adventures at tesco

first of all, i guess tesco is an english company, right? so i was perusing deb's copy of "notes from a small island," by bill bryson, which i had already read but discovered that she had a different copy of which included a glossary of words that might be unfamiliar to a speaker of american english. for example, i learned that a "cornet" is an ice cream cone. but anyway, i saw tesco in the glossary. obviously i knew what it was because they are all over prague. however, in bryson's glossary it was listed as "Tesco's." that leads me to wonder - do certain dialects of british english feature the unnecessary addition of a posessive? or was it just a mistake on bryson's part? because i thought this was a characteristic of western pennsylvanian american english. almost everyone, especially older citizens of the area, add the "'s" to the proper names of certain stores, bars, etc. for instance the drugstore chain "Eckerd's" or "Buckhead's" instead of buckhead saloon. i will have to do some research on this.

ANYWAY, it amazes me how easily tesco can successfully manipulate consumers. as i was walking from the entrance to the toiletries area, i noticed a display in the middle of the main aisle. the "middle of the aisle," in case you didn't know, is the place where they put the most worthless items on sale. the good sales -- you have to search for those. they remain hidden deep in the aisles of their respective items.

this week's sale was for random household items -- tools and the like. bungee cords, wrenches, huge rolls of packing tape, scissors. that kind of shit. things you don't realize you need until they're right in front of your face for 30% off. i even found myself slowing down... yeah, maybe i do need 24 AAA batteries. but what would i ever do with that many batteries? i don't have the luxury of owning many battery-powered items. i noticed a lady finely inspecting a yellow, plastic flashlight. someone else carrying an armful of clear tape. things they all probably didn't need until they unsuspectingly stumbled on this sale display.

why does this work so well? and why are the things i need not displayed so prominently? just once i'd like to walk into tesco and see facewash! bubble-wrap lined mailing envelopes! paper towels! right in front of me. (where the HELL are the paper towels in the narodni trida tesco anyway? they're not with the household cleaning supplies, and not with the toilet paper. WTF.)

instead i spent a half an hour combing the shelves to ensure i didn't put foot cream on my face.

superbowl

THE PATRIOTS LOST THE SUPERBOWL. there is a god.

i don't have anything else to say.

(PS. i only write about football and trams. sorry. i have a good one for tomorrow...)

random thoughts, tramspotting part 2

first off, the superbowl is going to be boring.

i hope the giants can pull something out. if they don't, it'll be the most boring superbowl and the most boring NFL season in recent history. also, i really intensely dislike the patriots (if you haven't picked up on that yet).

enough.

i don't know how, but the arrival times of trams are scheduled in just such a way so as to encourage excessive eating. espcially sunday nights. you get there, you've got about 13-16 minutes because you just missed the last 24. so you're standing around, and it's kinda cold, and the natural thought process is... there's a perfectly good KFC down the block, i've got all this time... it'd be a shame not to take advantage, right? then you end up with a bag full of greasy chicken and fries and sub-par coleslaw* that you weren't even hungry for in the first place. but it wastes the time.

they also conveniently placed a sausage stand right near the main night tram stop in wenceslas square. cunning business sense.

also, i've been considering when it is appropriate to run for the tram/metro.
(it's always okay to run for a bus. they are unpredictable.)

i'd say the following:
ALWAYS run for the 24. it's like the haley's comet of trams.
NEVER run for the metro on the red line. especially in the morning. seriously, if you can't be 45 seconds later than you already are... you either work for a despot or you're life is in shambles.
IF you can hear the metro coming, it's okay to run for it.

at the Urxova stop near my house, i consider it worth running if i'm about a block back from the main street. based on my calculations involving speed and wind resistance, and amount of time it takes the tram to approach the stop and for all passengers to board and deboard, i can usually make it from there. any farther back is just heartbreaking... you want to run, but you know you won't make it.

as you can see, i'm rather giddy with the situation of having a stellar public transport system.

*oddly, all the McDonald's in Prague are far superior in quality to those in the States, but the KFC's are dismal. the food is terrible. it was some of the worst coleslaw i've had too, by the way. my little personal plastic bowl serving had to have contained an entire clove of garlic.

the dangling conversation

so, i just spent some time backreading lori's blog (a life in the present, link to the right). among her excellent entries was one, an echo of her blog's title, that focused on her fear that she is wasting away the present by looking too hard at the future. i, and i think a lot of other people in my demographic, have spent of time recently (yesterday, the last few weeks, months, years) trying to answer two questions:

a. what am i doing now? and
b. what am i doing next?
-(and as a subquestion to b, how will what i'm doing now help me do what i want to do next?)

