The only girl who could spell Czechoslovakia

 

November 2009: twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolution that was velvet.

 Back in 1989 I was still at primary school.  I think I remember seeing the fall of the wall on TV but perhaps I’ve invented that later.  A boy in our class brought in a fragment of the Berlin wall to show everyone.  I remember being disappointed.  It was just a small bit of grey rock I could have picked up on the wasteground where I used to take my dog for a walk.  The dog was called Teddy.  He was a Bearded Collie and had masses of fur that I didn’t brush often enough so it matted into huge clumps I’d later have to cut off with nail scissors.

My very first Czech-related memory goes back to primary school too.  We had a spelling test and I was the only person who knew how to spell Czechoslovakia. There aren’t many words in English that begin with ‘Cz’. 

I also collected stamps.  Three pages of my album were devoted to Czechland. I still have it.  The ones from exotic places like Equatorial Guinea and Cuba and Malaysia have huge butterflies or angelfish or Disney characters launching space rockets. The Czech ones are less colourful. Some have tiny engravings of castles or a thumb sized portrait of Gottwald. Another one has a zebra; one has a Soviet red-star with a 50 in the middle. There are a couple with pictures of carp on them.  They are all very neatly arranged on the page, pasted on carefully with stamp hinges, those little strips of gummed paper.  I was that kind of child.

 According to Samuel Johnson, no-one but a blockhead wrote but for money.  Or a bloghead.  I’ve been trying to write for money recently which is partly why you’ve heard less from me here.  My recent assignment was to interview an ex-pat novelist whose last book was set in Czechland. I spent some time compiling a thoughtful and intelligent list of questions which I first saved as a Word document and then fired off by email.

‘You haven’t sent those questions yet have you?’ Czechman pipes up.  He’s been using my laptop since the graphics card in his gave up the ghost.

‘Yes, I have.  Why?’

 ‘There are spelling mistakes. Look, you’ve spelt Czechoslovakia wrong.’

Prague is just one big old folks home

For some, Prague is the new ‘between the wars’ Paris, a place for would-be Steinbecks or Fitzgeralds or Hemingways to be literary poseurs.  It is also an infamous location for stag parties: pissed-up Brits who attack defenceless telephone boxes and then turn up at the Embassy stark bollock naked unable to remember their name or where they put their passport.  Then of course there are the tourists: Russians, Germans, Italians, Americans, Japanese, Chinese to name but a few.  There’s one section of the population you cannot help noticing if you pay just a little attention.  The old. 

In Prague the elderly haven’t yet been erased from the centre of the city.  You can still see them shuffling along with walking sticks and their shopping trolleys which they somehow manage to manoeuvre on and off busy trams despite the crowds.  They don’t go around in jeans and branded tracksuits like the pensioners back home. Instead you see them in a shapeless acrylic jumper or garish floral print dresses made of hardwearing nylon.  Perhaps the reason no senior citizen wears that kind of thing anymore in London is that all such items have been rounded up and put on sale in vintage stores dotted around the East End to be sold to bright young media types at vastly inflated prices.  Nothing here in Czechland has actually gone out of fashion for long enough for it to be successfully rebranded as ‘vintage’.  Every time I switch on the radio all I hear is the sounds of the Eighties and I don’t think anyone’s doing it to be ironic.

 It’s not just the clothes they’re wearing that make the old people look older: their faces seem more heavily lined, more haggard.  Is this a sign that they have led less pampered existences or just my overactive imagination? Some of them seem so frail I’m amazed by the sheer determination it must have taken them just to get out of the front door.  Bent over almost double, you see them doggedly grab onto the handrail of the tram door and somehow haul themselves up the steps before collapsing into one of the seats designated for invalids.  Yes, of course, there are old people in London too but they lack that kind of grit.

It is a commonly acknowledged fact that in the Western world to which post-revolution Czechland belongs, the population as a whole is getting older.  However, while this generation of pensioners may have managed to hang onto their low-rent apartments, who is to say what will happen in the future?  By the time my generation is ready to retire, the centre of Prague truly will have become a sinister, sanitised Disneyland where all the old folk have been forced out by aggressive property development to live in the suburbs or placed in care homes by their well-meaning cash-rich time-poor children.  The only people with wrinkled faces you’ll see shuffling along Jecna or Stepanska will be track suited British tourists.

