Update

Thanks to everyone who voted for the blog. It came fourth which is remarkable given it was up against blogs based in Prague, which of course have a bigger audience. I was really touched by your comments.

Please Vote For This Blog

Adventures in the Czech Republic is in the running for an Expats Blog Award. If you enjoy this blog and would like it to win in the Czech Republic category. Please vote for it on  http://www.expatsblog.com/blogs/480/adventures-in-the-czech-republic.

You do so by going to the bottom of the page and making a comment and leaving a star rating.

Thanks.

Zoe 

Winter arrives

Winter has well and truly arrived here. The snow is several inches thick and last night ice flowers formed on my bedroom window. The sky was that brilliant Czech winter blue today and the sun was warm - so warm that I was glad I took this photograph of the window ice when I did, because it soon melted.

I apologise for this brief post - I have hurt the muscles in my right wrist, so typing is both painful and a problem. Let's hope normal service can resume quickly.

Conservation

Here I am in my Czech home trying to write a novel and procrastinating, so I'm writing a blog post instead. The weather outside is grey - November is a naff month here, by which I mean English weather, grey, foggy, cloudy with occasional rain. Winter hasn't really arrived yet, with that wonderful white crisp snow with skies so blue and clear you could furnish an entire navy with trousers. The village is alive with people getting ready - draping their garden plants with conifer branches and cutting firewood. But one preparation is already completed - the preparation of conserves.

All through the summer and autumn the Czechs have been making jams and marmalade, bottling fruit and vegetables and of course drying mushrooms. I too caught the bug for the latter - mushrooms were sliced and dried on trays or hung on string over the stove. And the result: I have a large kilner jar full of sliced mushrooms the consistency of foam rubber. As for fruit, well I have no need to lift a finger. My Czech friends will always bring me jars when they come to tea. And not just one jar either, a carrier bag will open and at least four jars will be produced. I am very grateful during these winter months - there is somehow nothing so warming as toast and jam.

It seems to me watching my Czech friends that they cannot bear the sight of food going to waste. What we would discard, they harvest. Baskets of bruised windfalls are gathered and every tiny bit of good saved and turned into delicious food. Perhaps it dates back to those years when food was not abundant. I am sufficiently old enough to have been brought up by parents who knew rationing and know the impact it had on their attitudes. I still feel guilty when I do not finish my food. But the Czechs do seem to take it to extremes - in Czech cellars and pantries there are jars and jars of the stuff.

When my lovely friend Hannah died she left shelves full of jars and several freezers full of mushrooms and vegetables (mostly runner beans). Knowing that they would otherwise go to waste, I took a basket of jars home with me. After all those saucepans she ruined making the stuff, it was the least I could do.

Street Art - Litomysl

 I found this wonderful sequence of street art literally painted on to a street in Litomysl. So Czech!

Slavonice - The Lutheran Prayer Room

Slavonice is a small quiet town in the area of Czech Canada on the Austrian border. The town isn't on most tourists' itinerary, which is a shame for the tourists but good for those of us in the know. The town is decorated with spectacular Renaissance sgraffito, but for me the gems in the town are to be found inside the buildings which crowd round the town's two adjoined squares. Step through any number of archways and you will find yourself in entrance halls with wonderful ornately ribbed ceilings.

I recommend visiting the tourist information centre, if for no other reason than to admire the wall decorations. But best of all is a house where one of the rooms was used as a Lutheran chapel in the very early days of Protestantism. Three of the four walls are decorated with scenes of the end of the Last Judgement. The iconography is fascinating with the pope clearly depicted as the anti-Christ. It is not hard to see that to the worshipers who sat in that room four and a half centuries ago the day of Judgement was nigh.

The house is now a small museum and bed and breakfast. It was very strange spending the night in a museum, although I am pleased to say that you do not sleep in a room with demons dragging souls off to hell on the walls. Now that really would be spooky.

The museum is only open in the peak summer months, but can be visited by prior appointment on other months via the website http://www.evagiordanova.cz/en/modlitebna. You can also book accommodation there too.

Karel Jaromir Erben

An English edition of Karel Jaromir Erben's A Bouquet of National Legends, is being published on the 1st December.

Influenced by the Brothers Grimm and the growth in studies of European folk literature, Karel Jaromir Erben collected more than 2000 Slavic fairy tales, folk songs, and legends. In 1853 he published his most famous book A Bouquet of National Legends (Kytice z pověstí národních). He also produced Písně národní v Čechách (Folk Songs of Bohemia) which contains 500 songs and Prostonárodní české písně a říkadla (Czech Folk Songs and Nursery Rhymes), a five-part book that brings together much of the Czech folklore.  

His works reflected a wider rise of interest in Czech heritage and Czech nationalism. A Bouquet of National Legends  “is one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature, and it remains the only one of the three that has not yet been published in English.” according to Marcela Sulak, the translator of the new edition.

The new book is  published by Twisted Spoon Press, a Prague-based publishing company, which publishes English-language translations of Czech works.

A 32 page excerpt is online on http://issuu.com/twistedspoon/docs/bouquet_excerpt?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage