A further distraction from my studies

Like the greatest cricketing all-round of all time, Sir Richard Hadlee, I am similarly driven (on the odd occasion at least) by the shameless need to claim my place in statistical legends. While I can't boast an overall bowling average of 21.3 runs per wicket or a batting century against the West Indies (in my one competitive match I struck a flukey four before being bowled second ball), I can boast that, with your help, we have made July the second most prolific month of this blog. Give yerselfs a pat on the back.

As the title indicates, I'm just using this as a distraction from my studies. I was meant to submit my third assignment today, but I'm only about a fifth of the way through it. Have to write seven annotated bibliographies of long-winded and dense academic tracts on ecofeminism. I could have chosen another topic, but by the time I thought about it it was too late (I'd blindly started into the text book without bothering to discern what the subject matter was). No time to change tack now. I did find out some tidbits of mildly interesting trivia, however. Apparently, women condemned to be burned at the stake as witches in medieval times were in fact nothing more than your local family planning consultants who advised the female population on contraception methods. This is was deemed to be a challenge to the authority of the lairds and the church, and so death it was. And I always thought 'tree-hugger' was a pejorative term dreamed up by some nutso right-way nazi American columnist like Ann Coulter, but actually it stems from the Chipko people's movement in Uttar Pradesh, India, formed to prevent the decimation of their forest habitat. Chipko, or its longer title, which I can't remember at the moment, actually means 'to hug a tree'.

Um, yeah, that's it really. Rotten will be pleased to learn that I've finally purchased some HST and am currently imbibing that each night. Will hopefully be able to swap quotes with you shortly.

Rules on how to stay sane

Rule number one: it's okay to have fantasies (especially if your favourite pub in Zizkov is one), but they must also be within the realms of the realistic and achievable, even if the chances are miniscule. For example, I used to fantasise about being Pavarotti, or at least having his lungs minus the girth, and playing La Scala every night for a year. But that's not a very practical fantasy. When I was ten years old and dreaming up ways of escaping my insanely strict and religious mother, I would fantasise that Farah Fawcett-Major was my old lady and we would ride to school together each day on horses (fuck, that's a bit weird). Or kicking the school bully in the nuts and not only getting away with it, but having him pay homage to me forever after. Neither were those particularly achievable fantasies.

Now, however, I get myself to sleep each night (yes, very good at the back there in the cheap seats, haha) by dreaming blissfully about the great journey to be embarked upon next year. Yes, I'm going to bore you all to death with this one at least once a week from now until it happens. I made some more enquiries about flight tickets on Friday, as I've heard it's possible to get return tickets to Prague, but get dropped off somewhere in the subcontinent along the way. I thought maybe I could cut some kilometres off the planned route by flying into Tehran, but that's about the most expensive option. Most probably I'll keep to the Delhi idea and limit my time there and give Pakistan only a week at most. This is because it dawned on me the other day that it's actually about 8,000km from Delhi to Prague and eight or ten weeks isn't actually that much. Especially not when I want to concentrate on Iran and Turkey: the latter to make up for the six months I spent there in 1992 prior to my passage to CZ, when I managed to get out of Istanbul all of two times. One of the those times had to be cut short when my credit card ran dry in Cannakale, and the other time was a trip to Zonguldak courtesy of the hypnotically beautiful Alev, for whom I just about had my buttocks impaled. Although if I were to be 100% honest, which isn't always the case (swift intake of breath), the real reason I went there was her little sister Ebru.

Digression Alert! When I first arrived in Kadikoy on the Asian side of Istanbul, it was into an apartment on the top floor of a seven storey building about ten minutes walk from the waterfront. Sokak Yogurcu, I think was the name of the street. And only five minutes from my employer, English Fast, which generously put me up 10 days before my TEFL course started (cheapest in Europe and matched only by TEFL courses in Cairo) because I'd drained my resources on the epic train journey from Munich. That's another post all on its own, but one digression is enough. The only drawback about this apartment was that I had to share it with an Englishman. Yeah, I know, and it was a cross to bear, believe me. Worse than that, he had a girlfriend who was also English. Yeeeech! She was a total minger and drank like a rainbow, so my flatmate had to shag her early in the evening while the going was good. Her only redeeming feature was the fact that she doubted my intentions toward women long before I recognised them myself. For a simple buran like me, Turkey proved to be my inexorable undoing because it was the first non-Anglo-Saxon country I'd ever resided in, i.e. it was the first country I'd come across where women made their interest more than obvious. It's been a precipitous and very steep downward slope ever since. Should I take the blue pill or the red pill? Whichever it was, I took the yo! open-your-mind-motherfucker pill, and gone forever was that sweet age of innocence (now I'm starting to write like Yoda). Sooooooo, when I leaned over the balcony that looked into our internal courtyard one day and looked down, I saw this most amazing aparition staring back at me. That was Ebru, and to this very day I swear that Turkish women are the most gorgeous I have ever seen. Of course, when you come from the Land of Skank like I do, then it's understandable that women from anywhere else would appear criminally beautiful, but my own personal epiphany occurred in Turkey.

