Three-Meter Pushkin

by Karl

Proposed statue

One of the nice features of our neighborhood is Puškinovo náměstí, or Pushkin Square. It's a small city block, shaped sort of like a diamond, with grass, two play areas, and big trees, surrounded by quiet streets and pleasant five-story buildings. This was the site of Garrett's biking breakthrough earlier this month and a great place to take the boys for some running around without a big expedition.

Garrett bikes past the playground at Pushkin Square.

Today was the boys' last day of school (!!). I walked them past Pushkin Square, down to the shuttle bus, and when I got back to our building, as I made my way to the stairs I noticed a flier taped up on the building's information board. It turns out today is the last day to comment on a proposed addition to Pushkin Square.  Prague is divided into more than 20 "parts," each with its own mayor (as opposed to the lord mayor of all of Prague) and local council.  Our neighborhood of Bubeneč is in Prague 6, whose mayor says:

The Russian Cultural Foundation has offered Prague 6 a statue of the Russian renaissance poet Pushkin. They have also requested the placement of the statue on Pushkin Square in Bubeneč. Given that the statue would be placed near the dwellings of hundreds of people, we consider it our duty to ask the residents whether they agree with this plan. Based on their answers, we will formulate our position as a response to the Russian side.

I don't feel particularly confident in judgments of visual aesthetics, so I can't weigh in on whether this is a fine piece of art or some kitchy abomination that will ruin a pleasant neighborhood space. But there's also the whole Russian thing.

Odcházení

by Karl

This post takes its name from a 2007 play by Václav Havel, about a prime minister who is leaving after a fairly long term in office. Havel says he had the basic idea for the play long before he was directly involved in politics, but the autobiographical connection seems obvious, since Havel served as Czechoslovak president from 1990 to 1992, then as Czech president from 1993 to 2003. Last year the play was turned into a movie, with Havel himself premiering in the director's chair; a friend who saw it said that it's fine, as long as you go in understanding that Havel hasn't so much made a movie as filmed a play.

Proposal for movie poster, not implemented

The title means "Leaving," and it's about the difficulty of going away from something that you've gotten very used to.

This morning when I was up at the office handing in my key and picking up some boxes to ship things in, our landlady called to see about coming by with two prospective tenants to show them the apartment. I met them back here, and as they looked around and asked the landlady about various features, I noticed an odd thought in the back of my mind -- "Wait, this is our apartment. We live here. You mean you're going to rent it out to someone else?"

We've gotten very used to it here, and as much as we're looking forward to being back with old friends and the familiarity of home, it's hard to leave our Prague life.  In four days, we're outta here.

Can't we all just get along?

by Karl

Back when there was a Czechoslovakia, American students learning geography might naturally assume that there were people called “Czechoslovaks,” just like in Italy there were Italians and in Germany there were Germans. But this was a long name, with weird spelling to boot (“cz” pronounced like “ch,” and “ch” pronounced like “k”—what’s that about?), so “Czechoslovak” was often shortened to “Czech.” This didn’t get rid of the weird spelling issues, but it did save three syllables, so its use was widespread. If there were an Olympic hockey match between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia, the Americans were said to be playing “the Czechs.”

This seemed innocent enough to Americans—after all, people from other countries in the western hemisphere might object to the way we hogged the title “Americans,” but what were we supposed to call ourselves? “U.S. Americans”? Ungainly. “North Americans”? Well, that would still include Canada—and Mexico, too, technically, though they were part of “Latin America,” and so not really in North America, except to some stickler of a geography teacher.

So we were equally comfortable calling ourselves “Americans” and referring to people from Czechoslovakia as “Czechs.”

But if you happened to study the history or geography of the region more closely, at some point you had the surprising discovery that there were actually two different … peoples in Czechoslovakia: Czechs and Slovaks. What’s the difference? It can be summed up with history, religion, economics, and language.

