So says the guide book the taxi driver from the airport gave me. A small notion of the perils of translation, or the imperatives behind it, from, I'm guessing, a translator of the Facebook generation.
On a lighter note, the revamped lift/elevator in the residence has instructions for what to do if it gets stuck: 2/ press emergency button, 3/ talk to receptionist, but the first advised step keeps making me laugh: 1/ Be Quiet.
It's 1.15am and the jet lag has got me - I managed to stay awake till about 10, but then woke up at midnight. I'm sitting out on the terrace, Prague is all lit up and there's a full moon. It's an interesting area, here. The residence is about 2 or 3 blocks from the metro which was being extended up here when we lived in Prague - it's converted what was a 30 or 40 min tram ride to the centre into a 15 min metro ride. The metro, even though it was relatively recently built, is done in full brutalist style, maybe to go with the surrounding high rises from the 70s - think Bladerunner meets Brezhnev. There's a shopping mall in the same style by the metro, with three or four pizzerias / Czech food places, one of which, a one-storey concrete bunker, has its name emblazoned boldly in lights: "LAS VEGAS."
The surprise - apart from the huge rise in prices - is how friendly everyone is; I'd got inured to the brusque rudeness of Czech public life (very different from the real private sweetness and generosity); this new friendliness is a little disconcerting. "Mejte se hesky!" the checkout woman said to me, in her Smurf-themed outfit, "Have a nice day!" I moved to let a woman sit down on the metro and she looked me in the eyes and thanked me effusively. When I got back there was a strapping woman in her mid-fifties skipping - skipping! - along with her grandkid in a pram, singing to the baby with absolute joy.
I did get into the centre and was also pretty surprised; this metro line goes into Muzeum which is a station I avoided at all cost when we lived here, because it was so seedy and sketchy. It has been cleaned up; the only dodginess was a group of English guys - a stag party - leering at me. I've got glasses! I wanted to say. I'm going to a bookshop! The free guide book mentioned above jauntily chirps about liking the holocaust and the nice red light district one might want to visit. Jeez.
The bookshop was the one place I liked on Wenceslas Square. I sneaked in there a lot when we lived here, partly because I loved the quality of Czech books; they're really lovingly made, nice textures and usually a place marker. They'd wrap the book you bought in thick paper, sellotape it up. When I sent off to Prague for Havel's collected works (very aesthetically pleasing box set in field green, each volume with two place markers in them), the person who sent them had taken so much care in wrapping the large box, tightly cosseted, shrink wrapped, bubble-wrap, and exhaustively neat brown packaging, it gave me a lump in my throat. Just the sense of respect for what these were.
Nerdorama.
I was a bit nervous about what my reaction would be coming back - when we left back in 2002, I was ready to leave. Michael was going to start law school and I'd got the Fulbright and I was excited to be heading to New York (for what would turn out to be a great year). But it's a little unexpected; in no way did I think it would be a dramatic return to the homeland, but I worried it would feel awkward. I never feel Czech when I'm here (though I have to admit, quite sentimentally, that when I used to arrive back here on Czech airlines, I'd get teary-eyed when they played Smetana's slushy patriotic "Ma vlast" / "My country" when the plane landed, partly from the absurd nobility of a kind of resigned patriotism for a tiny landlocked country that's incessantly invaded). Surprise though; it feels like I'm not away anywhere - not that I never left, but it just feels natural that I'm here.
I've got absurdly attached to my dorm room. I think it's some atavistic urge to be a student again (even the tiny 2 foot long desk, I'm fond of). The eternal round of class prep, teaching, grading, administration and committees kicks the passion out of you after a while; the thought of having a month of thinking, reading and writing, without having to consider "real life" is such a thrill. Wouldn't it be a great, eccentric world if everyone had enough to get by and pursue their monomania? Real life sucks - who the hell invented it?
I read Elif Batumen's book of essays, The Possessed, on the plane; most of them had been published and it turned out I'd read them - the ones that hadn't been published kind of deserved not to be. But they're about the life of a Stanford comp lit grad student and the eccentric academic life (the trope being that academics are like Dostoyevsky's obsessed characters in the novel of the same name). Needless to say the profs come out of it looking pretty bad, vain, self-obsessed, but Batumen bravely reaffirms her faith in the academic life by the end of the book. Which is a crock because now she's a non-fiction writer etc. Her descriptions of the Russian novels she reads, though, made me want to read and re-read them; she conveys her passion (if not in great depth) about them. To some extent she's right, you need to be an obsessive, but ideally not about your career and any ensuing vainglory. The coy undertone of the book smelt of the latter.
I'm re-reading the three Jesenska biographies, starting with her daughter's memoir, which is a really flawed and idiosyncratic take, but quite wonderful and briskly moving. She beings with finding out about Jesenska's death from a fellow inmate of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She had been in denial about her mother being actually dead and the ex-inmate came to visit her, telling her she had something of her mother's. When they sat down, the woman put a tooth on the table. It was all that was left of Jesenska.
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