Unfortunately, while I was a mere youngling of 23, Ebru was only 16, and on the Asian side of Istanbul anything was most definitely not possible. Actually, I take that back, because then I met Dilek, who was most definitely not shy about being forward, but that's a darker episode of the personal history that I will only delve into when I get really, really desperate to write something for the blog. Okay, I also met Ebru's sister, Alev, before Dilek...oh, shit, I can't remember the dates at all really...but Alev was almost as stunning as her sister and she possessed the inestimable advantage of being four years older. On the negative side of the ledger, however, she also had a boyfriend already, although she kept that fairly quiet until my cultural awareness radar finally started to pick up some traffic, by which time it was a bit too late. Hence the reference to impalings of sharp utensils into soft underside tissue.

God, and I thought I started to write about Iran. Back on track then: even though I'm not a big fan of Lonely Planet, they are the only big travel guide publishers with a book dedicated to Iran, so I got one on Friday. BradtTravel do one as well, but I've had to order online for that one. Possible routes in are train via Quetta in Pakistan, which would bring me out at the border crossing of Mirjaveh. From there I could go to the 'lonely, silent, crumbling city on a mountain' in Kuh-E-Khajeh before retracing my steps to Zahedan and then on to Bam of devastating earthquake fame. But here I'm sinking into needless detail. Ultimately what I really want to see is Persopolis, the famed Islamic architecture of Estafan and Shiraz, Tehran, and some of the villages and towns on the coast of the Caspian Sea. More importantly, I want to experience some of that reknown Iranian hospitality and friendliness before Jester George and the President potentially fuck up the region even more than it already is.

I served the box office

Anybody seen Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale yet? Probably a dumb question given that it's likely to have been in circulation now for a couple years. We saw it last night courtesy of the annual International Film Festival at the theatre that underwent a $60m makeover for the world premier of The Return of the King (almost no need to write NZ$ or US$ anymore since we're up to US81c and rising - fastest strengthening currency in the world allegedly, which I suspect is bollocks because we're still losing value against the crown).

Have to admit I was slightly disappointed by the film after reading some fairly over-the-top reviews of it at europeanfilms.com and some other extremely earnest arthouse site (almost identical reviews actually, so someone was showing a definite lack of initiative). They gave the distinct impression that Menzel had produced another masterpiece to compare with Ostre sledovane vlaky and Skrivanci na niti, with pastiche black-and-white slapstick comedy scenes to rival Chaplain. The opening scene at the train station was said to be an example of the latter, but I was singularly unimpressed and not stitching my sides up as a result. And after four years of marriage and five years away from Central Europe I was anticipating the alleged “gratuitous nudity” with more than a little bottled-up salacious middle-aged macintosh-coated excitement. But it all turned out slightly flaccid in the end in comparison with what one is used to from Czech cinema. I do agree though that Menzel does film naked women with an artistic eye that you rarely see from anyone else. The scene of the millionaires feasting at a circular table while simultaneously feasting their eye on a lightly-clad young woman lying supine on a revolving ‘lazy Susan’ in the middle was worth the price of admission.

And for dedicated Liberazzi there was even a shot of our very own Reichenberg radnice. But more than that, I discovered during my virtual wandering that another film has been produced that is based wholly in Liberec – Grand Hotel. No surprises that it’s filmed at that monstrosity on top of Jested, but I wonder if anyone’s seen it. I note the director is the same as he of Samotari fame, so does that mean it’s quite good? Does Rotten have a part as a cadaver or a diner in the background?

Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale was meant to have provoked controversy in CZ, but I haven’t found any reference to what exactly that means yet. I presume it has something to do with the inherent criticism made of the treatment of the Sudeten Germans in the aftermath of the war, huh?

