Blog:

What I Did This Summer

2007-10-14T15:21:00.000+02:00

I went to Linz:No one suggested I go there. I had never heard anything about Linz. But it was early in the summer, my pack was feeling light, and it was on the way to Salzburg, where I was meeting up with Zuzana:So I went.

There's nothing in Linz. There's a cathedral.

There's the Danube.

I remember being there and lying on the grass. A tour cruise was going up the river, with ten little shapes on board. A woman's voice in the sunny heat, on the loudpseaker, telling them what they could see from the boat, which was nothing, the Austrian emptiness. Every country, I guess, has a nowhere.

I was playing with my used ticket to the modern art museum. On the back of it were some instructions and a diagram. You could turn the glossy paper ticket into a small model of the museum itself:
Thinking of that now reminds me of Sveti Marko in Belgrade. Late in the summer, the weather inexplicably cold, the clouds low and gray and depressing after two straight months of sun. My pack feeling pointless.

This was the day when I knew definitively that my trip was over and I should go home. I went inside the church. Inside, under the gigantic dome, was a smaller version of the church itself--a beehive version, actually: And that's exactly what happens when I try to write about a place, or a series of places or a journey: I keep walking into smaller and smaller churches. I have to keep stooping lower and lower to enter.

And now you've seen all four pictures I took in Linz.

And before I go on talking about my trip, you should know that I don't completely feel up to it.

I want to tell you about where I've been but I'm completely lost. I'm homesick. Heartbroken. Anti-home. Living my life here, but always a little bit angry and estranged.

My country's still at war after all these years. I miss my sisters and my parents. I miss the desert, where I've never lived.

My cousins have joined the army and are fighting. My friends are at home, in Athens, in Texas, in Savannah, helping poor people, sick people. Those numbers are growing.

I miss the damp nightscent of the Georgia forests along 316.

My country isn't well, and maybe I should be there, helping. In fact, I have absolutely no doubt that I should be there, helping.

But I am here and I have absolutely no doubt that I belong here as well. And every day, in little seductions, this tiny little train-set of a nation confuses...

...and thus seduces me. So as I write there's a double geography in me, and a kind of buzzing guilt which (I hope) knows its place.

I know my place. But still...

I feel I have to ask some good spirit for permission to be split in the way I am. For an exemption from wholeness. I will get whole, I bargain with it. But the world is too big still.

Of course, I know I'm not alone. There's this poor darling in the Archeological Museum in Athens:

Anyway, we've always been heavy with ourselves and still managable. There's an ancientness to being off-balance...

Athens, Greece

Rovinj, Croatia

Tirana, Albania

Rethymno, Crete

You are entering forever unfinished
churches and their light isn't
yours yet, like candles leaning

in toward each other, a heat
in your side keeps you moving, keeps
the secretly purposed parts of you moving

in toward each other. Moving
is praying for you.

I guess you imagined yourself
some lost earth's little darling, the one
who'd piece all the varied uses

together: vases and scattered
graves; blacked lines
on a limestone face, a face

with only a nose, and a cannonball buried
deep in its bottom half like a kind of mouth.

The living dog with a brown wound beneath it, howling.

But that cannonball has used every second
and every hour of a thousand years to remain
exactly where it is.

There's a prayer moving faster than you, so fast
and so fractured you
feel it only as continuity.

It was not continuous ever.
Never yours to look at like that, with the bright
leer of some kind of reassembler.

Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

Split, Croatia

Plitvička Jezera, Croatia

Plitvička Jezera

Athens

near Prilep, Macedonia

So, it's the middle of September in Brno. A dull drizzle is somewhere between hanging in the air and falling. I'm trying to write something about my trip this summer, a two and a half month journey from the Czech Republic--which occasionally claims to be at the center of Europe--to the south coast of Crete--as far south as you can go before Europe starts being Libya--and back again. It's not easy. There's too much to synthesize. I want to refuse to synthesize. The concrete apartment blocks across from mine, painted in Froot Loop colors a few years ago to make their dreariness more bearable, are sliding back into their romantic communist Czechoslovakian grayness...

A good friend tells me she's met some people who seem like reincarnations of me. That's fine, I'm willing to be reincarnated. I never felt like me while I was still me. My memory has always felt largely borrowed from somewhere. Like an old rope winding through my room from some other room I can't see. That room has a window on a wormy orchard. And when I tug on the rope some tree-dwelling thing from the Urals tugs back.