Magic Prague nights: Mariee Sioux and Matt Bauer play Prague

I’m going to break another rather long silence by telling you all about my Friday evening.  It was magical.  It involved listening to an indie-folk songstress called Mariee Sioux and bald-headed man with a beard from Appalachia Matt Bauer sing their hearts out in a semi-deserted cinema in the bowels of the French Institute.  Great stuff.  This is not merely my attempt to stray off into the territory of music criticism: I want to make a more general point about life in Prague versus life in London but I’ll save that until the end.

My nights out here are pretty tame and don’t involve one very Czech ingredient: that amber liquid produced by Pilsner and Staropramen. This was no exception but I wasn’t the only one abstaining.

 “We saw all these huge white birds when we were driving in here,” Bauer said, pointing to the logo on the a bottle of Mattoni mineral water he’d just taken a swig from, “but we didn’t know what they were about.  We thought it would be a beer or something.”

There was something a little surreal about sitting in an almost deserted cinema watching Matt blast out bluegrass-flavoured tunes of murder, heartbreak and sorrow but in a good way.  Broad-shouldered Bauer acknowledged the strangness of the situation as he quipped in a break between songs: ‘I feel like I’m in a Fellini film.’

Bauer shared the bill with Mariee Sioux, a self-taught singer songwriter with a doll-like face and appropriately Native American influenced dangly blue earrings. (I’m not much of an earring-wearer myself which is why I was admiring them.) If you had to try to define Mariee’s music, then I suppose you’d end up calling it something like ‘indie-folk’; complimentary comparisons have been made with Joni Mitchell. 

In a world where most so-called recording artists have their voices digitally enhanced when they play live I was impressed by how melodic and magical Mariee sounded with just her guitar for accompaniment.  I used to listen to a lot of angry music (I came of age as part of Generation Grunge) but these days I prefer soothing tunes that make you forget your cares and transport you somewhere else. Mariee Sioux’s music hits the spot for me in this respect.

Czechman enjoyed it too. He even made a few very shy wooing sounds while applauding and then shocked me further by buying Matt Bauer’s CD which apparently was “a good price”.  Allow me to digress slightly at this point in defence of Czechman who would like me to stress that his thiftiness has been overstated in this corner of cyberspace. He can be extravagant too on occasion and has specifically asked me to make it known that only last weekend he spent 500Kc (around £15) on the New York Times. 

When I lived in London there were thousands of different live concerts I could have gone to every night but I rarely did. When something happens here in Prague, you make the effort to go along.  London’s enormity, the sheer vastness and bulk of it, defeated me in the end. Prague is a place on a human scale.

I’m sorry you weren’t at the concert on Friday.  Really.  You missed out.  But it makes me feel smug and special that I’m one of the few people who got to see a really fantastic gig and I didn’t have to spend an hour of my time and use three different forms of public transport to get there.  Viva Praha.

 

Having your cake and eating it (so long as it doesn’t cost more than 50Kc)

'No, I am no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be...'

There has been another long silence. Since my last post, we seem to have skipped autumn and slid directly into the beginning of winter. I haven’t been out in the elements much though and have instead had to observe this process from my bedroom window. Ms Girl in Czechland has not been having an easy time of it recently. Don’t worry, the problem doesn’t lie with Czechman or Czechland. I should explain that I am caught between two worlds in more ways than one – not just between the anglophone and Czech spheres but between the land of the healthy and the land of the afflicted.

I have M.E. Perhaps the letters don’t mean much to you: unsurprisingly really as the mysterious condition also goes by other strings of letters like P.V.F.S or C.F.S and more confusingly still, some doctors still see it as merely a psychosomatic disorder. It affects my energy levels, I suffer from muscle pain (some days my legs feel as though someone has just taken a baseball bat to them) and my ability to concentrate. During a bad spell I’m like a battery that cannot hold its charge, in and out of bed all day with the ‘rest’ doing little more than taking the edge off the exhaustion. Making it to the computer and thinking in proper sentences has therefore been something of a challenge.

I wasn’t going to mention any of this: it feels quite personal and not whimisical and un-Czech related. I worry that talking about illness is nearly as boring as having to experience it. I muse (I like to muse, it amuses me) that splurging out your angst in an emotionally incontinent fashion online is ugly. However, if you’ll forgive me a little navelgazing, blogging does encourage a certain kind of intimacy which makes it tempting to confess more than you might to a bunch of essentially strangers. Perhaps because I’m sitting here alone at my computer typing, this what I write has a message in a bottle quality. I’ll write something I think somebody somewhere might find of interest whether it’s an example of Czech extreme thrift or my favourite tram journey or strange meat products on offer in Tesco and I hope that some like minded person will stumble across it and enjoy reading it. There’s something magical about that, in it’s own way.

