June 12

For the past week or so, the weather has been blazing hot, by Czech standards. The standard opening to my classes these days is:

Me: What do you think about the weather?
Czech 1: (derisive snort)
Czech 2: It should not be so hot.  May we open the window?
Czech 3: This is good for sitting by water.  But for work. . . horrible.
Everyone in the room shakes his or her head and contemplates the heat for a moment.
Czech 1: (derisive snort)

I suppose I should not ask about the weather anymore, but I really get a kick out of all the snorting.

Since I last wrote, I have taken many weekend trips -- to South Bohemia, to Moravia for a church retreat, and again to South Bohemia for a canoeing carnival.  Here’s the lowdown on all of them:

May 23-25: The Bechyne Bonanza.  A former student, Vaclav, invited me several times to come with him to his hometown of Bechyne.  I finally managed to clear a weekend, and so he and his girlfriend Jitka picked me up Friday at 6:00.  On the way, we listened to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Moby, and picked up Vaclav’s daughter Martina in Sudomerice, where she lives with Vaclav’s ex-wife.  He actually has three children: the oldest, Tereza, was already in Bechyne when we got there, and the youngest, Vaclav, joined us on Saturday.  The weekend was a quiet one for me, as my Czech skills are limited, and their English skills are limited.  Vaclav had taken one brief English course before I tutored him four times a week for two months.  So he didn’t have much vocabulary, but we had a connection, which counts for a lot.  Tereza studies English at the gymnazium, but she said she wasn’t very good and was pretty shy about using it.  Martina also studies English, and understood a good bit, but never wanted to speak.  Jitka: none.  Little Vaclav: none. During the weekend, I was essentially Vaclav’s retarded oldest child who could barely speak.

Lest anyone think that I am criticizing the disabled, here is my reasoning: I was largely unable to speak or to understand much communication aside from body language.  I unquestioningly went wherever I was told to go.  And yet I was perfectly able to enjoy my surroundings.  Whenever something new had to be told to me, I had a chance to stop and look around while the dictionary was sent for and the right word arrived at.

Friday we walked around Bechyne (the word is three syllables, with the last “e” pronounced “ye,” because it has a symbol over it that is not on English keyboards like the one I’m typing on) and went to the bell tower of the church on the main square.  From it, we could see the whole town and all the pubs in it (11, at least), the river and the bridge over it, and the rolling hills and forest that surrounded the town.

Saturday morning we went to Hluboka castle, in the town of Hluboka.  It is a beautiful castle, but it seems that they do not offer tours in languages other than Czech unless one has a busful of tourists with one.  Germans and Austrians seemed to be hiking up the hill to the castle in the requisite busfuls, but it seemed that I was the only English speaker there that day.  So I bought a booklet about the castle in English, we took the Czech tour and I tried not to bump into valuable 18th century knickknacks while reading it.

For lunch, we went back to Bechyne and Vaclav’s parents’ house, which is just a couple of blocks from his flat.  Then we went to the soccer stadium and watched Vaclav and his buddies play their weekly soccer match in the hot afternoon.  Following the game, all the participants sat around talking about the match over beer and goulash.  Unable to participate myself, I whiled away the time by watching a baby toddle around and making honking noises by blowing through grass leaves.

Then we walked Vaclav’s parents’ dog, Lupe, a long-haired dachsund. Although we only took Lupe out for a couple of blocks, he managed to toddle over to roughly 3,000 objects and leave his mark on them. In the doggie realm, he apparently owns everything in a kilometer (or more) radius of his home. He may well be the dog godfather of Bechyne.  After the dog walking, I was not feeling well, so I retired to the flat for the night where I played a game of hockey with little Vaclav and watched a game show called the National IQ Test.  The hockey game had little plastic figures that you controlled by pulling and pushing metal wires in and out of the rink.  The two teams were Russia and the Czech Republic. Hockey games like this in America also feature Russia as the opponent, which made me think, a) does every country hate Russians enough to pit themselves against them in hockey games for children, and b) who is the other team in Russia? Do their tiny uniforms say “the rest of the world” on them?  Little Vaclav beat me 6-3.

It was fairly difficult for me to maintain interest in the National IQ Test, seeing as how it was in Czech.  But what I gathered was that they had several demographic groups in the studio (teachers, policemen, celebrities, twins, blondes, etc.) competing against each other, and the viewer at home was also able to participate.  I didn’t understand most of the questions, but I kicked butt on the math and logic.

Sunday, we went to a mountain, Klet, on which there is a view tower from which you can get a good view of south Bohemia.  We took a chair lift up.  Vaclav’s sister and brother-in-law lived nearby, in a town called Kremze, and we went there afterwards and cooked out.  I had some excellent chicken cooked on a slab over a cylindrical grill-like thing.  From time to time they would speak to me, but generally I was left to enjoy the view.

In the afternoon, we all went to Ceske Budejovice, home of Budweiser beer.  Everyone except me went swimming in a pool downtown, but I walked around the center.  There was a park, a river (the Vltava, which also flows through Prague) and a square, which has the typical elements that one finds in a square in the Czech Republic, i.e.: cobblestones, colorful old houses, a plague column, a church.  Sometimes there is a tower and a fountain.  There was in Ceske Budejovice.  I climbed up the tower. The view was interesting, but what I found more interesting was that the steps inside were made of wood, and halfway up I encountered a group of teenagers. . . smoking.

May 30-June 1: The next weekend I went to a church retreat in Zdirec, a small town in Moravia.  I attend the International Church of Prague here (the Web site is www.internationalchurchofprague.com, I think. May be .org), and the retreat was for everyone in the church to gather together at a retreat center and hear speakers and play sports.  There was also a talent night.

