commonwealth Nations at the annual Remembrance Day ceremony. This was held at the Prague Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. The service was very moving, particularly when a Czech military band played Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations while the representatives of various nations laid their wreaths.

One of the teachers here was a member of the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service and attended the ceremony in uniform. Apparently it is quite rare for the Navy to be represented at the ceremony, which is unsurprising as Prague is a long way from any coast.

I first spotted the cemetery a few months ago when I passed it on the tram. It is part of a large municipal cemetery which also contains war graves from the Red Army and the Bulgarian Army. According to the CWGC website the Prague War Cemetery contains 256 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 34 of which are unidentified. The graves were brought into the cemetery from 73 small cemeteries scattered all over the Czech Republic. Many of those buried there died as Prisoners of War. There is also one burial of the First World War and eight Polish war graves.

Out of the City

Sue came out for a long weekend, so we decided to go for some walks near Prague. On Friday we took the tram to Hostivař, in the south-east of the city. According to the Rough Guide there is a 4.2 km walk from there past a lake to a nice village called Průhonice. The walk passes a large lake and makes use of a trail which is part of the Prague-Vienna cycle route. We set off on the walk and soon discovered that the guide-book was incorrect. After 4km we came to the village of Petrovice, but Průhonice was another 7km from there. As it was lunchtime and we were getting hungry we decided we would leave Průhonice for another day and look for lunch in Petrovice.

The original village is quite nice, but we couldn't find any nice pubs there so we set off to the new part of the village which is a large development of concrete tower blocks. We couldn't find anywhere to eat there, either, so we cut our losses and took the bus to somewhere we knew before we got too hungry.

On Saturday we decided to take the bus to Průhonice and explore the park there. It was a very grey day with the threat of rain, so we didn't take any pictures of the park. You can get an idea of how it looks from this site, though.

We decided to have some coffee and a snack before we explored the park, so after getting off the bus we went into the first likely-looking place. This was a very up-market restaurant, but they welcomed us and served us morning coffee and cakes. We left before lunchtime so we weren't causing them too much trouble. Their menu looks good, so we intend to go there for a meal sometime.

After a couple of hours exploring the park the weather closed in and we returned to the village for lunch. This time we went to U Bežousků, which is a popular pub and micro-brewery. The pub was crowded, but we managed to get a table in the restaurant which was nice, although a bit less cosy. The beer and food were very good, and we certainly want to go there again, too.

Kutna Hora

Sue and I visited Kutna Hora two weekends ago with another teacher from the school.

The town was a silver-mining and coin-minting centre in the 15th century, and became very wealthy until the time of the thirty-years war. A combination of being on the losing side, and the end of the easily reachable silver led to its decline.

Prior to that the area first became famous as a place of pilgrimage. The nearby Cistercian monastery in Sedlec was reputed to contain a handful of earth from Calvary, and so many faithful were buried here from about 1278. The ossuary at Sedlec contains bones from about 40000 skeletons, some in large pyramidal mounds, and others in macabre sculptural arrangements. The present arrangement of the bones dates back to 1870.

The weather was fine and warm and we spent a lovely Autumn day there. We travelled by train and learned that the Czech railway system is more complex than we had imagined. On the way out we had to pay supplements as we were using an Inter-City train rather than the local train we had bought tickets for. On the way back we took a local train, but we inadvertently chose one which took a longer route. This meant we had to pay another supplement for the privilege of an extra 45 minutes journey with more stops.

I also managed to cause confusion at lunch due to my lack of Czech. I ordered two Mattoni mineral waters (or so I thought), but ended up with two Martinis. I now know that Mattoni is subject to the rules of Czech grammar just like any other noun, and that if I had ordered dve Mattonku I would have got what I wanted.

Some of the pictures I took at Kutna Hora and Sedlec can be found here.

Kofola

Kofola is the local soft drink here. It was first produced in the 1960s as the Communist world's answer to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Somehow it managed to survive the entry of western soft-drink companies after 1989, and is still popular here.

I have had a bottle in the fridge for a few weeks, but hadn't got round to drinking it until yesterday. The taste is quite different from Coke and Pepsi, it is quite fruity and spicy. If you can imagine "mulled cola" it is that kind of taste.

I'm not sure how often I will drink it, it is a bit of an acquired taste in my opinion, and I don't think I will bother to acquire it. I'll stick to beer, mineral water or wine.

I Served The King Of England

"I Served The King Of England" is the title of a book by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. I first read it five years ago when we visited Prague for a holiday. The book is a satirical look at the history of the Czech Repbulic through the eyes of a single character, a waiter called Dite.

The story starts in the 1930s with Dite working as a young waiter alongside a head waiter who appears to know everything. When Dite asks him how he knows things he replies enigmatically "I server the King of England". Dite's own big moment comes when the Emperor of Ethiopia makes an official visit to Prague, and by a combination of good luck and sharp wits Dite ends up serving his food. Thereafter whenever he impresses more junior waiters with his skill and knowledge he always explains his abilities with the phrase "I served the Emperor of Ethiopia".

From there his life follows the twists and turns of his country through the German annexation of the Sudetenland, the Second World War, the brief period of freedom before the Communist coup, and the purges against businessmen during the early Communist period.

For me the book gives a darkly-humorous overview of Czech history. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the country. Apparently a film of the book is due to released later this year.