Healthwise I’m picking up a little. Today Czechman and I went on an brief excursion to the Cubist museum in the Old Town where we looked at angular armchairs, strange still-lifes and queer statues. The building itself – The House of the Black Madonna – is of course an example of Cubist architecture so one of the most impressive things about the place for me was the staircase inside. There is a cafe (you know by know how fixated I am on coffee and cake venues) with green and white stripey padded seats but it was full of tourists (I know, I know, I’m a snob) so Czechman and I went elsewhere. This led to the usual clash between spoilt Western values and Czech thrift.

“If a piece of cake costs more than 50Kc (£1.70ish) I’m just going to walk straight out of there again.”

We were standing outside Cafe Cafe on Rytířská. I knew, having been here before with my expat friends, that a chunk of creamy gateau would set us back almost double Czechman’s specified top price.

We go somewhere else which was dark and drab and almost as expensive. The cake was good though and as I ended up paying, I shouldn’t moan. Or perhaps I should – that might be a sign that I’m finally managing to integrate…

There will be better posts soon, I promise.  I’ve enjoyed reading all your comments, especially on the winterphobia post, and I’m sorry that I haven’t always managed to reply.  The blog will go on though, M.E or no M.E, as long as some of you out there want to find my cybermessages in a bottle.

From zenophobia to freezophobia: will I survive the Czech winter?

After tackling the serious topic of the Czechs and racism, I thought I’d move onto more neutral territory: the weather.

Today it is gloriously sunny in Prague. There has been a distinct lack of cold or rain despite the fact that we’re nearing the end of September; my recent visitors from England first words when I went to pick them up from the metro were, ‘You didn’t warn us it would be this warm!’

Of course, I should be grateful for this late burst of sunshine but instead I can’t stop thinking about the cold days to come. It’s been six months since I made the move to Czechland and so far, things are going well. I haven’t felt particularly homesick and I think I’m managing to settle in reasonably well. However, I’ve never experienced Prague in winter, not even as a visitor. In fact, I’ve never been anywhere in my life where the temperature gets lower than minus two or three and I’m worried that the Czech winter could be the thing that sends me back on the next Easyjet flight home for good.

Winters in England are grey and miserable. There’s rain and mist and cold and ice and sometimes even snow. When the snow does appear, as I was explaining to the amusement of my students recently, everything stops: schools close, trains are cancelled and most people stay at home. Last year, the three or four centimetres of snow stopped London’s buses from running, a feat even Adolf Hitler couldn’t manage during the Blitz.

It never gets to minus 10C though. I’m so anxious about the approaching winter that I’ve already begun buying huge thick wool cardigans even though it’s so warm now that I’m sweating when I try them on. I don’t care. I must be prepared. When I imagine what winter will be like in Prague, I keep thinking about a film about Napoleon where he’s sitting in the Winter Palace in a deserted Moscow covered in a thick carpet of snow with his army in ruins defeated by a freezing winter. Now I am aware that Prague and Moscow have different climates but this is the nightmare scenario I have in my head that makes me shop for sweaters in the blazing sunshine.

I’ve also realised I need a new pair of winter boots. Czechman disagrees, even though the pair I currently own are two years old and have a hole in the front. When I complain that a replacement pair will set me back 3000Kc (I take my mother’s advice and only wear footwear made from leather) Czechman makes the following suggestion.

‘Can’t you just paint over it?’

Am I alone in thinking that this is taking thriftiness just a little bit too far?

Back to the winter. I’ll knit socks. I’ll buy thermal vests and longjohns and for the first time in my life, have a decent excuse to wear them. I’ll sit very close to the radiator when indoors, drink numerous cups of tea and pray this winter, unlike the last, is a mild one.

“I’m not normal, I’m a nigger”: are the Czechs more racist?

***

I didn’t want to write about this. Really. I would have much preferred to break my rather long silence with a whimisical piece about trams or clocks or a funny picture of a man eating an unfeasibly large sausage. The problem is, people keep coming out with things that as a self-confessed Guardian-reading lefty liberal, I find, well, shocking. Let me give you a couple of examples and then we’ll see what you think.