Now that I'm not me anymore, it's nice to know that someone else is picking up where I left off, taking moronic pictures of mostly sky, or of only the upper half of some sign.

Venice, Italy

Santorini, Greece

I saw a lot of churches on this trip. Lots of interiors of churches. I lit a lot of similar candles, stuck in bowls of sand or water, and the candles doubled over in the other candles' heat in similar ways. But I think my three favorite churches were in the last three cities I came to before coming home. Number three: The Rotunda of St. George in Thessaloniki, Greece.

I was the first visitor there in the morning. They were reconstructing it. There was nothing inside but sunlight and scaffolding. A stone altar, looking obviously temporary, awkward in the space around it. And a single worker, up near the ceiling, perched on the wooden planks of the scaffolding, out of my sight. But I could hear him.

He was manning some drill or polisher, making a low, intermittent buzz. I walked around the empty skin of the church, and it was like walking underneath a tree in an arid country (maybe Greece) and hearing a cicada, somewhere on a leaf of some high branch, out of sight. You imagine it's fat, and ugly and brown. Its sound is so regular it disappears. But the sound is necessary to create the feeling of silence you feel underneath.

The silence doesn't last; pretty soon your mind is working again. The purpose of the present reconstruction is to correct the inadequacies of the previous reconstruction. Signs with these (or similar) words are everywhere in Greece and the Balkans.

Before it was a Byzantine church, this place was a temple to the gods. Maybe the cicada is one of Zeus' dumber incarnations. He had had incredible success with women in the past--as a black bull, a swan. But this time he chose a very unsexy insect to appear as. And the only babe he's managed to attract is an unshaven American tourist.

But I'm only thinking of these metaphors now, when I need something to say. At the time, after two months of travel, and just after a 25-hour ferry ride across the entire length of the Aegean, my mind was blank and swimming in its own egg-yolk light.

The truth is I didn't think at all about the classic Greek myths when I was in Greece--those white marble tales of heroes and columns and softly plucked lyres. The museums there are too good. All the statues and trinkets have explanations translated into excellent English, and they point you back not to the myths, but to the human drinkers and tunnelers who told them around a dingy pit full of fire. Their saliva and wine, their plumbing, their feces, their clay figurines--which the captions inform us were "already cracked in antiquity."

I walked out of St. George's in Thessaloniki, past the bored slump of the lady on watch, and into the city, which was all very fashionably built in the 50s, around and on top of these Roman and Byzantine ruins. I didn't know what to think about it all.

That's what happens. You walk out of these churches and these museums, into whatever city it is, and you don't know what to think.

You walk out of these churches and they are there, and you're not. They are solid and you're space.

Or you walk into them, and you're there, absolutely, but they aren't, and never could have been.

Sunlight and sawdust. And so you can start to talk about them.

But you get it slightly wrong. One γ near the end, which you copied down as a λ.

So all your notes are wrong. You realize you're talking nonsense.

You realize you should probably get some breakfast somewhere.

Oia, Santorini, Greece

Venice

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina

Venice

Split, Croatia

Verona, Italy

Padua, Italy

Venice

ATTENTION! LOVELY READERS...there's a poem I wrote that should go here. Unfortunately, Blogger is not very poetry-friendly, and I couldn't display it in the necessary format. So PLEASE, if you haven't got the poem already, email me at shnoozie@aol.com and I'll send it to you. 'Cause, like, I want you to see it.

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Sarajevo

Pula, Croatia

Sofia, Bulgaria

Here are the 12 countries I visited this summer (and how long I spent in each one). Their names are written in the native language, and then in the languages of all the others (at least all the ones I could find):

