Jeden rok!

As of today I've been here for a year. It seems like just yesterday that I stepped off the plane and onto the blank page. With time going by this fast I must be doing something right.

Sorry about the lack of updates the last couple of months, but my free time in November was spent on the National Solo Album Month challenge, in which I somewhat successfully wrote and recorded an album(-ish thing), and December was, well, you know, December.

Other than the album the only thing I can remember about November is that Marit and I attended a small vegan potluck at Andrea's place for Thanksgiving. It was a workday, so we didn't get started with the feasting until the sun had long been down, but that didn't stop us from pigging out and going into a food-induced coma. I'm not sure if I've fallen asleep so quickly since I was a toddler.

A couple days before Christmas my friend Clementine and I had our first "gig". It was just an unplugged set at a high-quality hole-in-the-wall cafe. It was mainly covers and not really the style that we're aiming for in the long run, but it made for a very nice evening.

I ended up spending my first Christmas away from home in about as wicked sweet a way as possible. I went with Clem and Lukaš (her boyfriend and our band's manager) to Lukaš' family's house in the small Czech village of Řetůvka, not so far from the Polish border. We ate, drank, sang, ate, drank, went to mass, sang, drank, ate, slept, ate, did the gift thing, ate, drank, and then ate. In addition to the delicious smorgasbord with an ever-rotating cast of dishes and sweets provided by Lukaš' dynamo of a mother, I cooked up some Audryburgers (Red Beans n Rice, NOLA-style) to test the Czech tolerance for actual spices, and Clem cooked up some French-style crepes. By the end of the trip I felt like a veal calf. Czech Christmas is very similar to American-style Christmas save a few exceptions:

1)the main celebration is on the 24th (though it definitely doesn't end there)

2)their equivalent of eggnog is stronger and tastier

3)there's more eating and drinking and

4)instead of having their presents delivered by an old bearded man who sneaks in through the chimney, Baby Jesus Himself delivers them (i think so that sins may be forgiven or something). I'm still not sure of which is creepier.

For New Years Eve, I went to a potluck with some friends and had my first authentic Swiss cheese fondue, which as it turns out is sort of like nachos con queso but better (unless we're talking about a really good spicy queso blanco a la Gordo's). After a filling meal, tequila shots, and pea shooter wars, we went to a H.R. Giger-esque club and danced our way to a (disappointingly English-language) countdown.

So I sort of have a 2-part New Years resolution.

1)Learn Czech well-enough so that people don't have to talk to me like I'm a 2-year old. My Christmas experience was comforting in that I realized just how much of the basics I've got down pretty strongly, but it also showed me just how much there is yet left to learn (not that I didn't know, but at least now I have a better idea of what to work on)

2) To make this the best year of my life. Not exactly sure of exactly how to make this work, but it involves some mix of music-making, celebration, learning, exercise, and hopefully travel.

I started to attempt my fulfillment of 2 just this past weekend. On Saturday, Marit returned from a two-week holiday stay back in Sweden. For Christmas, she had given me a pair of ice skates, which I was both very excited and very nervous about. I've never been able to rollerskate, skateboard, or really do anything that requires much balance, so I was expecting to walk away from the experience with a broken coccyx. We went to this free open-air rink in the middle of town. It was tiny and crowded and at first I almost had a panic attack trying to drag myself around the side of the rink, holding desperately onto the railing. But after about an hour of baby steps and saying "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit" over and over again I pretty much got the hang of it without falling even once. My method of stopping is still of the "run straight into the wall" school but I'd say I'm on my way to fulfilling my dream of Curling championships.

This weekend we're going to attempt round two so I'll let you know if I catch the eye of any figure-skating talent scouts that I just know are lurking around the streets of Old Town looking for the next Kristie Yamaguchi.

Čau!

Wau! Podzim je mýtus!

Well, I've had a pretty busy but very fulfilling couple of months but now that the summer's over I'm kind of shocked by how happy I am to have the bitter cold back. Don't get me wrong, I don't like being cold. I hate it, in fact. But I really like what the cold does to you. The way it makes your blood race. The slight sting of the frost. I'm looking forward to the snow hiding all of the grays and browns. The cabin-fever-induced productivity. After growing up in a place where you throw a party whenever a hurricane hits I think I've acquired a taste for extreme weather.

Anyway, my busy days all started when I hosted my first visitor from back home:

D.

He was only here for a little over a week but we packed as much bro-ing down as we could into the limited time we had together. In between exploring the city, strolling through parks, and drinking lots of beer, we found the time to take a daytrip to Kutna Hora with my roommate David.

