Janek's Fantastic Friday

About a week and a half ago I had drinks with Dami, a Nigerian friend in medical school here. He's lived here about two years and mentioned that in the past year or so there's been a visible increase in the black population in Prague. Really? Where do they all hang out? Radost? Likewise, at lunch on Thursday, Steph talked about the days when he'd walk down the street and have a passing tram full of Czech people stare noses-to-windows intently at him. Not any longer.

Czechs maybe getting used to seeing a spectrum of colors these days, but many of them still have limited or no interaction with blacks. I attended my friend Yuriko's Xmas party two Fridays ago, and after I left her Czech coworkers told her they were glad I came because they'd never spoken to an African person before and thought I was quite nice. That's the standard type of reaction.

Then there's Janek's....

On Friday I met another friend of Yuriko's—Janek (and his girlfriend Kaya) who had previously told Yuriko he didn't get to meet many English speakers, let alone a black person, and thus was looking forward to an introduction. Janek is Slovakian, his girlfriend, Czech.

Prior to Friday, Yuriko had told me that Janek was very eager to meet me. Really? Why? I wondered, even though I had a hunch. Dinner was lovely (see last post) and afterwards we retreated to the seating area/bedroom for wine and cookies, and to view Yuriko's pictures from Japan. Janek complained of tense muscles around his shoulders. I offered to give him a massage.

Oh no....
Oh yes....

Sigh. Blame it on outside forces—the vodka, the wine, the yummy food, and the fact that his girlfriend was at work. It seemed like such a harmless offer at the time. But some things you just can't retract.

Janek lit up: “Really?!” Poof. Off went his shirt. “You want some lotion?” Poof. Lotion at the ready.

Janek was in heaven, though it was hard to tell if he was reacting to my magic fingers or to something else entirely.

“Yuriko, you must take picture.” Snap. Snap. Snap....

“Say hello to my friend on Skype.” We waved into his computer's camera....

A camera phone. Snap. Off went a picture to his friend in Helsinki who immediately wrote back:

“Is she going to take off her clothes?”...

Janek turned to a crucifix on the wall and lifted his hands:

“Thank you! Thank you! I don't know what I do in my life, but thank you for today! This is like big dream!”...

I couldn't stop laughing. All this production because of one massage? He kept holding, touching my hands and planting kisses. Yuriko looked uncomfortable and apologetic, as in, “If I had known this would happen....”

Janek was sweet and funny, but a handful, and Yuriko and I were relieved when his girlfriend Kaya finally returned from work. (We told her about the massage; she rolled her eyes and laughed.)

Feed Me...All Week Long

The past week went well and I have a new waistline to prove it.

Christmas Day: Dinner at Andra's. The headliner was “Sarmale”, a Romanian dish of minced meat—plenty of it—rolled in cabbage leaves and cooked for h-o-u-r-s. (She started the night before!) Deliciously smoky. A potato-meat-vegetables salad that sans the meat is a dead ringer for the type of salad served often at parties in Nigeria. Dessert—I baked an apple crumble; Michelle brought mini minced meat pies. My first time eating one—turns out they don't have any meat, just candied fruits. The name is a leftover from the days when the pie did contain meat.

(Michelle, Andra & Ionut)

Wednesday: Dinner at namesake's home, where I discovered that in a pinch Krupice, a grainy Czech flour, makes a good substitute for Nigerian semolina. A combination of condiments—egusi (dried melon seeds), dried fish, chilis—and we whipped up a tasty semo and efo elegusi. Okay, I didn't actually cook, I just drank her wine, snacked on home-baked white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookie and yapped away. Dessert—strawberry cheesecake and a caramel tort.

Thursday: I decided to “ease up” by having a light lunch at KavaKava with Steph—an L.A.-based friend I met through Regina (now in Dubai). Kava does great soups and my spinach soup quickly took my mind off the chilly weather. I didn't fare so well at dinner with Iulia—a whole grilled trout, vegetables (alas steamed in oil I discovered too late) and a frisbee-sized potato pancake (seriously). No dessert. A laughable attempt at moderation this far into the week.

