Counting

Twice a week I have a Czech language lesson. They say it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and as I struggle with my new language I realise that this dog is definitely getting old!

Now in most languages you often start with learning to count. Pity the poor souls who take this route when learning Czech. One is jedna, two dve, three (not so easy - it has the soft r) tři, but then you hit four - aaarghh! Four is čtyři - phonetically (or as near as I can get it) chteeeezrzree.

Okay you think, I'll give up on that - I'll try days of the week instead. Bad idea. Again you start ok: Monday - pondeli, Tuesday - utery, Wednesday - streda, and then you hit the fourth day in the week - čtvrtek. And don't even think about telling the time - not only is there čtyři to cope with but also quarter past - čtvrtek - and quarter to - tři čtvrté. The worst time of all is quarter to four - tři čtvrté na čtyři.

My secret is always to buy three apples or five and make sure my watch is telling the correct time. The old dog may not be able to do the trick, but there is more than one way to skin a cat!

Whitewashing Visitors

My sister and her family are staying in our Czech home at the moment. They have been there for a week, having spent a fortnight there last August/September. Just as last year the weather until the day they arrived was perfect - sunny and dry as is normal at this time of year. But, as has become a standing family joke, they brought English rain with them.

The advantage of that for us is they need something to do to pass the time and so last year we got a large chunk of whitewashing done for us! My sister wanted to be an art restorer when she was younger, but was denied by having done the wrong exams. So her art restoration skills were put into practice on the decorations in the house. In the old days the whitewashed walls of the houses in the area were decorated using coloured paint on rollers. The rollers produced a regular pattern on the walls similar to wallpaper. When the decoration grew old and tired, it was whitewashed over and a new pattern applied. Thus on the walls of our old house there were layers of decoration stretching back through many years and generations of house-proud German families. My sister painstakingly removed the layers and counted ten before hitting the stone wall.

The problem with these decorations is unless you know to apply a coat of stabiliser to the wall before applying the whitewash, the paint of previous decorators will appear like a ghostly signature on the wall. Not having any experience of whitewash (to those Czechs reading this, we use emulsion paint in the UK) I wasted a whole day painting a room, only to wake up the following morning to see the paint coming through. Whitewash has other disadvantages not least being the fact that it comes off on your clothes if you lean against it - so don't put coat hooks on the wall - but on the upside it does allow the old walls to breathe. What with the ghostly hand of past decorators and breathing walls this house has a life of its own.

Czech coffee (and tea?)

Czech coffee (kava) is drunk dark and strong. It is like a giant turkish coffee and with just as great a caffeine kick. A lady friend of mine has been plying me with it in her flat for several months now and so I decided to ask for a lesson on how to make it. Basically you need several spoonfuls of well-ground roasted coffee in the bottom of a mug or cup, add boiling water, stir well, add milk and sugar to taste, and stir again. Then let the coffee stand for a while until the grounds settle at the bottom. Drink at your leisure until just before you hit the mud of coffee grounds!

There is a Czech phrase "To je silná káva" - "that's rich coffee" meaning "that's rich". There is an equivalent for tea - only it's in the opposite - "that's weak tea" meaning "nothing much". As usual the Czechs are spot on - the tea here is indeed nothing much. Tea here is served horribly weak - "gnat's piss" as they say in England. Sadly the Czechs are under the illusion that the tea that we export here under the name of English Breakfast Tea is actually what the Brits drink. Well for any Czechs reading this, may I disillusion you - we do not drink Lipton's export tea in England, we drink Typhoo or PG Tips - tea which "will put hair on your chest" (another English phrase about tea). My husband and I bring large amounts of English teabags over from England in our luggage, so we can drink proper tea.

All this talk of coffee and tea reminds me of my first visit to Prague and a visit to Cafe Slavia. I arrived at the cafe one day to meet up with my puppeteer friend, to find her trying to explain to the waiter that she wanted the tea with milk and to leave the teabag in. For years she had told me how she was really Czech and there she was desperate for that most British of institutions - a proper cup of tea!

If you do come to Krumlov, don't try to find a British cuppa. Instead go to the Laibon tearooms (see the photo) run by the lovely David and try out the exotic teas they have on offer. I recommend the yogi tea.