Just Like Old Times

by Karl

Last Wednesday morning I went to hear a public dress rehearsal of the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Smetana Hall at the Municipal House. Walking away afterwards, I noticed a poster on a lamppost and—WHAT?! I’m not sure whether I first recognized the picture or the name, but it was indeed Ben Zander conducting the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra from New England Conservatory.

That’s my youth orchestra (1982-85). In my day its name was Youth Chamber Orchestra, but that was about the time that Zander started having the group play things like Mahler and Bartok, so calling it a chamber orchestra was getting to be ridiculous.

In 1985 we played Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Zander wisely told us to get hold of a recording and listen to it before rehearsals started. The first time I heard it, I was crushed. It didn’t sound sweet, like the Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Beethoven and Mozart I was used to playing with the orchestra. There were so many harsh sounds and discordances, and I was not at all looking forward to spending the season working on that noise. But as I listened more, I started to hear it differently, and as we rehearsed it, it really made sense.

I had the great pleasure of being second trumpet to Rich Kelley. Many of the kids in the orchestra (like me) were from well-off suburbs of Boston, but Rich was from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston itself, and if I remember the story right, he started taking lessons with a clarinet teacher, because that’s who was in the neighborhood. After three years, he was good enough to win the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concerto competition for high school students. After that, the principal trumpet player of the Boston Symphony started giving him lessons for free. At first I was disappointed not to be first trumpet—it was my last year in the orchestra, and part of me felt like I had earned it—but Rich was much better than me, and anyway, doing a good job on the first-trumpet part of the Bartók was not quite within my abilities. I was comfortable playing second, and I hope I didn’t make the section sound bad for Rich.

(On my left, third trumpet was covered by Bijon Watson, who, like Rich, has gone on to do a lot more with his trumpet than I have.)

In Spring, 1984, we toured Austria and Poland. In Vienna, we played Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Musikvereinsaal, where Mahler himself had stood at the podium as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic.

I remember this view (though I found the picture here).

The Laundry of Rovinj

From Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ~

By looking at the clotheslines I can tell who is a good housekeeper, whose laundry is white enough and properly hung, how big the family is, who lives alone. My grandma taught me all that, and how to hang a man's shirts, trousers, or pullovers. She taught me that you could tell a lot, even the character of people, just by looking at clothes. Laundry was like an open book to her.

'That woman over there, she is playing the lady. Look how many nylons she's hung out!' Or, 'The one from the first floor, she must be stingy, she doesn't use bleach at all.'

Croatia ~ Istria Peninsula

Part two of our Croatia/Slovenia/Austria vacation. Part one on the Plitvice Lakes can be found here.

Monday ~ Senj and Rovinj/Rovigno

We left the Plitvice Lakes and wound our way west to Senj on the Adriatic Sea.

Ben, Karl and Garrett brace themselves against the gusts.

Our first view of the Adriatic was from the very windy pass at Vratnik. This pit stop also provided us the opportunity to teach the boys not to pee into the wind.

Nehaj, the Uskok fortress at Senj, built in 1558.

The Uskoks -- known as Croatian freedom fighters to locals, but mere pirates and hoodlums to Venetians and Ottoman Turks -- used Senj as a base from which they attacked and raided ships (often Venetian) traveling the narrow Adriatic passage. Venetians had a saying in the 1500s, "May God preserve us from the hands of Senj."

Kate and Karl at Nehaj

Even though we'd descended more than 750m/2500ft from the pass, we didn't escape the wind down at the coast!

Kill the Messenger

by Karl

As I’ve followed the local press here, the thing that has come to overwhelm everything else in my sense of the Czech political scene is the level of corruption (it was part of the context for my post on classical liberalism in Czech politics). It’s not that I don’t think American politics is riddled with corruption, but maybe our politicians are somehow … smoother about it.Whatever the reason, when I’m at home the corruption there doesn’t seem to smack me in the face the way it does here.