Friday: Accompanied Yuriko to her friends Janek & Kaya's home for dinner. Janek got things started with a special Slovakian aperitif—melt butter, honey and sugar in a pot, add hot water and then your preferred spirit. In this case, vodka. Hooa! Then followed by my first home-cooked Czech/Slovak meal—pork medallions with cranberries and cream sauce, potato dumplings stuffed with smoked ham. (His potato knedlicky is soo much better than what I've had in restaurants.) Dessert—sugar cookies.

Though I've gone to the gym every day this week except Tuesday I've obviously been taking in more than I could expend in one hour on a treadmill. So when I returned home last night, I didn't need a scale to tell me that I had probably reached my tipping point. I felt it.

Today, Yuriko and Janek are joining me at my gym to “sweat off” last night's excess. But there will be no treadmill run for our trio. We are doing it the lazy way: the sauna.

Make New Friends, Keep the Old

I was absent through October and November, posted three entries at the start of December and then disappeared yet again. Until someone (ahem) felt compelled to pen a short verse yesterday about my relapse.

Playing catch-up with individual stories from the past weeks is out of the question. But there are two that definitely warrant blog time....

Tania (aka White Girl in Prague) returned home to Australia for good almost two weeks ago. Prague is a transient city; you know it within a few months of being here. But when I thought of Prague in the long-term Tan was always in the picture—trips for 2008, soup sessions at KavaKava, hunting for cafes with good desserts, exchanging Salsa moves, kicking it up at Solidni, and so much more waiting to be explored. Then life happened (doesn't it always?) and Tan decided her time in Prague was up.

I wanted to scold her: “You're leaving? You can't leave! What about all our plans?” (Actually, they were mostly “my plans” and I intended to get her up to speed about them later....) But people move on, and instead of getting into a funk about it why not look at the big picture? So I chose to be thankful for her friendship instead. Memories of our good times together would always evoke smiles, and another thing was certain: I would have a good friend to call on when I visited Australia.

As one friend prepared to leave, a new one made an appearance.

I woke up one morning and discovered that I was not the only Tinu in Prague. C'est imposible! The revelation arrived via email, from a comment left on my blog. My first thoughts were: Who is she? And is this city big enough for the both of us?

According to the message, “Tinu” had googled me after someone at a bar mistook her as the writer of this blog. Funny tidbit: she ended up getting free drinks from the guy as a result. (Golly, if I knew I had such generous fans I'd toot my horns a bit louder. Lord knows I could use more free booze....) That aside, I was mucho curious about this namesake. I wanted to meet her right away, but I was also wary—I've been excited about meeting new people before, but only to walk away sometimes feeling disappointed about a lack of connection or an unexpected defensiveness.

“Don't try to see her right away,” someone suggested, which made me roll my eyes. What is this? A date? The Rules? Still I recognized where the advice was coming from.

Eventually, the two Tinus met up for dessert on a Sunday evening at Cafe Louvre, and chatted for almost three hours. She is also Nigerian (of course) and lived in Finland for five years, which I found so impressive that I decided to shelve my backup plan of ordering a hit on her.... I had one ready just in case. (Can you guess which Tinu is a bit crazy? Ha!)

Meeting Tania was one of the highlights of 2007; before her I wasn't so sure about making solid friendships in Prague. But it is possible (maybe not always easy) and I look forward to my current friendships evolving for the better and to the new ones ahead.

I'm going to end with a line from a school rhyme that I remember singing as a little girl in Nigeria. Serendipitously, it popped into my head as I was typing this entry.

“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other is gold.”

An Un-Christmas Holiday

For weeks now, I've been fielding questions about my plans for the holidays. And to each inquiry, I've given the same set of responses: Not going home. Staying in Prague. No particular plan for December 25th.

Last year, I was itching to be out of Prague for the holidays—and for good reason. My first five months in a foreign country, away from friends and family, and trying to make heads-or-tails of a rocky relationship.

(View from Helena's hotel of the Christmas Tree lighting at Old Town Square, December 1st.)

This time around, I'm content to stay here. I'm a Prague “veteran” now, with a good circle of friends and absent one dubious boyfriend. One other reason is that I decided pretty early on not to stress over holiday expectations: how one should feel or what one ought to be doing. I made my peace with the fact that I might probably be alone for the holidays, and that it'd be okay not to have an agenda centered around holiday festivities or loads of people.

When you let go of an anxiety things tend to just fall into place. Turns out I have plenty to do actually.