Beer - Czech Breakfast - Yes?

The Czechs have a saying - "Beer makes men beautiful bodies." And if that is true Czech men are the most beautiful in the world - because the Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per head in the world - one bottle every day for every man, woman and child.

The reason for this high consumption rate is possibly the low price of beer here - a bottle of Budvar will cost about 25p (10 kcs) in a local supermarket and maybe 50p (20 kcs) in a pub. The Czechs regard cheap beer as a birthright. No Czech government wishing to stay in power would dare increase the prices, so when the EU tried to raise duty on beer last year the Czech Government blocked the rise. The other reason is of course the quality. There are breweries all across the Czech Republic - the most famous of these are Pilsner Urquel (Plzensky Prazdroj), Gambrinus, Bernard, Kozel, Staropramen and of course our local Budvar.

Budvar for me means that I am getting near home. Ceske Budejovice, the nearest large town to our home, is the home of Budweiser Budvar - the real Budweiser and infinitely superior to the American stuff. You pass the brewery on the train from Prague, it is a sign to get your bags from the luggage rack and get ready. There is a large bottle, several floors high attached to the side of the brewery, so you shouldn't miss it.

That Czechs drink beer at any point of the day was brought home to us when we moved into our house. A gang of blokes turned up to move out the furniture of the family we were buying the house from about 7.00am. After an hour or so's hard work humping chunky furniture around they stopped and started looking for something. One came up to us and made a shape of a box in the air, we shook our heads blankly. Suddenly there was a shout and someone appeared carrying a crate of beer. Bottles were cracked open and they began to drink. The leader came up to my husband and offered a bottle - in broken English he said "Beer - Czech breakfast. English breakfast - whisky and soda, yes?"

Our favourite Czech beers are Gambrinus and Bernard. I am particularly fond of the Czech dark beer, which English drinkers will be less familiar with. Dark beer according to another Czech saying is meant to increase the size of a woman's breasts. I don't know if that is true, but it is certainly worth trying before you resort to surgery!

Svejk or Kafka - two sides of the Czech nation

My Czech friend believes that the Czechs are either like the Good Soldier Svejk of the novel of the same name, bumbling through life indifferent to the impositions of authority, or like the heroes of Kafka's novels stuck helpless in an impossible maze of bureaucracy. The more time I spend in this country, the more I come to realise that her analysis is correct. These two great Czech writers had indeed captured something of the Czech soul.

I am regularly struck by the Czechs' laissez faire attitude to life. An example of this is the lack of timekeeping as exemplified in my last post by the failure of the local town hall to keep to office hours (which played to my advantage) and the irregular collection dates for rubbish (which doesn't). Had this been in England the local householders would have been ringing up the town hall to complain and muttering darkly to one another about how we pay our money and should get proper service. The Czechs on the other hand are positively Mediterranean in their attitude. They shrug their shoulders, as if to say, "That is how it is. What do you expect?"

Our house is full of nearly finished and annoying items of work that the builder, the plumber and electrician all need some day to get round to sorting. Every time I sit on the loo and it rocks because the plumber has yet to fix it to the floor, I am reminded of this. Every time I end up turning on my very expensive central heating by hand, when I should be able to do it by mobile phone from England, I am reminded. I do not take offence at this or feel that I am hard done by. I have observed that nearly all the Czech homes I have been in are in a similar state.

Then on the other hand there is Czech bureaucracy. Things that are simple in England can take up an inordinate amount of time here, waiting in one office to get the right form, waiting in another office to get the form stamped and then in another and another, and then finally being told you've got the wrong form and need to go back to the first office for another one. Even the simple job of paying a bill requires a trip to the bank or post office and filling in a form, as the Czechs have yet to discover cheques. It gets more complicated when trying to understand Czech laws, which can be overly complicated and indeed contradictory. As a Czech friend explained, when a new law comes in, they don't necessarily change the old ones which it should replace. So what do you do, faced with this impasse? Well you can do nothing, be paralysed by the Gordian knot of bureaucracy or you can proceed although in some way or another you will be breaking one law while obeying another. Kafka or Svejk, take your choice.