We visited the infamous Sedlec Ossuary (the bone chapel!)...

...where I posed for a picture that now makes me feel obligated to record a death metal album.

Then we went to see St. Barbara's Church but were quickly asked to leave after Derek ate one of the gargoyles.

And before we headed back to Praha we took a couple spins on the local Bobova Draha and unleashed our inner 12 year-olds (who am I kidding, our inner 12 year-olds are never restrained)

As we wandered around Prague I was happy to see how much of an interest Derek took in the city's cultural history, particularly it's sculptures.

As a nice twist of fate, his visit coincided with the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. We celebrated the occasion by treating ourselves to a Leonard Cohen concert. He's now a Buddhist and he's getting up there in age, but he was surprisingly spry, dancing on and off stage between the encores. Even though he's touring to raise money to deal with financial troubles, it seems like his religious path has brought him peace. Of course the downside of this is that you'll never again hear him howl an epic drunken self-loathing performance like "Please Don't Pass Me By". But he's still got plenty of songs of love, loss, and redemption that have a really poignant ring now that he's found peace. I loved the show, as did Derek (despite missing "Hallelujah" on a piss break).

After we had such a great time together, Derek was thinking about skipping his return flight and staying with me here in Prague but that option disappeared when I was eaten by a giant tree, so he went back home.

Having an old friend to talk to in person allowed me a great deal of badly needed self-reflection. Seeing such a familiar face in the streets of my new home allowed me to build a little bit of a bridge back to my life as a whole. For a long time I felt like the plane touching down at Ruzyne Airport was the start of my life. I felt like a recovering amnesiac. I saw my past like it was a dream or something that had happened to somebody else. But having D here to have big "life" conversations with allowed me to reclaim myself and was a fantastic reminder of where I come from.

Speaking of where I come from, with a little luck and a lot of digging I passed through the tree's digestive system just in time to welcome a visit from my mom (Hi Mom!). Though we didn't make it out to Kutna Hora, it was a wonderful visit. It was awesome getting to be the straw that broke the camel's complete lack of trips to Europe. I sort of felt like a 7 year-old again, showing off the picture of an epic dinosaur battle that I drew in art class, only instead of just scribbles of crayons it was actually something almost as cool as a dino-battle. To top it off, while Mom was in town Marit returned from her summer sojourn in Scandinavia.

Since then I've been busy teaching, playing music, hangin' out, and studying Czech. Lately I've been using television as a study aid, particularly a very dubbed Walker: Texas Ranger. Needless to say I revel in the irony of using a 100% flag-wavingly American show to learn a language that most Americans don't know exists.

So this morning we got the first snow of the new winter. Autumn was a short handful of days of very confused weather and it feels like winter following her tail in circles before she lies down and sleeps on the city for the next 6 months. Got no complaints here!

_k

Where is that sound coming from?

Well, it's been a fairly quiet and lazy summer. Between everyone being out of town and a lightened workload, I've had a lot more free time to.... well....what have I been up to again??

Oh yeah.... I guess the big news is that I'm back to playing music, after an almost year-long exile from my oldest dearest friend. I've been practicing weekly with my new french friend Clementine. We're going to start off by playing covers of old standards and early rock music and once we get our sound down we'll starting working on originals. I have a lot of ideas for directions to go with it but the only things I'm sure of is that our music will be 1)synthy 2)noisy 3)fun and 4)good (not sure if I've ever been this confident about future creative output but maybe moving to the other side of the world and starting your life anew does something for your self-confidence). Clementine's got a wonderful voice and I've been finding my voice more and more, thanks in part to the help of karaoke night at the Blind Eye (which I co-hosted for a couple weeks while Noah was out of town). We've been practicing in the centruries-old basement of Clem's apartment building in a space we've dubbed "the Dungeon". During our first practice a man was subdued by heroic firemen while attempting to jump off the roof of the building across the street and since we've moved our operations into the Dungeon it has rained during every practice, so maybe we're fated to be a little goth, too. I also suspect that I'll be starting a solo project at some point in the near future, as an outlet for my even noisier inclinations.

Other than music, the second most exciting part of the summer has been that after a lifetime of slowing down and scanning for shamrocks when walking by clover patches, I've finally found not one, but TWO four-leaf clovers. Not only that, but in the same week that I found the first I saw a full rainbow. I'm not generally superstitious but hopefully this indicates good things to come.