i wrote recently about not knowing what i want to do next and being quite happy about it, which is still true. it's really refreshing not to have to think about everything as interconnected steps to achieve some greater goal. i also don't really have a reason for a. either. at first i was here because it might look good on a graduate school application. also because i wanted to try something different, i suppose i felt that i had wrung pittsburgh dry.

those are not really true anymore. i still want to go to grad school, but for what? who knows. and being here for five months has made me realize i'm not really tired of pittsburgh; on the contrary, i love it even more. prague is just a different place; teaching is just something to make money so i can be happy, here, and when i'm not happy anymore, i'll leave. i'll go back home or i'll go to washington dc or i'll go somewhere else. why i'm there, and how being there will factor into what i want to do next, won't really matter.

i suppose i'm here because i can, i've been given the opportunity, and that's it. i'm lucky to have had the resources to pick up and move to a new country, i was lucky get an education and to be raised to expect these sorts of priveleges, not just to hope for them. whenever i think about missing home, or not wanting to be here, or wondering why i came in the first place, i just think about my mom. when she left me at the security line at pittsburgh international she started crying harder than i've ever seen and told me "i'm so proud of you." i haven't done anything particularly impressive in my life, but i know she's proud because i've done things that she was never given the opportunity to do, or maybe things that she never thought she could do (even though she probably could).

obviously, i don't know what it was like to be her, growing up, but i'd imagine she was caught in between what women were supposed to do in the past, and what they can do now. she finished high school and lived with her parents until she met and married my father, when she moved into his ("their") home. she had children and was a stay at home mom until that could no longer pay the bills. she didn't get to go to college, she didn't get to have an apartment and live on her own. she's barely been out of pennsylvania, let alone abroad; i don't even think she has a passport. i think it's a typical case of wanting more for your children than you had for yourself, though i think my mom was intensely lucky. she is in love with someone who loves her, she is one of the most loving and compassionate people i know. i can't really think of the right words to describe her.

so when i want to complain about not knowing what to do with my life, i think about my mom and that she is proud of me for just being here. which is something that, when i think about it, makes it a lot easier for me to "just be here."

which was quite a long way to lead me to the title of this blog, which is "the dangling conversation." it is a simon and garfunkel song, but it is also the would-be name of a restaurant i'd like to open someday, theoretically in pittsburgh but i'm open. i don't know exactly what i want it to be, yet, but i pick up things as i go; i want it to be a decoupage of things i've seen from places i've been. it started with crossword puzzle placemats on the tables. i think i want to decorate it with maps. i have one sandwich name so far, "the stinkin' lincoln." it involves onions. also, i "borrow" ideas, such as the way the bathrooms are decorated in meduza. there are old tiles from the floor to halfway up the wall; then an uneven frieze of jewels and seashells in some sort of cement or putty or something. anyway, at some point i'll put all these things into this perfect little place, the dangling conversation.

i used to think i needed to do something really "great," like be a famous writer or a scholar or something, and that owning a restaurant in pittsburgh was not that. however, i think i was wrong, and i think thats why i've spent a lot of my formative/adult years unhappy. i've been searching for my thing to be "great" at, and i've been frustrated because i'm not finding it. but i think i could be happy with the dangling conversation, or just being here in prague not really doing anything. which, and this might sound terrible -- is somewhat of a relief.

tramspotting

some thoughts on the trams:

1. i really want to steal one of the routemaps. they put up new ones at the turn of the year and they are sweet. i have an affinity for maps. they are something i collect from places i go instead of souvenirs or postcards or what have you. however, i'm getting bored with the typical mass-produced city plans that you find most often. the new tram maps include not only the metro lines but all the tram and bus routes, and in full technicolor no less! debs and i decided the primetime to steal would be sunday afternoon. the night tram, ostensibly the best option for theft, is actually bad because it's usually crammed full of people. (crammed tram. ha.) i was inspecting the signs today and they seem as though they could be easily slid from behind their protective plastic display. i want one before i leave.

(setting goals is important.)

2. the hierarchy of tram seating is really getting on my nerves. back in america, where things make sense, the young give up their seats for the old and men usually give up their seats for women. that's not how it works in prague! countless times have i been pushed aside by a young, able-bodied gentleman in a race for the last empty seat.

here's how i think it should go. if there's one seat left, it should go in this order:
a. old woman with a cane
b. old man with a cane
c. old woman, clearly no longer at physical peak but lacking cane
d. old man, ditto
e. pregnant woman
f. person from age of young-adult to middle-age with a minor injury, ie a broken leg requiring the use of crutches
g. anyone holding more than a half-full bag of groceries
h. mother with young child
i. couple sharing a seat

aside:
i once had a cursory dicussion as part of a "couple sharing a seat" about this hierarchy.

