so, i just finished reading Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows, which i read for the first time. i will admit that i teared up at the end. i also found it to reflect the American ideal. a czech friend wants to read it and i think it might help illuminate the American mentality, even if it is a flawed perspective. the protagonist (and his family) are god-loving, noble and honest, friendly and sensitive - the stereotypical American. there is a little emphasis put on education/intelligence, an emphasis which i think we have lost sight of in recent years in exchange for increasing focus on spirituality and industrious. (of course, we're losing a lot of our industries, but what does that matter?!)
oh yeah, the protagonist cries too much.
it seems that i've spent a lot of time recently reading books that i should've read when i was younger. i finished reading C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia about a month ago. i started reading them because i heard that they were making a film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
the part of the post where i get SIDETRACKed:
i subsequently heard that they were endeavoring to remove the Christian elements of the story from the film version. this is a ludicrous idea to mean. i also don't know what credence i'd give to the rumor to begin with, but if it is true it would fundamentally damage the story. especially since i read today that if the film does well, they are planning to make the next three books in the series.
in my opinion, the series became increasingly symbollic in a Christian way as it progressed, so to remove the symbolism would be insane, if not impossible. i could see doing it successfully for one film, but the more films you make, the harder it will be to ignore. unless, of course, you fundamentally alter the story to the point that it's almost unrecognizable.
END of the SIDETRACK.
i moved on to read Arthur Miller's The Crucible after that. it's a play that i should've read long ago. it has relevance now because the Salem witch trials revolved around naivete and fear - which, of course, is where the general population of the U.S. stands at the moment. that may be changing, however, since i read in The N.Y. Times (Krugman, "The Oblivious Right") yesterday that Bush is currently the most unpopular second term president since the measure was first taken.
(i then read Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows.)
i have now moved onto the third book in the Ender Wiggin series (Xenocide) by Orson Scott Card. the series is surprisingly philosophical while being Sci-Fi.
of course, these are/were all "in transit" books - books i read while using the efficient public transport system of prague.
bedside, at the moment, is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which one a Pulitzer for best non-fiction. it explores the origin of human societies. it's incredibly interesting, as it combines the anthropology of human studies with the biology of genetics, evolution and ecology. it's fascinating, if slow, reading. unfortunately, i can also forsee this book being bedside for a long time (and not because i'm not reading it).
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on a different note, i came up with a name for my business (idea). a very practical name, unfortunately, but accurate.
oh, and of course, the word for "yes" in czech is "ano", so when the vows were being exchanged (in czech) the response was "no", which brought a chuckle from the english speakers in the audience.
the other thing is that the groom used to be a professional photojournalist and a lot of his friends at the wedding knew him through that work... which meant that there were more cameras in use during the ceremony than there were at the Charles and Di wedding, i think. it was non-stop flashbulbs, almost...
so, what's the worst possible single thing that could happen at a wedding (excluding the marrying couple)?
hooking up with the sister of the bride? maybe. but it didn't happen.
the priest being drunk? maybe. but it didn't happen.
somebody dying? probably.
i went to a wedding this weekend. two of my frisbee friends here in praha got married at a castle in southern Moravia, about 30 or 40 kilometres north of the Slovakian border. the castle is "Lednice" Castle, which in Czech means "refrigerator". it was/is a very romantic location to hold a wedding - there were no fewer than 4 other brides wandering around the grounds at the same time as the wedding i was at.
(actually, their wedding invitation was cute: it was shaped like a refrigerator and had a picture of them on the door of the refrigerator. and on the back it said, "Lednice, a cool place to get married".)
anyway, so friday night was a pig roast at one of the two hotels where guests were staying. it was a fun little gig with czech folk music being played.
i stayed in that hotel, so getting to sleep was easy - but i was scheduled to be the DJ on saturday night and i still had some planning to do for that. so i cashed out of the pig roast - where i didn't eat any pig, since i'm a modified non-pig, non-cow incomplete vegetarian - at about 12 o'clock. i stayed up until 2 doing the planning.
on saturday (aka yesterday), i woke up at 9:30-ish, had some breakfast, and hoofed it to the castle for a 11:00a.m. free tour of the interior. Lednice Castle was originally built by the Lichtensteins and was used as a vacation home - mostly for hunting is my guess, considering the obescene number of trophies adorning almost every room.
i did the tour of the interior of the palace. the grounds of the castle are something like 180 acres including an arabic-style minaret. from the castle, i walked around an enormous lake to get to the minaret and climbed the minaret. it is about 60 metres tall and offered a good view of the surroundings. i didn't have much time, however, since the wedding started at 3p.m. and i still had to change and shower and the time was about 1p.m. and I still had to get back to my hotel, a 35-minute walk away...
