Cousins
After way more discussion than was needed, two of my Chicago cousins came to visit me in early April. They brought with them an extensive care package, including Wisconsin cheese, American GQ magazines, and my iPod, which I left back in the States at Christmas time. It was a tear-jerking reunion (with the iPod).
Nick the Sissi (more on that later), 24, and Zoe, 21, arrived on a cold and snowy Tuesday. For their first taste of Prague, we went to Letna Park, which overlooks the city from a northern vantage point and offers a great view of everything from the Charles Bridge in the west to the massive statute of Žižkov on his horse in the east.
I went to work early the next day while my cousins slept in. They met me for my third lesson in the center of town at Cafe Adria. There I meet every Wednesday with Eva, a 39-year-old housewife for a 90-minute English conversation lesson. I do error correction and teach her new vocabulary, but mostly it's just a chance to practice her third language. Students often get too comfortable with their teacher's speech pattern, and the teacher also grows to understand the student even if something is expressed poorly, so I brought in the cousins to throw her a curve ball and make her work hard. This also meant that I didn't have to. I sat back and moderated their conversation, eating my lunch and responding to Eva's mistakes with a full-mouthed "Hmmm?" Afterwards, I headed to the southern part of town to do my last two lessons. Nick and Zoe went shopping.
On Thursday we went to Pražský hrad (Prague castle) , really a bunch of government buildings surrounding the Gothic cathedral of St. Vitus. When the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia, they also seized all private assets, churches included. When Communism fell, St. Vitus was returned to the Catholic Church. The state of the Czech Republic then sued for and won back control, and the two sides are still fighting a legal battle over possesion. Anyway, there's some great stained glass in there, but as Nick said, "you see one European cathedral, you've seen 'em all." I tend to agree.
Before coming to Karlov most (Charle's Bridge), we stopped at the Lennon Wall to take in the
graffiti. The wall sits across from the French embassy, and during Communism, kids would graffiti it protesting the regime. City Hall responded each time with a thick coat of white paint, until eventually the French ambassador, who liked looking at the brightly colored graffiti from his office window, asked the mayor of Prague to leave it up. At some point Lennon's picture was painted up there, but the original has long since been covered with layers of spray paint. A bust of his head now hangs from the wall. We were screamin; "Yeah we all, shine, on!" while snapping pics.That evening, we headed out on the town and Nick and Zoe got to mingle with another local, this time my friend Jana. Finding a pub near the IP Pavlova metro stop, we sat down and Jana began to order us Czech spirits, mainly Becherovka and Slivovice. They warm the belly and fog the mind. Because it's his way of making small talk, Nick asked Jana her opinion of Radiohead, and was shocked and appalled when this young woman, born behind the Iron Curtain, returned his question with a blank look.
Magyars
We had bought train tickets for the next morning to Budapest, but after our drinking session, we still hadn't made a hostel reservation. Stumbling home at about 2:30 am (the train left at 8am), we sat down at my computer to find accommodation for the weekend. Zoe had her dad's credit card, so they decided we'd stay in a hotel, courtesy of Uncle Rich. Nick wanted me to pay a third of the price. I responded politely by telling him to shove it up his shitter. I did pay my cousins the price of a hostel (about $20) which was supposed to be relayed to their father, though I doubt it ever made it to him. Using the one provided on the website as a guide, I scribbled my own make-shift map from the train station to hotel, then we all crashed hard.
In my room I have two double beds pushed together, probably equaling the size of a queen. The original sleeping plan was for the cousins to alternate between the floor and the extra bed. My mother told me that we should give Zoe the bed the whole time, with Nick and I alternating, but I don't go for that chivalry crap, and I wasn't going to give up my bed either. Their first night in town, Zoe graciously took the floor, but the sleeping mat I had procured for her was lousy, so I invited my tiny cousin to join Nick and I for the remainder of the time. Though Nick is over six feet and 200 lbs., the addition of his small sister didn't affect me much, and I slept surprisingly well during their stay.
After about three hours, we awoke groggily to take showers before hustling down to Nádraží Holešovice, the train station near my flat. The seven-hour ride was uneventful, except for some nice views of the small Hungarian mountains. Upon arrival, we all realized that not only did we not know what the currency was there, we also had no idea of the exchange rate. But we did have the map! I pulled it out of my pocket and tried to decipher the chicken-scratching I had made the night previous.
"Which way do we go?" one of the cousins asked.
