Getting revved up for China

I've got three weeks before the reality of travel to China will really hit me. In the meantime, I'm pouring concrete in the daydream by buying batteries for my creaky old camera and making lists and doing some research.

I now know how to write the pictograms for numbers 1-10, though I haven't figured out whether those numbers are the ones that get used in a store, or if the Chinese rely on Arabic numerals for that.

I also did some research on Chinese bathrooms. I gleaned useful advice: bring your own toilet paper. Most public toilets are squat toilets. That will take some getting used to.

1 Chinese yuan is worth about 15 cents. According to my coworker who was in China just last year before the Olympics, Beijing buses cost about a yuan for a ride.

Tomorrow I'm going to the library to pick up some travel guides and a book about Chinese calligraphy--as though I didn't need to feel even worse about my bad handwriting.

Still haven't purchased a plane ticket. And of course I won't know the status of my Chinese visa for a week and a half, and that makes me feel paranoid. I never like forking over important documents. (On a similar note, the woman at the financial aid office checked to make sure I had actually signed my documents, today. What, did I look like a newb?)

Last post of the trip, my friends and family, last post.

I didnèt sleep tonight, and strange accent marks are from a French keyboard, not my typing skills, I assure you.

We stood on Charles Bridge, built by Holy Roman Emperor Charles when Prague was the seat of his castle, in the 1300s. There was wine, and swans, and light on the water and we watched the moon rise and set, and the swans fall asleep, and we met a woman from Wales and a man from Alabama, and then we walked to a gyro stand and talked to a guy from Chicago for a while, he recommended the Chicago gyros.

I am richer than I was before.

I am delighted to be writing you all from the big old clunker computer set up at the hostel Mellonu in Prague. We got in last night and had enough time to grab dinner and see the sun set over the city after our forays to St. Barbara's cathedral in the silver mining town of Kunta Hora and a visit to Karlstejn castle, where the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV lived, not to mention the strange little church completely festooned with human bones (easily 40,000 bodies some of them plague victims, some of them bodies dug up when the cemetary shrankin size.)

Prague is bustling. Our hostel is right next tothe bright pink house of Antonin Dvorzak. I'l go home and listen to some of his music and brag about living nearby, however briefly.

Today I get to see the Charles Bridge, which is spectacular by reputation.

I'm going to have another fabulous falafel, probably, and then wait around until everyone buys multiple hotdogs, so that I can offer to eat all of the hotdog butt ends (which are really the best part) which iswhat happened last night.

We hung out in an underground bar and I had the best White Russian of my life, though everything I wore smells pungently of smoke, even after I hung it up in the window so that the night air could freshen it up a little.

I am terribly excited to be coming home.

After Bitoc castle and the Znojmo underground we went to a little winery in a very old monastery. (Very old, old and new all have slightly different meanings to me now than when I first arrived.) Wine is aged in a Gothic cellar with a series of hash marks carved into the wall where a trio of monks were once punished for drinking wine off of the monastery ground. At the wine tasting I gave my wine away to our teacher (not to be a suck-up or anything) and to Marek, our Czech interpretor and sometimes tour guide and general organizer of amazingness. They were both very appreciative of the wine that I shared. I did drink the first taste of white wine, it was a good sweet one, and when I taste it again I think it will remind me of my favorite moment on this trip which came shortly after the winery.

After our tour and tastings we all trouped outside into the sun and sat picnic style under a grape arbor, eating bread and cheese and briney olives and everyone else drank wine from the little winery shop. We lingered for so long that they shut the front gate on us. THe bus was parked a mere twenty feet from the front gate. We slipped out a side gate and started searching for another way to get to the fenced-in bus parking area. We found a tall wooden fence and a metal door that was open, four feet up. Marek climbed through the opening and rather drunkenly suggested that we all do the same. In the end he just went and informed the bus driver where we were, and brought the bus to us. When we finally got on the bus he handed out the phonetic version (and rather bad English translation) of a Czech drinking song. He had the song on an SD card, and my MP3 player was the only one that would play it, so I went and sat up front and showed him how to work it. We jerry-rigged it so that he held the headphone to the bus microphone and it actually played the song quite clearly. We listened once, and then sang along stumblingly a dozen times until we were home, back to Olomouc. I have been singing this song ever since.

Veenechko beele
si od may meehey.
boudou vas peet
tso boudou jeet.
Veenechko beele.

One of the things that made the singing so sweet was when Marek explained to me a little later, sharing his wine, that he was very shy to sing in front of people, but he loves to sing. It was a small moment, but full of kindred spirit because I feel the same way.

I will be home on Monday, and I am very excited about this fact. I probably won't sleep in Prague, and I might not sleep on the plane, so I may be some hiccuping zombie by the time I fly in.

Krakow was my favorite place. I will be shocked if Prague tops it. I didn't write about Krakow on my free day, Monday, after I got back from the city. I took a long, quiet walk out to the park and sat writing about what I had seen and felt at Auschwitz-Berkinau, instead, and that seemed to block any words about the giddy fun times in Poland from coming out.