Since I’m getting long-winded, I’ll mention everything briefly.  The speakers were American missionaries who have lived in Plzen for several years.  They spoke very well.  Saturday we played soccer and Ultimate Frisbee until we dropped.  Saturday night I was in a skit which is kind of difficult to describe accurately: it was a re-telling of the story of the Fall, featuring a bongo section and commercial jingles.  There were all the usual characters, and the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil were also played by people who grooved to the beats.  I was the serpent.  The skit ended in the way that story always does.  There were also a number of great other acts, including the Cinderella story delivered deadpan by a group of people facing the audience.  (Stepsisters: “You are so handsome.”  Prince: “I know.  And you are so ugly.”  Stepsisters: “We know.”)

June 6-8: The NEXT weekend, I went to south Bohemia AGAIN, this time to Cesky Krumlov (the “C” is pronounced “ch.”  It also has a symbol over it that is again not on this keyboard) with some other ESI teachers for the Krumlov Canoeing Carnival.  After teaching at the nuclear institute on Friday, I went to the Vietnamese market near the Florenc bus station and bought some spiffy new sandals for the weekend.  Then I went to another bus station and embarked on the three-hour trip south.  Cesky Krumlov is a very popular destination, and I had not bought a reserved bus ticket beforehand, so I ended up standing in the aisle for most of the trip.  It was not so bad, though if the bus had smelled like sweat and body odor laughing at the thought of deodorant for the whole trip as much as it did at the beginning, I would have had to stop breathing.  It’s a good thing that didn’t happen.  Cesky Krumlov is a beautiful town, and I can see why everyone goes there.  It’s built on a peninsula with the Vltava snaking around it, and a castle on the heights on the north side.  11 ESI teachers from the Czech Republic and 6 from Hungary arrived on Friday night, and Saturday we walked a kilometer or so south of Krumlov to pick up our 8 canoes.  I hadn’t been canoeing since camp, and I forgot how difficult it was.  Well, the paddling itself was not so bad, but I was sitting in the back, and so long as we were moving, I needed to think about steering.  Avoiding rocks and so forth.  Sometimes I did a good job at that, and sometimes I didn’t.

On the Vltava, they have several weirs which it is not pleasant to go down in canoes.  Fortunately, there are small sluices on the left or the right.  Going down these lends an element of adventure to a trip down an otherwise lazy river.  It also lends an element of entertainment for the locals who like to stand on the bridge in Cesky Krumlov and cackle at the canoers who tip over.

A few of us tipped, but not tipping didn’t make that much of a difference sometimes.  After one sluice (the one that gives so much derisive glee to the people on the bridge), our canoe was so full of water and tipsy that we had to pull over to the side and empty it out anyway.  We had sponges in the canoes, but they took a while to have any effect.  We did bail it out after the last sluice of the day, but there weren’t any obstacles in the river at the time and it didn’t matter that we let the canoe drift aimlessly while the sponge was wrung out over and over.

Saturday evening we all went out to dinner, then walked through the castle (It has bears in the moat.  Did I mention that it has bears in the moat?).  We all stayed at the same hostel, which was nice, except they had a problem with bedbugs.  Not everyone’s bed had them, but some people had to go to the doctor the next week for some cream to bring down the welts.

June 16

Exciting news! My nephew, Calvin Arthur Ritzema, was born June 14 at 12:58 p.m.  He weighed 6 pounds 6 ounces and was 19.5 inches long.  Arthur is a family name; I guess Calvin comes from the fact that my brother and sister-in-law are good Reformed types.  I will see him for the first time July 3.  Yee HAW!!!

June 27

This will be the final news update for this year.  My webmaster and I will be taking the summer off, and I will be touring America this summer.  Check if I will be coming to a town near you:

June 30: arrive in New York
July 1-2: Fayetteville, NC
July 3-4: Charlotte, NC
July 5-7: Richmond, VA
July 8-18: Fayetteville, NC
July 19-August 3: Pasadena, CA
August 4-12: Grand Rapids, MI
August 13-24: Fayetteville, NC
August 25 (or thereabouts): Budapest, Hungary

In February, I listed all the books that I had read so far this year.  Now I'll list the books that I've read from then until the end of my stay in Prague.  The total count for the year is around 60, I think.

The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Nieder
Eugenics and Other Evils, G.K. Chesterton
On Writing, Stephen King
The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams
Vaclav Havel: An Introduction, Appreciation and Critique, James Sire
George MacDonald (biography), Michael R. Phillips
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson
The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis
God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis
L'Abri, Edith Schaeffer
*Lives of Three Renaissance Artists, Giorgio Vasari
Letters of Francis Schaeffer, ed. Lane Dennis
Walden and Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Walter Lowrie
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
Summer Lightning, P.G. Wodehouse
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
True Spirituality, Francis Schaeffer
Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, Dallas Willard
The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. Alexander Dru
Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot, Elisabeth Elliot
The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
God in the Dark, Os Guinness
Open Letters, Vaclav Havel
Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins (poetry)
Talks With T.G. Masaryk, Karel Capek

Some of these I bought.  A lot of them came from the Prague Christian Library.  The one with the asterisk wasn't a full-length book; it was a 60-page extract brought out by Penguin.

You might have noticed from the recent pictures on the site that my hair is really long.  This isn't because of the lack of good barbers here; it was just an experiment.  I'll probably at least get a trim when I get back to America.  To be honest, a lot depends on my friends Doug and Jessie, whose wedding I will be in about a week after I return.  I don't want to mar their wedding pictures for life by looking like a refugee from a hippie commune, so I'll have it cut to their specifications.