Rugby, racing & beer

Not a lot of blogging action recently, huh? Here's another fill-in to keep the numbers up. It was the final of the Tri-Nations as well as the Bledisloe Cup on Saturday night, and despite my absence during the first half while I chatted to my insurance company, the ABs showed traditional grit to overpower the Aussie bastards 26-12. That pudgey twat Matt Dunning showed just what a paucity of good front row players the Ockers have, as the Man Mountain Carl Hayman wiped the paddock with him. Okay, I'm not too good at rugby commentaries and will end up doing some serious mixed or inappropriate metaphor shit, so I'll leave you to watch this Kiwi rugby skit on YouTube.

Oh, and the reason I was on the blower to the insurance company for half-an-hour was to lodge a claim for our compacted car. Somehow the missus managed to side-swipe a stationary car parked on the side of a perfectly straight road. I could see it coming since I was sitting in the passenger's seat and while I considered reaching over and making a deft turn of the steering wheel, all I managed to do in time was whimper a weak "oh, God...". Fortunately the owners of the victim car took it all in their stride. It was only the third time it had happened to them. They even drove us home after we'd swapped contact details. Only now we have to wait probably ten working days before an insurance assessment is made. Moral of the story: If you make comments on your wife's driving, it's because you really do know best.

Never too early to prepare for global travel

Other wine cellar trips came back to me in a flash the other night, but I’ll save them for when I’m truly desperate to write something…Hmmm, I suppose that would be now, but I just wanted to point out that I’ve been purposefully filling in the last couple of days visiting all the outdoor equipment shops in pursuit of a sturdy and reliable one-person tent. It’s not that difficult to do in Wellington where all the tramping shops are located virtually along the same strip. And the point of hunting down a good quality tent is that it’s time to begin planning with military precision the travel campaign for next year. It’s getting on toward the end of July afterall, which leaves just 7 or 8 months before departure.

As I’ve mentioned before, a potential plan of attack is to parachute into New Delhi or Kathmandu and reconnoitre the Himalayan foothills before the peak season tourist hordes arrive. I won’t be doing the Annapurna trail in Nepal because of the newly introduced system of compulsory guides for all foreigners, but I’ve been doing some preliminary reading on other 10 or 15-day treks that will require packing up a two or three kilogram tent. As I’ll spend six to eight weeks travelling overland to Prague through Pakistan, Iran, (maybe Syria) and Turkey as well, I’ll try to stop off along the way for the odd trek in one or two of those countries as well. Plus I want to give the Jeseniky and Beskydy a good once over. At the moment, my only semi-concrete plan is to head north of Delhi into the Himalayan area of Uttarakhand province to walk through the Valley of Flowers, as per the picture pilfered from Wikipedia.

I stopped by a travel agent’s yesterday afternoon to enquire about the cost of flight tickets to Kathmandu or New Delhi. Thanks to the strength of the Kiwi dollar at the moment (worth US80c) you can get return flights to Delhi for around NZ$1,500. Tickets to Kathmandu on the other hand are around NZ$2,000, but I’d only head there if my Indian-Malay friend, Sukanya, is still in Pokhara working for the UN and who could possibly stitch up a job for me at a later date. If you’re wondering about the return aspect of New Delhi, that’s because it would work out cheaper to get a budget fare on AirIndia from Prague to Delhi by the time I’m ready to head back in August or September. (It’s all very curious this business of cheap flight tickets; the bubble of cheap aviation fuel and tax-free status of international air travel has to burst soon.)

By the way, this talk of exchange rates has got me curious about what’s happening to the crown. The Kiwi keeps getting stronger and stronger against other currencies all the time, but it keeps getting weaker against the Czech currency. What’s the story there? What’s driving that strength? Rotten, you dabble in the financial markets to keep yourself away from the dirty business of paid employment, so what gives? It’s most disconcerting.

I want to ride my bicycle

...following on from one of yesterday’s themes, I finally tracked down a decent website promoting cycling tours around the vineyards of Southern Moravia. How times have changed because there wasn’t anything like this at the start of the century. I guess the place is really opening up to foreign tourists now and is no longer the sanctuary from the well-worn tourist trails of the past. This particular website has an English version as well, so it’s probably not long before the praguepissup.com crowd get there, if they haven’t already introduced their charming ribaldry to the region. The sklepky were admittedly prominently advertised in my 1991 edition of the Rough Guide to Czechoslovakia, but they were bloody hard to get to in those early days, nobody spoke foreign languages and the product was basically hamster’s pish. Still, whether it’s pish or not, and no matter whether there are hordes of Germans requesting oompah music and smearing greasy bratwurst over their faces, I’d still like to strike out on an expeditionary mission into the wine-growing estates for two or three days at least next summer. Has anyone been on these steky already? tvc? Here’s a picture plagiarised from the site to jog your memory. Not that jocular ribaldry has been totally absent from the region, of course. My very last weekend in Moravia in 2002 was marked by tvc washing the cobblestones outside a lovely bucolic sklipek in Mikulov with stomach acid. That trip must just about have commemorated the tenth anniversary of my originally introduction to vinny sklepy back in 1992 when the Hlidkovi signed me up to a teachers’ weekend excursion to Hustopeče on board the school bus. Things started out badly when I discovered the risky and zitny chleba that Nada Hlidkova had prepared for me and wrapped in tin foil had been stolen from the communal fridge at my kolej in Jablonec. The day got better though after we stopped five minutes into our trip to purchase a couple crates of beer. This exercise was repeated several times on the way to Moravia, so everyone was in a rather jolly mood by the time we pulled up at our designated sklipek.