Last week I as teaching ‘if clauses’ to one of my groups of business students. They range in age from early thirties to mid-fifties. I gave them halves of sentences which they were supposed to come up with their own creative endings too. Fellow TEFL teachers will be well-acquainted with the kind of thing I mean: ‘If I won the lottery…’, ‘If cars ran on milk…’ ‘If everyone had eyes in the backs of their heads…’. One of the sentences my students had to complete was the seemingly innocuous, ‘If everyone had to learn Chinese instead of English..’

“I’m afraid of the Chinese,’ announced Jitka.

“Why?’ I find myself obliged to inquire.

“They are like ‘mravenci’.”

Oh God. I know this Czech word. “You think the Chinese are like ants?”

“Yes. There are just so many of them. It makes me afraid.”

***

I had a one-to-one student at a multinational company. She was in her late fifties. Let’s call her Ludmilla. Like many students, Ludmilla liked to use her English class as a kind of pseudo-therapy session so I know all about her difficult elderly mother-in-law who is too infirm to live by herself but refuses to go into a home, her concerns about restructuring in the department which means she will probably be made redundant and her sadness that the revolution happened too late for her to really do something with her life. Every time the class ends I feel faintly depressed and resolve not to police my boundaries better in future, which I of course then fail to do.

Anyway, one day we wander off onto the topic of previous teachers Ludmilla has had.

“I had someone from South Africa once but she was not a nigger.”

I burst out laughing; I don’t think I’ve heard a real person – i.e not a rapper or someone in a Spike Lee film – say this word out loud for years.

“No, you can’t say that in English”.

She pauses, reformulating the sentence in her mind. “She was not a nigger. She was normal.”

“No, you can’t say that either,” I told her. “In fact, what you just said is even worse.”

It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that Ludmilla greatly admires Brigitte Bardot for the work she did later in life to promote animal rights.

***

I taught a new group somewhere in the bowels of a huge glass corporate headquarters somewhere on the edge of Prague. We are doing icebreakers. One of the icebreakers involves the students finding out something the others in the group really object to. All of them are in their late twenties to early thirties.

“What does it mean, ‘object to’?”

“It’s when you really, really don’t like something. When you are against it.”

“Can I say, ‘I object to the rain?’”

“No, it must be stronger. For example, ‘I object to racism.”

Lenka looks at me, genuinely puzzled. “Why?”

***

I didn’t want to write about this topic as I really don’t want my Czech readers to think that I’m coming over here claiming that everyone in Britain lives in multiracial harmony and that no-one would ever utter a non-politicially correct word. I don’t. In case you doubt me, I refer you to my entry where I talk about my own father’s racist comments.

What I do find surprising is that there is more casual racism here in than in Britain: for example, when I mentioned I was going on holiday to Berlin to a group of students, one of them quipped that it was the second biggest Turkish city in the world, knowing he would get a laugh. In Britain, that kind of comment would be rewarded with an embarrased silence. It’s probably just a symptom of the fact that the country was closed off from the outside world for so long but I’m still irked by the fact that youngish people who have probably travelled and had that contact with outside can still make these kinds of comments. Anyway. Enough attempts at serious analysis. Next time expect photos of mushrooms and statues and mannequins.

I look forward to your comments. I have a feeling they’ll be plenty.

hi-how-are-you-i’m-fine-thanks-how-are-you

***

***

How are you?

I know I’m asking but don’t go assuming that means I’m actually the least bit interested in the response. Apparently that’s because I’m English and for us, asking that innocuous question is just a way of clearing our throats. Often we don’t even bother to provide an answer before blurting out the same question parrot fashion. The French make things more convenient from this point of view; when you are asked ‘ça va?’ a simple ‘ça va’ will suffice in reply.

The Czechs do things differently. If someone bothers to go to the trouble of asking how you are, it is okay to assume they are interested in the response. You are allowed to say, “I’m feeling pretty shit actually” or go off on one about your bad boss, hair day or divorce. “Not great” is an acceptable answer here. In England, only “I’m fine” will do.

The linguists have a term for what we English do. It’s called phatic communication: language acts which have very little meaning or purpose other than to avoid silence. Perhaps the reason the Czechs I’ve spoken to about the ‘how are you?’ issue are confused about English ‘how-are-you-ing’ is that they misunderstand the true meaning of the standard response ‘I’m fine’. In fact, saying you’re fine doesn’t signify all that much, just that nothing terrible happened to you or your nearest and dearest that particular day, that you are alive, in reasonable health and not anticipating any imminent catastrophe. That’s all. You’re ok.

