Absnasm is so freaking happy!
It’s just not fair. I’ll tell you why, and I found this out from my mum while we were out there. Because my granny was sent to England from Czechoslovakia as a young girl in 1938, to save her from the impending Nazi invasion and the gas chambers which eventually claimed the lives of her parents. While studying at a school in Wales for Czech refugees, she met my granddad, who was one of her teachers (shocking!), married him and had my mum in 1946. They went back home to Czechoslovakia shortly afterwards, where my granddad continued his former career as a politician. It looked like his party was going to win the forthcoming election, and Granddad was going to end up on the Cabinet, but the Communists invaded, and all three of them had to sneak out of the country in fear of their lives. My grandad died in the late ‘60s, never having returned to his homeland.
Scary stuff, eh? But it’s strange how at home I feel there. I must have some kind of genetic memory. Such a beautiful city, and I had a wonderful relaxing time with my mum wandering around, people-watching, shopping, and indulging in all kinds of linguistic geekery. My mum is similarly linguistically inclined. I know you won’t believe me, but one of the most fun things we did was go to Tesco (that’s a supermarket) where we spent at least an hour looking at all the words and working out what they meant. I had a supreme moment of triumph when I worked out that the lump of unidentifiable gunk in a fridge cabinet was some kind of dough, by finding another packet bearing a picture of apple strudel and spotting that the word’s root was the same. Yeah, yeah, laugh, I don’t care. I’m going to learn Czech. My granny would be so proud.
Sooo, what else did we do? We went to see Odysseus at the Black Light Theatre, which was a gob-smackingly brilliant production mixing dance, multimedia, mime, and bizarre silhouetting techniques. Almost impossible to describe, really. But I’ve never seen a bedsheet used so inventively. It had ropes attached to it, and a team of people offstage pulling into different shapes to represent a ship, a mountain, the gates of hell… pretty much the entire set. Amazing. And the bloke playing Odysseus was jaw-droppingly fit. In fact, the only thing that marred it was the occasional use of Enya’s music. We went to the crypt where the Butcher of Prague Reinhard Heydrich’s assassins hid out from the Nazis. It made me feel quite emotional. What else, what else? We met up with an old friend of the family, a lad called Honza who is the grandson of my granny’s best friend’s sister. He’s now a freelance illustrator, and quite the cool guy about town. He took us to the most chilled-out little tea shop I’ve ever been to – a place called Dobrá Chai just off Wenceslas Square – and an amazing new veggie restaurant that we never would have even known about without him, whose Czech name bears the rather unfortunate English translation of “Easy Head”. But we spent most of the time just wandering around marvelling at Prague’s beauty and bizarre words, stopping for coffee every now and then and, um, buying boots. And yes, neenypie, I will post pics of them just as soon as I can work out how to take a picture without making my legs look two foot long!
This entry has grown to Eastern Bloc proportions so I’m gonna give your eyes a rest and sign off. Nowt more boring than hearing about other people’s holidays. But if you’re a glutton for punishment and want to see my Prague pics they’re here. Now to make myself a cup of tea and catch up on all the stuff I missed while I was away.