This is actually damaging for the Czech economy and society. For starters a lot of transactions happen on the wrong side of the law (brown envelopes and the like) not just to avoid paying tax (an old Czech saying is "He who does not steal from the state, steals from his family") but also to get something done sometime this side of doomsday. But there are other serious consequences for this country. The whole culture appears to biased against things happening, against people taking ownership of their own lives and fates. As a Brit and one who has been involved in helping communities help themselves, I am shocked by how difficult it is to mobilise people to improve things. Firstly people do not believe that anything will change if they do something and secondly they believe (often rightly) that bureaucracy will stop them.

A few months ago I was working with a collection of local residents about issues relating to their home town. It was clear from meeting with them that they really did want to change things. It was agreed that they would individually write to the authorities involved, which they have done. I also got them to agree (or so I thought) to set up a group not only to fight for changes, but also to access the large amounts of EU money that are available for programmes of positive change. I now discover that they have decided not to proceed with forming the group. Why? Because of the bureaucracy involved in registering it - whereas in England unincorporated community groups are able to start up easily. As a Brit I would still have gone ahead with it, but then I was brought up in a deep-seated can-do culture that believes in climbing mountains because they are there. My Czech friends, seeing the high hurdle in front of them, believing perhaps that they could do very little and what they could do was only influence others, talked themselves out of taking the next step. Who am I to judge? I cannot understand. They are right in the context of their own history and culture. But meanwhile there are piles of EU money waiting for the Czechs to claim, or waiting at least until 2012 when it will go elsewhere.

Czech rubbish collection

In front of our house gate is the dustbin. It is old and rusty with holes in the bottom and was inherited from the previous owners. This vital piece of kit is the source of much amusement and bemusement.

In order to get your bin emptied, you have to go to the Horice Na Sumava Town Hall and register, so I recently went with a Czech friend to sort out the bin. We arrived at the Town Hall down an alley off the main square to be greeted with a sign that the offices were not open on that day. I was ready to turn away, when my Czech friend said "Let's see if they are open." and went in. The place looked empty but in one room to the right we found two women in an office. They knew me at once - the news of the British woman from the village had proceeded me. They looked at me with interest and smiles.

There was no problem with sorting the bin for me. I paid an embarrassingly small sum, which probably costs more to collect than I actually paid, and they gave me a sticker, like a car tax disc, which you stick on the bin to show the dustbin men that you have paid. It would be emptied once a week, the women explained, on Monday. I went home, stuck the sticker on the bin and put in a load of rubbish ready for collection. Of course the dustmen did not come on Monday, but several days later they appeared with a lorry, that was more like a skiptruck than a British dustbin lorry. As far as I can observe there is no regular day for rubbish collection at all. And when the lorry does turn up I have to run out the house and point at the bin to get it emptied. I have seen my neighbour do the same. But hey, the rubbish goes and that is the main thing.

In towns, lots of people don't bother with this bin-registering lark (probably because it is more expensive), but pop out quietly in the dead of night and deposit carefully wrapped rubbish in the public litter bins, which are emptied regularly. As my punster of a husband put it recently "It's bin a real learning curve, I can tell you."

Two rules for visitors to Prague

I spent a few pleasant hours in Prague a few weeks ago. It is a city which is very special for me - it was here that I first fell in love with Czecho. I try to spend some time wandering aimlessly every time I visit - it's by far the best way to discover the city's hidden treasures. I have two rules:

No. 1 When you see a crowd of tourists, especially a gang of shirtless British stagnighters, dive down the nearest alley. It is amazing how just going a few yards to the left or right of the tourist routes, which stretch from Charles Bridge to the Town Square, or from the Bridge up to the Castle, you will find yourself alone.

No.2 Look up. It is easy to have your eyes captivated by the glitter of shop fronts and the allure of mammon and not to see Prague's architectural and decorative treasures above. Look up and you will see frescos, sgraffito, carvings, and sculpture. Look up and you will see architecture from all that great city's long history.

And as a result of following either or both of these rules you will have the added bonus of getting lost and so find a part of the city that you weren't looking for, but should have been.