so i hoofed it back to my hotel and changed. i walked with some other guests to the wedding. after some discussion about where the wedding was actually taking place in the castle, we finally figured it out and started around to the back of the castle.
as we were walking up to the room where the ceremony was to take place, much joy was being had. the details of the ceremony were beginning to be unveiled. most importantly, the bride was to pull up in a horse-drawn carriage. and so it would go...
until the bride's aunt passed out. people immediately began to maneuver her into an easier position, as she had passed out on the gravel road leading up to the back of the castle. but her (the aunt's) daughter wasn't having any of it, she wouldn't let anybody move her...
until she started turning blue and her daughter also passed out. let me say, at this point, that the weather was very nice and quite warm, meaning people were all dressed rather warmly on a hot day with no clouds and a blazing sun.
thankfully, one of the party was an e.r. doctor and would be able to help with the bride's aunt...
if he could've been found. (he was wandering around the interior of the palace, waiting for the bride to show up.) he was found about 3 minutes after she passed out. however, luckily, a czech ems technician happened to be biking by and saw the woman passed out. she immediately moved the lady's tongue to allow her to breathe again.
the american e.r. doctor showed up.
they started doing cpr and pounding her chest.
of note, Lednice is a small town without a hospital so the nearest ambulance was 15 minutes away.
the mystery biker and the e.r. doctor continued mouth to mouth for the 15 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive.
upon arrival, the ambulance crew immediately defibrillated and intubated her. she didn't respond. the last hope is a shot of adrenalin... which started her heart again... since her heart had stopped... she had been complaining of shortness of breath before she passed out... the e.r. doctor said that's a good indication of a heart attack...
they took her away in the ambulance. last i heard, she was sitting up in bed and communicating via writing, since she can't speak due to the intubation tube.
once the ambulance was successfully away (at around 3:45p.m., long after the ceremony would've ended if the incident had never happened), the bride pulled up in the horse-drawn carriage and the ceremony took place (in czech with english translation).
suffice it to say, the mood of the party/ceremony went from joyous to bleak to a mostly-recovered joyousness, since the aunt had pulled through.
after the ceremony (and some tossing of a frisbee) came the reception. i went back to my room, picked up my laptop from which i was to play the music, and hustled to the reception.
at the reception, we had traditional czech roast duck with cabbage and dumplings - very tasty and very filling. the groom, upon removing the bride's garter, looked right at me and through it directly at me. a gypsy band (sounding a lot like "The Gypsy Kings") played and i played music in between their sets and again after the band finished completely. i got to sleep around 4a.m.
today, i had breakfast, walked around the castle-grounds with some friends and came back to prague, more or less.
oh, and one of the groom's aunts had her camera and wallet stolen from her room, in what seemed like the more secure hotel (not mine).
i've been out of it for awhile. or, at least, out of this blog.
so, as i said before:
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i went to italy. we started in 24th place. we ended in 25th place.
of note:
i almost had a completed 'greatest', which entails jumping from inbounds, grabbing the disc and tossing it back inbounds before you hit the ground. i threw it right to dave, who was unprepared and it hit him in the chest before falling to the ground.
the team that beat us so that we could not compete for 17th place ended up in 31st place. which means that after knocking us out of contention for 17th place (of which we were then only able to make it to 25th place maximum), the team (ZUF, from Zurich) lost all of their games except the last one. whereas, we went on to win every game after we lost to them.
that was paganello.
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czech easter:
the monday following easter sunday is the larger holiday. the festivities entail men walking around with switches and hitting women (lightly) on the ass. the woman then must either give the man an egg or give him a shot of alcohol. this is before noon, however. after noon, the woman throws a glass of water in his face if he hits her. both years that i've lived here, i have unfortunately (yet fortunately) been in italy during easter, but rumor has it that this tradition has also been largely relegated to villages and is not very common in Prague.
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envy.
every czech student i has has explained a typical czech personality: envy. they have a saying which goes along the lines of this:
if your neighbor has an excellent dog and you don't, you hope it dies.
that's a rough approximation, since my word stretching powers feel pretty limited at the moment.
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northwest airlines is having a sale on transatlantic airfare. ya'll should look into it!
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i'm going to vienna this weekend to compete in yet another tournament.
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spring has sprung and i haven't touched my winter coat in over a week! i can't even wear a very light winter hat anymore because it's just too nice out.
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i know i teased you by saying that i'm writing a business plan. but alas, i cannot explain it except in person until it is fully written and protected.
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which brings me to my future plans. as they're being ironed out, it looks as such: teach english until the end of June. travel around europe in july and august. stay in prague and devote myself fully to writing my business plan until late october, early november. from there i will either A) do charity work for one or two months, probably in south america and then move to california to find investors and advertizing for my business, or B) move directly to california to find investors and advertizing for my business.
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lastly, something for my left friends...