"let's do the couple sharing a seat. that way we don't have to get up."
"who do we supercede?"
"um, i think single men."

however, i think that since the couples are exercising efficiency by taking up only one seat instead of two, they should be rewarded and be allowed to supercede any single rider.

j. able-bodied woman
k. any child
l. able-bodied man

men have much less regard for chivalry here, i've noticed. i know a lot of women are feminists nowadays and insist that chivalry is actually condescending, but i disagree. after centuries of patriarchal society, i think you can manage to open a door for us. or give up your seat. i don't think it's an unreasonable exhange.

3. they should invent a tram route that goes through the tunnel from karlin to zizkov. it would make my life 100% easier.


....and then i found $5. sorry, i'm bored and i've got nothing.

slaveryblog

i've been put in the position of defending my country and my american citizenship countless times since i've been to prague. for the most part, i hate it -- i've never had so many people say completely rude things to me only seconds of cordial introductions. i understand that we are not the most popular of the world's citizens, but give me a break. that doesn't excuse you being rude to someone you don't even know. it's not like i meet a german person and the second sentence out of my mouth is "so, how about that time hitler killed all those jews?"

i can explain myself out of the barbs thrown by most. however, today, i was totally caught off guard.

i had some time this morning and found myself browsing in the bookstore. i saw a copy of "the adventures of huckleberry finn," and since it was only 97 crowns and it's one of those books i've been meaning to read for a while, i bought it.

i had it with me in the herna today, just sitting on the table. late in the afternoon, one of the girls from the fourth class, patty, asked me about it.

"what's it about?"

"well.. it's about a boy named huck finn, who runs away from home. he meets jim, a runaway slave..."

"what's a slave?"

"um."

try explaining several centuries of racial opression to a ten year old. i think i came up with "well, in the 1700s we brought people from Africa over to work on big farms."

i didn't quite finish and she said "ohhhh." like, ohhh, yeah, i know about that egregious violation of human rights carried out by your country. i just needed a refresher.

that was maybe the most awkward i've ever felt in a conversation. mostly because she was so young and i didn't want her first impressions of america to be george bush and books about racism. and how do you make it clear to someone who barely speaks english that we're not all a bunch of cunts?

where were you...

alicia just read, and i have recently started reading, a book called "whatever love means." it was given to me by a certain english acquaintance of mine. i don't remember what i thought at first, but the other day when alicia picked it up to read, i read the back. when i saw "blah blah blah, vic started sleeping with emma the day princess diana died..." i thought, oh jeez.

turns out, the book is pretty good. it's not exactly the sun also rises or anything, but it's pretty well written and it's entertaining. but it got me wondering, is princess diana's death one of those "where were you?" moments in the lives of most british people? like a 9/11 or JFK assassination to an american?

i remember it happening, but i have no idea where i was. i know i was 13 years old. i remember feeling bad for princes harry and william, and thinking prince william was hot. reading the book has got me racking my brain to remember anything i can about my life when that happened, but i can't. i even tried to remember other details about the summer when i was 13, but i had no success with that, either. one of the lines in the book mentions that (in GB, anyway) that the hot summer weather didn't really arrive until august. i tried to remember the weather patterns of summer 1997 and got nowhere.

i guess in the long run it doesn't matter if july 1997 was extremely hot or only average in temperature, but its a little disturbing that for the most part, entire years of my life will be forgotten unless attached to some significant event. i remember where i was on 9/11 - in fact, my most vivid memory is that that evening i went to the eye doctor. i can't think of anything else noteworthy about 2001. or 1997. or many other years.

so my new gameplan is to try to get very invested in national events so that i can always "remember where i was." that way, every day i'll have a moment that will signify to my brain to remember every little detail. that way, i'll never forget. also, i'll have lots of great opening lines for parties.

where were you when they passed the 27th amendment?
where were you when anna nicole smith's baby was born?
where were you when jordin sparks won american idol?
where were you when barack obama won the iowa primary?

the fun never ends.

so, to begin, where were you when heath ledger died?*




*when exactly did it happen again?

musical (by anna/debs, alicia, me, and lori)

it was 6pm, (18:00 if you're a douche bag) and the musical sounds on the tram were at their height. most notable was the youthful young man sitting at the front who was half muttering, half chanting to himself. it could barely be heard over the idle chit chat and the sniffling, the tram stop announcements and brakes. what he was repeating to himself was:

"co vas pryteli nocht von trizedi most breheli," which in english means, "what goes up must come down."

he was referring, of course, to the recent promotion of his arch nemesis, tim calhoun. they grew up in corn country -- mid-eastern kansas -- on rival farms. there wasn't much going on in their town -- bruno, kansas -- and their only form of entertainment was a battle, no so labyrinthine that it was impossible to understand, over the miniscule differences in the quality of the russet potatoes, the size and uniformity in shape and color of the autumn pumpkins, the length of the ears of corn. tim calhoun was always winning this battle.

but not anymore.