A number of my friends are staying in Prague through the holidays. Andra's having a low-key dinner/catch-up session on Christmas evening. A new friend—and namesake—has invited me over the next day for a meal of yam porridge, semo and egusi—a feast that will require joint contributions from our personal stash of Nigerian condiments. Other folks are open for meeting up for whatever.

And with almost two weeks off from work, I'm also looking forward to tackling a few mini personal projects, catching up on downloads of my television shows (Lost, Heroes, Smallville, et al), and putting in face time at the gym. In fact, my gym will be open on Christmas Day—I may just pop in for a quick run. And I bet I may not be the only one there.

(One regret: the weather has turned absolutely frosty and I've shelved plans to take in some sites about town.)

The stress that most people—and the media—associate with this time of the year is just noticeably absent for me, and I am loving it. I don't know if every holiday season will be this way, but I can only try to make it so.

Overheard in Prague

...while walking to my office from the metro this afternoon.

An American to his two friends/co-workers:

“She wanted me to be grateful that she was dating me, because she was gorgeous! Well, if that's your fucking attitude....“

With my bad hearing and the passing cars, I didn't catch the rest of it. Anyone care to complete the sentence? Do so via the “Comments” box. Could be fun....

Occasionally, I browse the Overheard in New York site—it's a hoot to read. Copyright issues aside, a Prague version wouldn't be such a bad idea. With the hoards of English and American tourists that visit Prague year-round it wouldn't be too difficult to populate the site with inanities.

New Addition to Resume: Shutterbug

Can you think of every single job you've ever had?

A recent email informing me that a picture I had taken in Budapest (and subsequently posted to Flickr) was to be included in a Schmap City Guide got me thinking about my “career” history.

I've been working since I was 8. Thanks to Nigeria's non-existent child labor laws, our mom installed my sisters and me in her convenience/drugstore after school and on weekends. We had no choice really—it was right next door. There was no wage, but in return (and out of her sight), we occassionally helped ourselves to candy and soda (alas, my mom sold no liquor), created anatomically grotesque "condoloons" (condom-balloons), and took cigarette breaks behind the store. What a gig.

Since then, I've been a librarian, a newspaper telemarketer, a personal assistant, a bartender, a data entry clerk, a movie reviewer, a tutor, a sales clerk, an admin assistant, a teacher test prep instructor, an artist's model, a student manager, a legal assistant, a freelance writer, a multiple-time temp and intern, and a mystery shopper.

If there's something I missed it's probably a job I'd rather forget—buried deep in my psyche, too painful to dredge up. The one gig that did elude me though was Fast Food Worker. I mean, it's almost like a rite of passage for an American teen, yet I could never gain entry into the hallowed kitchens of McDonald's. I even applied to Burger King, KFC, Wendy's—nada. I imagine I must have had a blinking sign over my head that read: “Not Suited to Burger Flipping!”

Back to the present. Now I'm adding “Random Travel Photographer” to my work history. Though I find it amusing that I got tagged for Budapest and not Prague or the Czech Republic.

Is Tuesday My New Monday?

The hardest thing about blogging after a two-month absence is deciding on what to write for the return. Self expectation runs high, almost on par with disparagement about momentum and opportunities or good blog entries lost.

But after reading a NYT article about the perils of perfectionism, I'm going to jump right in with a short note about the pink elephant in the room.

I can only sum up my absence this way: “I had stuff happening”. A bit too simple, but packed with enough meaning that will resonate with most people, and very possibly Britney Spears. (For the record, during my absence I did not shave my head or lose custody of anything other than my peace of mind. And don't bother hunting the internet for pictures of me panty-less either.)

Folks asked: “When are you going to blog again?” Standard response: “This weekend, really!” But my internal day planner would rebel whenever I tagged a particular weekend or Monday as the day I'd get the task done.

Big Tip: Avoid planning to get anything started on a Sunday or Monday.

Wouldn't you know it, after all the declarations and false starts, this entry is happening on a Tuesday, and exactly two months to the date of the last entry in October. (Ironically, a post that speaks to the lure—and perhaps inevitable downside—of goal-setting for Mondays.) Believe me, I didn't even plan for today's post. At least, not consciously. In the farthest corners of my psyche? Maybe. Because how else to explain why I would wake up at exactly 5:00 a.m. and after a visit to the potty head straight for my computer and start typing?

I imagine it must have been penciled-in: "Today, she blogs."