"Well, according to this map which I drew while drunk and half-asleep..." I trailed off for comic effect. I located our position, set a course, and we marched.
One walk in a circle later, we retreated to the train station to get a real map. There I picked up 2000 forints, or the equivalent of $20. A few days later I noticed it cost me the equivalent of $5 just to use the ATM. Zoe snagged a tourist map at a kiosk, one marked with every McDonald's in town, and we set a new course. In retrospect, my map hadn't been wrong, just way off in terms of scale. I had assumed Budapest to be about the same size as Prague. In fact, the city center is much bigger, including large boulevards filled with speeding cars. Prague just doesn't have that. So what I had estimated at about a fifteen minute walk turned into close
to an hour.The hotel which Nick had chosen was called, fittingly, the Sissi Hotel. My cousin has very specific tastes, which tend towards the strawberry-flavored. He is not a beer drinker. He puts "product" in his hair. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. To his credit, he agreed to pose for the picture on the right. It's supposed to emphasis his sissiness, but really just looks like he's being surprised by the flash. In case you're curious, Sissi was the most beloved Magyar, i.e. Hungarian, queen.
The next day we did a boat trip. Though it was a gray day, we sat outside and listened to our headsets which pointed out buildings along the river. The Hungarian Parliament with its giant maroon dome and Gothic spires was magnificent. We also stopped at Margaret Island, where a tour guide told our rather large group about the ancient monasteries and castle ruins there, but we mostly watched a little girl from our group play in the dirt.
Before leaving, we knew we had to go to the famous Hungarian baths, so on our last day we again crossed the Elizabeth Bridge into Buda and hoofed it over to the Hotel Gellert, one of the more well-known and apparently "posh" spas in the city. In our bathing suits, we started in the thermal baths, braved the steam room for as long as we could (about seven minutes), then immediately splashed into the "sparkling pool." I think I heard somewhere that the quick transition from hot to cold water is best way to get clean. However, my soft tissue must have contracted, and I spent the next ten days hobbling on incredibly tight and sore Achilles tendons. Always stretch after bathing.
We bought our own sleeper car for the train ride back to Prague, and after making some simple but delicious sandwiches and watching a Simpsons epsiode on Nick's iPod, we climbed into our triple stacked bunk bed and let the soothing sound of the iron wheels on the tracks lull us to sleep. We pulled in to Prague in the early morning, and while the cousins snoozed in my room, I went to my Monday morning conversation lesson with my student Marketa, then joined Nick and Zoe for the remainder of the morning.
Hooligans
Feeling refreshed, we made the mandatory trip to Old Town Square, climbing to the top of the Astronomical Clock and killing time before the day's main event, which would serve as an exclamation point to Nick and Zoe's visit: the Sparta-Slavia football game.
Meeting my friends Patrick and CJ outside of the Slavia stadium, we strolled in to witness one of the more intense games I've ever seen. Sparta and Slavia are not only the two best football (soccer) teams in the Czech Gambrinus Liga, but they are also both from Prague. So the 20,000 some fans that had come that day to the sold out derby were obviously jacked up. In the first few minutes of the game, Zoe noticed a few cops in riot gear standing in the corner of the stadium, and I mentioned that there must be a lot more, somewhere.
The Slavia fans kicked off the extracurriculars by starting a few small fires in their section behind their goal. The Sparta fans, notorious for their hooligans, were not to be outdone, so they started some fires of their own. The police, which until that point had not wanted to stir anything up, left their hidden position and showed their full strength, entering from the corner, ready for battle. Though the game ended in a 1-1 draw, we spent most of the time watching the cops force their way into the Sparta fan section near where we sat. They would push the people back with their plexi-glass shields to create a perimeter for the fire brigade to go in and douse any flames they saw. Only once did they go in with sticks out, but they went in hard. I saw two cops swinging wildly as the crowd parted in their path, lost sight of them for a moment, then found them again when they emerged dragging their targeted moron out, his legs dragging behind him. The cops also threw incredibly loud but apparently harmless firecrackers into the fan sections to disperse the crowd. It was war. And I wanted to see those Sparta douchebags get their heads beaten in. Fucking douchebags. They tore out seats and threw them down on the phalanx of cops. FIFA, the governing body of football in the world, has handed down heavy fines to Sparta for rascist chants and poor behavior in the past, and hopefully did it again for this game. All in all, it provided an interesting end to my week with the cousins.