"pristi stanice - rahska zahrada" the tram proudly announced.

continuing to mumble, the man hobbled to the doors of the tram and exited. as he made his way to the five-star hotel pramen, he stopped into one of the many vietnamese vegetable stands.

"i've got it! i know how to defeat tim calhoun. i'm going to hire me some czech-speaking, vietnamese produce sellers and bring them back to bruno, kansas. those honkies won't have shit on my potraviny!"

and off he went, mumbling about his great ideas. and with his array of fruit, liquor and cigs he made a damn good business and eventually expanded to a fish and tackles shop and car wash.

you go, brother, you go.

i take back what i said about the patriots

i am actually rooting for the patriots to win tonight. i never thought i would do this, but it's actually very important for them to make it to the superbowl.

so they can lose.

to the packers.

which would make it one of the best superbowls in recent memory. what better story than this, really?

aging, yet beloved brett favre has taken the packers from worst to first. everyone is caught up in this "perfect season" bullshit, high on tom brady as one of the best quarterbacks ever and the patriots as an unstoppable, dynasty-caliber team. also, everyone has been calling for brett to retire for a few years now. yet he kept playing because he loves the game and he knew in his dear little mississippi soul that he had another one in him.

so he'll lead the boys out onto the field and in 60 minutes they will crush the patriots, ruining both the pats' perfect season and making tom brady look like the punk that he is.

it's kind of amazing when you think about it. favre is the last man standing from his generation of quarterbacks. all the other "elite" quarterbacks -- tom brady, peyton and eli manning, and i'll MAYBE, begrudgingly, give you carson palmer even though he is a whiny little jerk -- are younger, having played most or all of their careers in the 2000s. favre belongs to the 90s generation, which gave us, most notably, john elway, troy aikman, steve young, dan marino and favre.

brady and favre facing off in a superbowl is kinda like if the san francisco 49ers of the 80s had a chance to play the 49ers of the 90s. a steve-young-quarterbacked team versus a joe-montana-quarterbacked team. its hard to believe how awesome that would be.

it's a shame, but from superbowl winning teams, you usually remember the quarterbacks and maybe the wide receivers.

if the packers were to lose, it would be devastating. it would be like the movie "rudy" ending without rudy making that tackle. brett would probably slink off into retirement, tail between his legs, and be remembered as just another victim on tom brady's trail to the hall of fame.

but they won't! the packers will win and it will be a fitting end to favre's career. he'll prove that the old school is better than the new school, and that brady might be great but he'll never be as great as favre, which is true.

also, fun fact, if the packers beat the patriots in the superbowl, favre will have won both his last and his first superbowl against the same team.

go packers!

jaywalk, started by marie (continued by sergio, drew, debbie, alicia and me)

independence, freedom, step by step. cobblestone under my feet, a bell rings. where am i going, does it matter? green light red light, why do i have to stop? a baby is crying, mother and stroller, help her cross. peace and quiet, fresh air. gravel under my feet, just keep going. sunrise, sunset. stop to rest and breathe, only if i want to. tear the paper, break the rules, leaves in the wind. lines look better when you have drawn over them. step, step, stepping. past the bounds that are assigned. it's a small rebellion, just walking when you're not supposed to, but an important one. it is in steps that things happen, in steps that things unhappen. it is the way the world came to be (in 7 steps) and the way it will go might be fewer still.

each step grew larger still until i wasn't jaywalking, but jay gallopping, jay leaping. each step no longer represented one step in creation or destruction. it was an illicit street dance. pound, pound, pounce. her feet felt like quickly-drying cement, calcifying in the heat of the indian summer sunshine. yet just as she felt the final twinge of the hardening process end, a weight would lift off of her shoulders and she would begin her street dance once more.

from a distance, not quite so far but close enough that she could sense its origin, her ears began to process the notes and melodies of an ancient story. swaying ever so gently, her heart taught her feet to move in time with the rhythm of this haunting reverie. slowly, she found herself drawn closer to the aural center of this strange universe.

yeah, she had just chugged two bottles of robitussin. it was her thanksgiving day tradition now since the accident which left her blind two years ago. she had a delicate and specific schedule she followed every year. she would wake up at five, because getting into town for the parade always provided a challenge -- especially for a single blind woman. in her handbag she packed two bottles of extra-strength robitussin.

she would stand in the streets -- she liked to pick a busy one, like vinohradska, or preferably one with trams, maybe jugoslavska or revolucni. she would exit the metro, walking stick in one hand, robitussin in the other. she would bring the sweet nectar to her lips, gulp it down. then she would jaywalk, cross the streets like a metal ball in a pinball game, playing that game with the vehicular traffic. it was her parting shot at fate, her last chance to prove that this was always the future and never the future, that she was untouchable by the forces that had guided her to her thanksgiving day acccident.