I till can't think to write about Poland, really. It's pretty. I shared a meter (yes, meter) of beer with someone in a tourist bar off of the old town square.

I'll tell more stories about the drunken Scottish stag party, but not now.

I want to write about Znojmo and castle Bitov.

Bitov is the only castle at the bottom of a hill in all of central Europe. (This may not actually be true, but in my experience it is.) Usually we have to hike up great huge mountains to get to a castle, but we had a nice leisurely walk down. Our tour didn't start for a half hour, so I explored the main courtyard and found two kittens in a stairwell. I picked a blade of grass and dangled it on front of them, making them leap and bite the air and sometimes tumble into each other with their enthusiasm. They tried to climb up my pants, and when I shook them off they ran away to climb up a tree. One would cimb the tree a few feet and then drop like a bomb into the other, thent hey would switch roles. It was adorable.

The castle was converted into a more modern chateau in the 18th century, blah blah blah, the first few rooms were full of stuff that we have seen before on this trip. Then we got to a room full of a collection that was begun by the last owner of the chateau. The room was full of cases that were crammed to brimming with stuffed birds. Owls, eagles, even tiny stuffed humming birds filled the cases. Some of the birds were exotic jungle birds with brilliant gem-colored plumage, and some were drab little pheasant hens with goggly black eyes. But a thousand beady stuffed bird eyes had absolutely nothing on the next few rooms. Bitov is, apparently, home to one of the largest collections of stuffed dogs int he world. I'm not talking Pound Puppies here, but cockerspaniels, great danes, and everything in between. They have all been arranged in a single room, on a big coral-colored carpet. They are all in fairly life-like poses, and though they are over one hundred years old (and that is seven hundred in dog years), they look as though they are about to roll over or yip or leap at any minute. It was extremely eerie.

The last few rooms of the chateau were full of stuffed cats. WEaring clothes. And hats. Okay, so the owner of Bitov was kind of an eccentric fellow. Apparently his neighbors considered him "noveau riche" and snubbed him entirely, so he turned to other forms of company, including the largest animal menagerie in Moravia (live ones, this time, apparently he didn't have anything killed with the express purpose of being stuffed, he waited until they died.) The last glass case had a doll-sized table and a half dozen squirrels around it, wearing jackets, smoking pipes and playing cards. Okay, the guy was a full blown kook.

After that we drove to Znojmo, which is pronounced something like "znoy-mo", and we went into the underground. The underground is an elaborate undercity that started as cellars in the 12th century and gradually became passages. In times of war the people of Znojmo added chimneys and air ventilation shafts. By thr 1960s the passages were forgotten and abandoned, but then they started collapsing and houses, people and cars started falling into them. So the city went down, uncovered the undercity and started patching up rooms and reinforcing walls, so that it would be safe to build new homes and department stores above them. They are only used as a tourist attraction now, but how splendid is that, an entire city under their feet.

This morning we trekked down to a town called Telc (that is with a Czech "č" which is pronounced "ch") which is 100+ km West of Brno. Telč has a wonderfully preserved group of Renaissance buildings and because of this is a UNESCO site.

We toured the chateau, which was founded on an ancient castle. By 'ancient' I mean 14th century ruins of a Gothic castle, though the chateau was mostly built and renovated in the Renaissance. Some Moravian nobles traveled to Genoa and came back with some wonderful ideas about decoration and architecture to apply to their own home.

It was pouring down rain when our tour started, so we all dashed across the wet inner courtyard and made it to the oldest part of the chateau relatively dry. The lower floor had a long hall, several smaller rooms that served as kitchen and treasury. The most striking room on the ground floor was a little chapel with a highly decorated vaulted ceiling that had turned black from years of torch and candle smoke, though the original deep blue showed through in a few places. The ceiling was covered in carved figures and the symbol of the chateau's owners, the five petaled rose.

Of all of the chateau tours we have done so far this one ranks up with Namast ne Hana as my favorite. Namast ne Hana was wonderful because it seemed possible to imagine people living there on a day to day basis, people who did so not seem so far from the present. The old section of the Telč chateau was wonderful for exactly the opposite reason. The rooms were so exotic and strange and ancient. The ceilings of most of the rooms had intricate wood carvings, one of the rooms even had carved deer with real antlers attatched. Most of the rooms have been restored to their Renaissance state in that wing of the house, though the African Room remains as it was decorated in the early 1900's, with hundreds of hunting trophies from Africa. An entire crocodile skin hangs from the wall. A lion and lioness, a hyena, elephant tusks and the head of a zebra completed the impression that I was in the costume room for The Lion King Broadway show.

We toured the more modern wing of the chateau, too, but that was more Rococo than I fancy. Fresh flowers in both wings of the chateau made the rooms seem more lively and not quite as musty and old as the other places we have toured. The lilies were practically intoxicating they smelled so sweet.

After the chateau we ate lunch and explored in the town square. It was full of little souviner shops and restaurants painted in what I consider "San Francisco" colors, pale greens, pinks and yellows. Most of the stores sold ice cream (smrzlina) and beach toys for kids, since the town is situated on three waterways that are big enough to call lakes, I suppose, but were fairly placid and full of slow fish and ducks.