That’s where it all goes a bit blurry. I remember the walls being very damp and clammy, lots of singing, mountains of chlebičky and talicka (yuck), and the headmaster’s son instructing me to toast his father each time with confident ‘Čau vole!’. Then I was totally naked and trying to roger one of the cooks in a hostel dormitory with ten other people in the room trying to get to sleep. Christ only knows how that happened because I could only find my jeans, one sock and shoe, and a jacket the next morning. The cook in question led me back to the sklipek and along the way we found the rest of my clothes.

A round of bacon, eggs and rohlicky followed (can’t be arsed looking for the ‘č’ in the symbols menu each time) in the nearest pub, so it was only inevitable that liquidy refreshments started to flow once more. I was innocently stuffing food into my cakehole to stave off the hangover (still at a manageable pain threshold in those days) when a large glass of vodka arrived from the adjacent table of similarly-aged sniggering sports instructors. I accepted the challenge and sent a tray back to them and was rewarded with looks of sudden and unexpected anguish. That was the signal for a game of one-upmanship to the death, and then I woke up last on Monday morning having missed the first two periods of the day. Bedrich will know what it was like arriving back at school to be met with that resigned yet bemused look on Petr Hlidek’s face: “Oh dear Andy, you have caused much comments and laughter”.

Actually, I went on two wine cellar trips while at Sportovni skola a gymnazium, but I’m scoobied if I can distinguish between the two of them.

Mid-winter excursions in the southern hemisphere

According to my traditional predilection, I once again provided ample proof at the weekend that there are no pubes on the bawbaggery because hair doesn’t grow on steel (cymbals! thanks smeaton.com). It was time for the mid-winter tramp to the top of the mountains nearby for a touch of frolicking in the snow and sheet ice, and to prove my ‘metal’ I defied the sniggers and taunts of my fellow travellers and donned my favourite faded pair of rugby shorts. Pictures can be found at the usual place on Flickr. Here I’ve only provided the one photo below because it’s much nicer, and besides featuring the handsome derriere of one of the fairer members of my climbing party, also demonstrates just how sphincter-puckeringly cold it was on the top. That’s the mountain trig she’s climbing toward that had a good foot of ice hanging off it horizontally.
The original intention was to walk across the ridge from Mt Holdsworth to Mitre Peak, but none of us particularly fancied slicing ourselves another arsehole on the wind-blasted ice. I went point just after the trig in this picture but quickly lost my bottle when I slid about 10 metres down a jagged rock face and took half-an-hour to climb back up again. Even a bunch of old fellas wearing crampons thought it would be a bit foolhardy to attempt the crossing. Having visibility down to five metres didn’t help either.

This was with a bunch of about a dozen ex-pat Czechs and one random Pole following the birthday celebrations the previous evening that I mentioned in the last post. It’s always amusing tramping with Europeans in this country, as they insist on wearing the latest mountaineering fashion replete with bright pastel colours, while Kiwis are happiest when they’re covered in the mankiest old woollen jerseys knitted by grandma and moth-eaten long johns.

Change of subject: I know it’s a long way off, but is anyone up for renting a chata somewhere in the Jeseniky or Beskydy next summer? Have been amusing myself today by surfing Czech accommodation websites like superchaty, 1ubytovani, and levneubytovani, and I reckon it could be fun to rent cela chalupa for six or eight people and spread the costs. Could be anywhere in CZ and not necessarily in the areas mentioned. Don’t all rush to agree. Was also looking for information about the cycling trails through Moravian vineyards, but ran out of time. You got any tips on those, tvc?

And speaking of tvc, I was alerted to your comment on that earlier post only through the automated messaging system that I’ve set up for myself. I just finished Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book last night, but I didn’t see your name in the acknowledgements…Jaysas, what a bunch of loons those neocons are.