A lot of it here has to do with military purchases. As Kate mentioned in her post on David Černý’s Entropa, a Swedish company sold the Czechs some Gripen fighter planes for a vastly inflated price. By law, Czech military purchases from foreign companies are handled through private intermediaries, and the justification for this system is presumably that they can get the government a better deal.  But in fact the best-case scenario is that they replicate work that should be done by people in the Ministry of Defense itself, and the more likely scenario is that they function sort of like a very expensive real estate agent (imagine an agent whose commission is one or two times the price of your house) and open up a huge space for illicit money flows to parties or individual politicians.

The latest mess has to do with the investigation—or the non-investigation—of the purchase of wheeled armored vehicles called Pandurs. The first tip that there may have been something fishy in the whole thing was the fact that the Czech military paid too much for them, and that the Czech Army didn’t actually have much use for them. According to Respekt (Jaroslav Spurný and Ondřej Kundra, “Umlčte Stephana S. – Silence Stephan S.,” June 13, 2011), “they’re mainly for decoration, and the chance of their utilization in a foreign mission is practically zero.” But that was years ago and, as seems to be standard practice here in cases of corruption implicating high government officials, nothing happened.

"THAT'S not what it means!"

by Karl—probably of most interest to political-economy wonks. If that isn’t you, try it and let me know how far it holds your interest.

The Czech political spectrum has interesting legacies of its richly varied past. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 is portrayed both here and in the West as a liberation from a dictatorship, and that's what it looks like to me. But roughly 10% of Czech voters still pull the lever for KSČM, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, which is the successor to the KSČ, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

And while most people were glad to break the power monopoly of the KSČ, that didn't necessarily mean rejecting socialism. In his book Češi a němci (Czechs and Germans), Václav Makrlík cites polls finding that 80% of Czechs still wanted socialism in 1991. Support for the ideals of socialism goes back to the late Habsburg period, and during the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), the social democrats and the national socialists were two of the country's key parties (Czech "National Socialists" were not comparable to German "National Socialists," better known as Nazis). In the most recent national elections (Spring 2010), the social democrats (ČSSD) won the most seats of any single party, but a coalition of more "liberal" parties was able to put together a governing coalition.

In the European context, being more "liberal" than the socialists isn't hard, because "liberalism" here has a very different meaning than in the U.S., where “liberal” is roughly synonymous with “left.” Roughly speaking, an American liberal favors government action to deal with various social problems: Welfare programs to help the poor. Integration of public education. Bans on various forms of discrimination even in private business (such as hotels not being allowed to refuse a room to a person simply on the basis of race). In the sphere of behavior, American liberals are more likely than conservatives to be open to changing social structures: women's rights in the workplace; same-sex partnerships and marriages; freedom in reproductive choices.

Prague Portals

by Kate 
(Karl's posting so much these days, I think we'll start adding by-lines routinely)

Prague's architecture offers an embarrassment of riches. Renaissance, neo-Classical, Baroque, Cubist, and more. I'm partial to the grand doorways that grace so many of the city's buildings. Here are some entryways that have caught my eye, with addresses and perhaps occupants, if I know them. They're grouped by neighborhood/district.

Staré Město (Old Town)

At the corner of Melantrichova Street and Kozna Street

This house, called Dům u Dvou Zlatých Medvědů (House at the Two Golden Bears) is one of the oldest houses in Prague.

Detail at the House of the Two Golden Bears

Staroměstská radnice (Old Town town hall)

Detail on the Old Town town hall

Celetná 8, U černého slunce (House at the Black Sun)

House of the Black Sun was the home of Mozart’s Prague hostess, Josepha Duskova. It's not far from the Estates Theater where Mozart conducted the premier of Don Giovanni.

The Big Day?

by Karl

This is it!  The day of the strike!  Prague will be shut down!  Or it will be chaos!  The strikers will block highways!  Oh, wait, they changed their minds, they'll just process through town to the Castle, which will still block up traffic a little, but not nearly as much.  No, wait, they won't go as far as the Castle.