I'm missing the Czech vs. Portugal game, so I have to run and grab a gyro and then join the crowd in the square to see how the game goes.

And Friday isn't even finished! We went to the Pest side of the river for dinner and wandered around and had dinner and admired the pretty fountains. Then, blissfully, to our crappy little hotel. A group of us trekked to a 24-hour grocery and bought alcohol. We stayed up late drinking in the little park out front of the hotel and climbed trees and braided hair in the near pitch-black.

Saturday morning we dined on horrible hotel food (anemic bologna!) and then set out. First we checked out the Citadel, a bunker that had been used by Nazis in WWII when Budapest was a city under siege by Allied forces. Then we went to St. Stephen's basillica, the before-mentioned wonderful view was seen there. (Nice bathrooms, too.) Then we went to the Terror museum, a place dedicated to a very dark time in Hungary's history, the period of Nazi occupation and the following decade of bloody Soviet communist control. It was an incredibly heavy museum with lots of reading, lots of videos of former communist leaders and henchmen tearfully recalling their terrible deeds and pleading forgiveness. It was pouring down rain when we finally finished, so we had to dash and scuttle to the Subway, trying to dodge raindrops. We had another dinner in Pest, and then, half-drenched and chilly we finally made it back to the hotel.

Ah! See, I have remembered what I forgot. On Friday night we also went to an art museum full of Hungarian art. I could have spent a day wandering around. I went to the third floor, with the mid 1800s to mid 1900s, so I could work my way through the art that I really like before tackling the symbolism and lives of saints in older, ecclesiastical art. I feel like I really need to carry around a book of saints, so I can figure out who died and why for a lot of these guys. Mauled by bears, carries a little white book, oh, St. Whoja who was martyed by Romans, gotcha, etc.

Sunday we visited the largest synagogue in Europe, kind of a yawn, really, maybe I've been jaded by overexposure to massive cathedrals. The boys all had to wear construction paper yarmulkes. I got really pissed for a little while thinking about just how sexist and exclusionist Judaism is. There was a museum with a bunch of chalices and silver Torah scroll platforms and various other religious paraphanalia, which was pretty dull. (This comes second only to the car museum as my least favorite stop on this trip so far. Even the Really Dull chateau was amusingly boring, this was just boring boring.) There was a really great memorial outside in a courtyard for those who died in the Budapest Jewish ghetto in WWII. The memorial is a weeping willow statue, each leaf on a branch has a name stamped on it, so it was a really good visual of that level of devestation.

Next we went to the Hungarian National Museum. I lingered on the ancient stuff, admiring beautiful filigree jewelry and some 16th century pocket watches. I rushed through the WWI section rather qucker than I wanted to because time was limited. I wish I had gotten to see more of it. There were a bunch of great uniforms and dresses on display. I wanted lots of them, but especially the bright red and gold-trimmed Franz Joseph outfit. His mannequin even had a moustache.

Another thing I forgot about Friday, we went up to a hillside outside of the city where they put a lot of the statues that had filled the city during their communist years. Most cities pulled down the statues and destroyed them, but Budapest kept theirs, which is very curious to me. The place the statues live now is hardscrabble and weedy, and the statues are fairly neglected. Lenin peers out of elderberry bushes. (Another amazing view of the city from this hillside.) Socialist realism, which was the style of all of the really big pieces of art is kind of funny. Sometimes the people depicted wouldn't even have faces, eyes or noses or mouths because that's the minimalist style, but a few of them had moustaches. A face with a moustache but no mouth or eyes is pretty spooky. Kind of like the button eyes in Coraline.

Anyhow, we finished up Sunday with a trip through the labyrinth under Buda castle. The labyrinth has been there for a long time, it started as natural caves and was hewn out and used for hiding and secret meetings and a bomb shelter during WWII and finally converted into a tourist attraction. Lots of the doors and passageways are closed off by iron gates now, so people can't really get lost. It is very eerie to press up against a gate and peer into the semi-darkness, trying to peek around corners and trying not to imagine the vampires/wolves/demons/imps/etc that want to grab you and haul you away. There were drum beats and bell chimes used very effectively on the sound system. There was one room, The Labyrinth of Courage, that was completely pitch black. My professor, Dr. Murphy hid in there and jumped out and terrified people from our group. I teased him about it later, chiding him for being that childish. He looked quite serious when he said that after two weeks of babysitting this group he really needed to get that out of his system. I don't doubt it.

Then we rode home, and everyone made up new lyrics to Beatles songs (mostly Let it Be and Yesterday) about how much we all needed to pee.

I had strange dreams about the labyrinth and woke up, shocked to be in my hotel bed. I didn't understand at all, for a long time where I was. I even found my journal and though, "How strange! I didn't bring this into the labyrinth with me! I must be really lost!" until I came to full wakeful realization.

Today is a free day, so I will write like a maniac. I already did my laundry, so I only need to wander around the city and buy a few souviners today.

Ciao, loves!