One beautiful Saturday a couple weeks ago, Clementine and I were tempted away from a planned band practice by an offer from a friend of hers to take a daytrip to Český Šternberk, an old majestic castle out in the countryside about 50km from Prague. We drove out there and spent the majority of the day walking around the town, hiking in the woods, and generally soaking in the fresh air and idyllic scenery. It was a perfect break from the bustling city life.

I'm proud to say that I've also managed to spend a lot of my free time studying Czech. I'm still pretty far from being a conversationalist but I've almost learned all of the convoluted case endings and I feel like I'm getting a much better grasp of the language.

Other than that and teaching, I haven't really been doing much. The biggest and most exciting news on the horizon is that Derek is coming to visit me in a week and my mom is following suit a few weeks later! It'll be fantastic to see people that I've known for more than 8 months. And even moreso that I'll be able to show them around this crazy town.

čau!

Memento Mori

Not The End

Captain's Log:Stardate 6.7.09

I've officially been in Prague for 6 months and I still don't know what to make of this wondrous multi-headed beast.

What I do know is that beer is best when it's mixed (or řezané).

I know the importance and surprising depth of fleeting friendships.

I know how to say "cheers" in a few more languages.

I know that you actually can get used to walking around in a city full of fairy-tale architecture. But it's not just a simple matter of familiarizing yourself and "getting over it." Something really great happens in your subconscious when you can walk casually past things like this and this without looking up, instead just feeling the details and history of the atmosphere in your bones. It injects a dose of romanticism into your heart. It puts a spring in your step. It gives you back a little bit of your childhood.

But perhaps most relevant of all, I know that despite missing some really amazing people (and food), I won't be coming home any time soon. (even accounting for the shifting nature of the word "home" itself)

Love y'all
_k

RIP King of Pop

You will be missed.

What, me macabre?

I've been thinking a little lately about Spalding Gray and his constant search for "perfect moments". It's not that I'm on the same quest but I do think that two of the most important things in life are collecting stories and experiencing these perfect little moments. I don't know if mine reach the same intensity of Spalding's but maybe that's a good thing (I don't know if I'm ready yet to share his fate).


But the other night I was coming home late from a private lesson and thank god the tram reached my stop when it did because I was listening to Dracula Mountain by Lightning Bolt on my headphones and I didn't know how still I'd be able to sit when the song kicked into overdrive again about halfway through. On the two block walk from the tram stop to my apartment I was really very pleasantly surprised by the way that a song that I hadn't listened to in years could still fill me with such joy and light a spark in my adrenals. And just when I thought my smile couldn't get any bigger I turned the corner to see fireworks bursting in the west-texas-big evening sky, perfectly augmenting the already gorgeous view that I have from my front door. I really love it when you can feel how the present is just a collision between the past and future.

I've since asked a few of my students about the occasions for this and other inexplicable displays of pyrotechnics I've witnessed and they just generally shrug their shoulders. Apparently fireworks just happen sometimes in this city.


Another nice surprise came on a Saturday afternoon when Marit and I were showing her brother and her friend around the tourist parts of town. We were walking down the street and we noticed what seemed to be a small group of zombies staggering towards us, so out of respect for the dead we stepped to the side to let them pass. But what at first seemed like only a handful of sanguine catatonic strollers soon turned into an entire horde of brain-hungry undead. Thankfully the Swedes and I had all left our brains soaking in jars back at Marit's, so they didn't hassle us too much. But it was nice to see trails of blood splattered all over the cobblestone streets of Old Town (which I'm sure has seen much more horrifying events than a few hundred zombies wandering around).

Prague recently held it's own incarnation of the international theater Fringe Festival. I was very busy at the time, but I was able to make it to a wonderful show called Kubrilesque, which is as you might guess a burlesque interpretation of the films of Stanley Kubrick. It's not every day you get to see beautiful women stripping their way out of monkey costumes or showing off fishnets while rolling around in a wheelchair routine.

Two weeks ago Marit left to go work for the summer in Scandinavia. I promised myself that I'd spend this summer in as lighthearted and sunshiny a way as possible, so naturally the first thing I did when she left town was take a trip to Olšanské Hřbitovy (Olsanske Cemetary) with Roni.

We peeked into the abysses of cracked tombs (yes, that's an IMAX),

played the statue game,

and tried our best not to get swallowed by the ivy.

Thanks to the play that I'm in, I've also had the luxury of spending my Friday and Saturday nights lying down drunk in an alleyway waiting for tourists to come kick me awake and question me about a murder investigation. But hey, at least I've still got my dignity.