"LIVE: Only hundreds of union members came for the march through Prague."

"'Traffic jams' on the bike paths: Praguers broke the strike on their bikes"

"First hours of the strike turn into a smiling cyclistic 'happening'" (and they actually use the word "happening" in Czech)

It was supposed to be a day when anger would erupt. A day when life in the country would come to a stop and the 90% of Czechs who, according to the unions' statements, don't agree with the policy of the Nečas government, would move the country closer to early elections.

Thursday morning's reality could hardly be farther from the unions' vision.  In most regional capitals, nothing happened at all.  On Prague's embankments hundreds of cyclists rode past each other in the morning sun.  Some of them took pictures of each other and with smiles fell into conversation. 

Neighbors worked out carpooling and at least for one day there was relief from the nuisance of morning traffic, 1 car = 1 person.  In the morning traffic reports, drivers didn't hide their delight.

In those trolleys that did head out in spite of the strike and quickly became overfull, travelers describe an unusual atmosphere of unity and solidarity.  "Scooch in a little more so more of us can fit in here," sounded one example.  Incredible, compared to other days.

The counter-strike that I mentioned earlier turned out not to be much of anything. Tuesday's paper said that 300 people had already said they were going to do it, and it gave the impression that the numbers were growing.  In the end, only about 150 people got on Wednesday's last subway to Dejvická and didn't get off at the end of the line. Or rather, judging from the pictures, they got off the train, but didn't leave the station. They played guitars and sang songs. They chatted. They drank. (A picture with an earlier version of the story clearly showed a keg, which probably didn't contain mineral water. "What part of 'I'm not joining your worthy socio-political cause unless there's a keg!' don't you understand?") As the newspaper put it, it was more of a 'happening' than anything else (there's that word again).

Counter-strike!

by Karl

As I wrote on Sunday, there's a strike planned for this coming Thursday. It was originally scheduled for Monday (yesterday), from 3:00am to 4:00pm, but there was an injunction, so the unions moved it to Thursday and plan for it to be 24 hours, midnight to midnight. Trains will stop, presumably at the last station before midnight, and start up from there early Friday morning. (The railways management is planning to use the day for some maintenance work that's hard to get to while the trains are on their normal schedule. It looks like the unions will agree, since this work wouldn't violate the spirit of messing up life for the public.)

The latest development is that some subway riders are planning a strike of their own, which is being organized by a man who's described in the newspaper article as a café owner.  On the subway, when you reach the end of one of the subway lines, a voice comes on and announces, first in Czech but then again in English, "Terminal station.  Please exit the train."   The strike declaration reads, in part, "We, the customers of the Transit Authority of the capital city Prague, don't consent to the limitation of prepaid services.  We will protest against this limitation by a travelers' strike: we won't disembark at the Dejvická station."  On Wednesday night they plan to catch the last subway out of downtown's Můstek station, and when they reach the end of the line at Dejvická, they simply won't get off.

"The transit authorities are preparing for the event.  'If the strike takes place, employees of the transit authority will certainly be on hand.  If the travelers repeatedly fail to heed the call to get off the train, the city police will intervene,' said Martina Neckářová from the transit authority's press department."

The unions' slogan is, "We're striking for you!", the argument being that the proposed pension changes are bad for most people, so the unions are helping everybody by obstructing them.  The counter-strikers have adopted the obvious slogan, "You're not striking for me!", and they've set up a Facebook page (Shades of the Arab Spring!).  Supposedly there were 40,000 people signed up to the page by Tuesday morning.  In a counter-counter-strike move, somebody has set up another Facebook page, "Organization against the organization you're not striking for me."  The subtitle at this new page reads, "Everyone sets up nonsense organizations and pages here, so why not?"

It's a face(book)-off. We're just waiting for the puck to drop.