If you are feeling shitty and you’re speaking to someone English, my advice would be to keep a lid on it. Whatever you’re heard about the infiltration of U.S therapy culture, we still consider emotional incontinence bad manners. I only asked how you were, so don’t go spilling your guts everywhere: I don’t want to be subjected to a fifteen minute monologue.

I’m being deliberately provocative of course and I anticipate that you will agree or disagree with me as usual in the space provided.

I’m fine by the way. Really. Apart from having my mobile stolen on the 22 tram. No camera phone means no nice new pictures of bridges and mannequins and men eating sausages to put on my blog. But of course, I shouldn’t be telling you that as I’m sure you’re just asking out of politeness.

Don’t bother with Starbucks, just look up

 

I’ve been living in Prague for around four months now.  I like it here.  My life is falling into a routine which is good because it helps me to feel more comfortable and settled but bad because I am in danger of losing the magic of being in a new place. 

In ‘Talking it Over’ by Julian Barnes (one of my favourite books) Stuart knows that he is in love because his walk to work is mysteriously transformed.  He starts noticing things, little details – decorations on buildings, a plaque commemorating a Zepplin raid – that he had somehow previously managed to overlook for years.  Things are looking up for him: that makes him look up, literally.

I try to do the same as much as possible here in Prague.  The results are rewarding.  Every building seems to have its own little appealing quirk whether its a pretty mosaic mural in an Art-Nouveau style, a muscle-bound Greek god hoisting up a windowledge on his huge shoulders or a frieze of the great proletariat engaging in some industrious activity. 

I was standing outside Starbucks on Wencelsas Square waiting for someone. Just in case you think I’m being all spoilt and western again, I’d just like to make it clear that we were just using it as a rendez-vous point -  even I think 90Kc is steep for a vanilla moccafrotthacappolatte.

A little bored, I craned my head back and had a good look up at the building on the corner. 

 

Look at these queer jade faces: they look as though they could have been stolen from an Aztec temple or mystical totem pole.  Wander around the corner into Stepanska and look even further up (the zoom on my camera wouldn’t reach that far) and you’ll be rewarded by seeing a row of lions’ heads with golden teeth jutting out from the wall.  Seeing them gets me thinking.  Who put them there?  Why lions?  Thinking in this way is good: it means I’m engaging with my surroundings not just sleepwalking along in a routine-induced daze.

If you’re scared of getting lost, walking out in front of a car or bumping into people, then you can engage in active noticing more safely from the window of a tram.  Try jumping on the 9 at Jindrisska.  Fight your way to a seat – not the ones for invalids by the doors as you’ll soon have to leap up again for a senior citizen or someone on crutches.  However much you love people-watching,  ignore the people inside the tram, tilt your head back and look out of the window.  Don’t move until you get to Andel. 

Now experiment.  Try other tram routes.  Stare up to examine the buildings around you while you’re waiting for the bus or tram in the first place.  You could even try taking things a step further.  Disappear down side streets just to see what’s there.  I know you know this already but sometimes it’s easy to forget.   You might find something worth seeing or you might end up nowhere.  Don’t worry.  We know the world isn’t flat: there’s no risk of falling off the edge into a void.  Except here of course.

In praise of Czech thrift: five ways to save during the credit crunch

 

Canteen food, Czech style, complete with meat, dumplings and a thick sauce.

Thanks a lot for all your comments to my last post on the issue of spoilt and Western behaviour.  Rather than trying to reply to them all, I thought it would be easier to write a new post.

Just in case I didn’t make myself clear, I don’t think Czech thriftiness is a bad thing.   Far from it.  As one of you already said, what’s so impressive about the way Czechs save money is that they manage to do it so instinctively.  It is rare that Czechman would forget to prepare an adequate amount of sandwiches and other provisions to take along with us on the train or plane and why not: they’re cheaper, tasier and being wrapped up in tissue paper, better for the environment too.  However, what I do find funny (in both senses of the word) is that now I’m in Czechland the way I handle money marks me out as prolifigate while in British terms I’m considered to be what is euphemistically termed ‘careful’ (i.e a bit of a skinflint) .  

You should have my sister’s reaction when I made her have lunch in St Barts Hospital canteen (cost £2.50) rather than splashing out on poncey-nouveau-fusion-grub at a restaurant  (potential cost £10+). 