Strike!

by Karl

At 3:00 am tomorrow (Monday), the Czech Republic is scheduled to start being a mess.  Transportation workers have called a strike to protest the government's plans for changes to the pension system.  Trolleys and buses won't run.  There are discussions about whether subways will operate (that only affects Prague, since it's got the only subway system in the country; the Prague public transit authorities are hoping to provide Sunday service).

According to  Saturday's Mladá fronta dnes, the subway carries about 1 million travelers daily.  If you figure that for most people that's two trips (to work, and back), then that's half a million people, in a city of 1.3 million (plus an ungodly number of tourists).

The paper quotes a transportation expert who says that urban public transit carries two thirds of travelers [presumably that's in Prague specifically, but I imagine it's similar in other Czech cities].  So as the newspaper explains, "If subway employees join the strike, we can expect a total collapse of transportation."  There's not much point in heading out with your car.  As the quoted expert continues, "If [public transit] doesn't run, it's clear that there's no way that the road capacity can bear such an onslaught.  The result will be things shutting down completely."

Marti

Marti Stayton

June 10, 1950 - June 11, 2011

Rest in peace, Marti. We love you, and we will miss you deeply.

xoxo
Kate, Karl, Ben & Garrett

Reading, writing, and ...

Riding!

It's all in the tongue.

This has been a big year for Garrett!

He has been this close to riding a bike on his own for almost two years, but he'd get anxious about falling, or frustrated with his teachers (can't wait to teach that kid to drive), and just abandon his bicycle for his scooter when we were home.

But now ... look at this action. And this.

Garrett did his first solo ride on Wednesday afternoon in Puškinovo náměstí, just a block from our apartment. Tonight we brought a picnic dinner down to Stromovka and let the boys ride. 

It's good to have a goal. Next week is Activities Week at school, and from what I can tell it's nothing but fun and games and water fights and field trips all week long. On Thursday Garrett's class is coming to Stromovka to ride bikes.

A little more practice on taking off and stopping, and Garrett will be good to go.

Croatia ~ Plitvice Lakes

The inside back cover of National Geographic Traveler magazine always shows a single beautiful picture of breathtaking scenery, usually from some remote place in the world. We had an issue in our magazine rack back home for several years (go ahead, mock my housekeeping skills -- I can take it) that featured a lush forested area with waterfalls cascading into ethereal aquamarine lakes. Plitvička jezera. The Plitvice Lakes. Croatia.

"Well, that looks lovely," I thought. "If only ..."

Aunt Infestation!

Lauren and Mara

Question: What could be more delightful than having your doting aunties (in the case of Ben and Garrett), your beloved sisters (for Karl), or your yet-two-more-examples-of-how-you-really-lucked-into-this-family, super cool sisters-in-law (that's me speaking) come all the way from Boston to visit?

Answer: Precious little.

Parc Astérix

Part four in a series of posts on our trip to Paris. Took even more pics than usual as we were visiting friends. And, we were in Paris. And we were having fun. Previous posts: part one, part two, part three. This one's far less esoteric.

In considering all of Paris's sites and activities for our visit, there was one place Karl and I really didn't want to go: EuroDisney. I'm sure it's fun. And we knew the kids probably would have loved it. But Karl and I couldn't swallow the idea of spending that kind of money and 20 percent of our time in Paris at Disney. And we assumed it wouldn't be an issue – we wouldn't bring it up, so the boys would be none the wiser.

Then we borrowed a friend's copy of Toy Story 3.

“Mom! Dad! Guess what?! There's a Disneyland in Paris!!!”

This DVD (released in Europe) was happy to enlighten Ben and Garrett on the hectares and hectares of fun that awaited them at Mickey's Euro-theme park.

Karl and I were resolute in our desire not to go to Disney, but it was disheartening to think that we were going to spend a long weekend in Paris and the boys would come home disappointed. So we compromised.