‘I come here sometimes with Czechman,’ I explained by way of justification.   

‘You deserve each other,’ she replied, looking up from her burger and chips with a contemptuous look.

Anyway, in the interest of balance and for the benefit of my sister, here are some valuable tips in the art of financial management I have learned from the Czechs.  None of them are going to make you rich overnight but hey, there’s a credit crunch on so every penny (or crown) counts… 

1) Grow your own.  Not a practical option for city-dwellers but this is something the Czechs excel at.  A weekend with Czechman’s family always means returning back to Prague with a sack of potatoes big enough to see us through a nuclear winter. I guess since they knocked down the Berlin Wall there’s less chance of that actually being necessary.

2) It is possible to make two perfectly good mugs of tea with just one teabag.  I was shocked when Czechman first attempted this but provided you avoid the horrible Lipton rubbish and stick to the Tesco Red Label builders kind, the results are perfectly drinkable.

3) When buying for any Czechs in your life, remember that inexpensive but thoughtful gifts will be probably be more appreciated than they would in the West.  For example, one Christmas when I was particularly short of money I managed to buy a copy of the Independent newspaper from 1989 featuring the Velvet Revolution on the front page.  It only cost me £3 including postage but he loved it.  Job done.

4) It is also possible to knit a bathmat out of old rags.  There’s nothing Czech about this but I think it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever done to save money. Czechman was very impressed by my ingenuity though.

5) The main lesson to be learnt from the Czechsters is this: you don’t need to spend a fortune to have a good time.  During my long weekend at Czechman’s brother-in-law’s family cottage thanks to some clever budgeting we spent the grand total of 180Kc (£6) on food each.  This covered all our meals for three days.  Yes, we did eat some rather suspect pink luncheon meat but we didn’t resort to boiling any rabbits’ skulls or consuming any offal. 

My next post will steer cleer of matters financial and will not include a list.  Instead I’ll be writing about another Czech cultural institution: the summer film festival…

How to be spoilt and western: a beginner’s guide

 

 

The first time I heard him say it was during a trip on the 254 bus. We had passed through Stamford Hill and we were now travelling along the Seven Sisters Road towards Manor House tube.  This long straight stretch of road was flanked on both sides by a collection of vast housing estates. Although they weren’t the high rises filmmakers use as a backdrop when they want to suggest urban decay, something about them depressed me.

 ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to live in one of those?’ I said in a low voice.

‘You are just spoilt and western,’ came the reply from my Czech companion.

 I admire the way Czechs know how to get by without spending a lot.  I do, really.  I’m pretty thrifty myself: most of my clothes are second-hand or bought during the sales, I can make a roast chicken stretch for at least three meals and unlike many of my British friends, I have modest savings rather than a whopping overdraft.   That’s why it puzzles me that my behaviour is still somehow deemed spoilt.  Anyway, here’s a list of my deviant actions I have complied so you can judge for yourselves…

 8 Ways to Impress your Czech Partner with your Spoilt and Western Behaviour

1)      Paying for anything you already have or could somehow get for free.  You’ll notice how very few Czech people ‘forget’ to bring a carrier bags with them to Albert or Billa now you have to pay for them. 

2)      Owning more than two pairs of jeans.  It has taken me a number of years to convince Czechman that owning more than six T-shirts, two sweatshirts and two pairs of jeans is not bad and wrong.

3)      Spending money on having a tea or coffee not because you really want to drink it, but because you want to sit somewhere warm while waiting for the train/bus.

4)      Using a taxi.  Ever.

5)      Refusing to eat sandwiches in a bus shelter in a remote part of Scotland in the rain while on holiday and demanding to be taken to the nearest pub for lunch instead. 

6)      Believing it is acceptable to spend more than 100Kc (£3) on a hot meal at lunchtime (including a hot or cold beverage). 

7)      Believing it is acceptable to spend 150kc (£5) on a hot beverage and a slice of cake while socialising with girlfriends.

8)      Refusing to travel abroad by coach rather than by plane.  It may reduce your carbon footprint.  It may be cheaper.  It may be a way of avoiding annoying stag parties.  I’m not sitting on a coach for fifteen hours.  Sorry.

DISCLAIMER 

The points listed above may or may not be based on actual events or reflect the current views of Czechman who may or may not exist. 

Sorry.  I had to put that bit in or he’ll get upset.