Česká republika; Tschechische Republik; Reppublica ceca; Češka republika; Çekia; Τσεχία; Чехия(3 days)
Österreich; Rakousko; Austria; Avstrija; Austrija; Austri; Αυστρία; Австрия (5 days)
Italia; Itálie; Italien; Italija; Itali; Ιταλία; Итaлия (8 days)
Slovenija; Slovinsko; Slowenien; Slovenia; Sloveni; Σλοβενία; Словения (2 days)
Hrvatska; Chorvatsko; Kroatien; Croazia; Hrvaška; Kroaci; Κροατία; Хърватска (11 days)
Bosna i Hercegovina; Bosna a Hercegovina; Bosnien-Herzegowina; Bosnia e Herzegovina; Bosna in Hercegovina; Bosna dhe Hercegovina; Βοσνία και Ερζεγοβίνη; Босна и Херцеговина (3 days) Crna gora; Černá hora; Montenegro; Črna gora; Mali i Zi; Μαυροβούνιο; Чepнoгopия (2 days)
Shqipëria; Albánie; Albanien; Albania; Albanija; Αλβανία; Албания; (3 days)
Македониjа; Makedonie; Mazedonien; Macedonia; Makedonija; Maqedoni; Πρώην Γιουγκοσλαβική Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας; Македония (7 days)
Ελλάς; Řecko; Griechenland; Grecia; Grčija; Grčka; Greqia; Гърция (20 days)
България; Bulharsko; Bulgarien; Bulgaria; Bolgarija; Bugarska; Bullgaria; Бугарија; Βουλγαρία(4 days)
Srbija; Srbsko; Serbien; Serbia; Σερβία; Сърбия (2 days)

I especially like ridiculously complicated Greek name for its northern neighbor Macedonia--in English, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Greek pride prevents them from using the name Macedonia for this country, since Macedonia was the name of an ancient Greek kingdom which included some of the territory of what's now the Republic of Macedonia, and which was the homeland of the Greek hero Alexander the Great. The Greeks' stubbornness has led to some bizzare road signs, like this one in Thessaloniki:

Take a left and go back in time about 20 years...well, you can't fit Πρώην Γιουγκοσλαβική Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας on a road sign, can you?

And then there's the Macedonian side, which I must admit I have a slight bias towards (first of all, because spending three days in a monastery on a windswept mountaintop in a country...

...kind of predisposes you towards that country---and second, because Macedonia was a brand new country in 1991 and had to pick a name. Asking it to choose something other than Macedonia would be sort of like if New Mexico seceeded from the US, and Mexico demanded that it call itself the Former United States State of New Mexico).

Names and languages and nations are a tricky thing in the Balkans.

If in doubt, speak English.

Of course I tried to learn at least hello, please and thank you in each native language. But in Sofia I told a taxi driver a word which I thought meant train station in Bulgarian. I ended up in some village on the edge of town at the time I should have been catching a train to Belgrade. So I learned my lesson: If in doubt, speak English.

My brain isn't organized enough to map out all the implications of the spread of English as a world language. Maybe the political history that has led to this phenomenon isn't so rosy. But I don't agree with those who claim English is taking over, monopolizing, boxing out the beautiful palette of the world's littler languages. Because it's not. It's actually English that's in "danger." The other day a colleague told me he read somewhere that one sixth of the world's people are currently learning English. I don't know if that's true, but it sounds believable. And if one billion people are speaking English, then they will have the power to alter it, abuse it, fuck it up royally to suit their needs. No one in the US or the UK will have any say in what they do to "our" language. And since I myself like to do nasty things to English, I don't have a big problem with this. English is alive and yummy as an eel. To me, my native language is a hard concrete mystery, and a muddy, sexy thing at the same time, and I love it. I want everyone in the world to speak it--drunkenly, nervously, incorrectly. I want to hear them speak in a language I can understand and not understand a single word they say.

But still I haven't gotten over how strange it is to be in some place you think is nowhere, exotic, inaccessible---some dusty bus station in Bosnia, or Hercegovina---and to hear English spoken over the PA system. Poorly, by some machine. Poetically, mangled by some sign or shop assistant. Or on the last page of a tourist guide called "A Day Through Sarajevo": There is a night in Sarajevo that waits for you.

And when the night I thought was waiting for me
came, it wasn't waiting
for me, but for the woman smoking sitting
on a red and white stack of magazines outside the Applebee's

in Jonesboro, Tennessee. I had traveled
a lot, and I had assumed
that anything that was only a part of the world
couldn't hurt me. What I had assumed

I was vulnerable to in the end was the world
as a whole. The pack of wild dogs
outside the National Museum, the cornflower blue
concrete steps of a small,
otherwise wooden church, a dark red soda called Granat--

I had thought these things would vanish
in the absolute. The absolute would move
its body over the thick bureaucracy
of ponds and ledgered gestures, increments
and sports, and burn it all.

There would be silence and fire.

But there were two kinds of there
in the dictionary I had as a child. One
declaring existence. The other
to say where it had happened. Where she was.

The location of her hair.

In the end it was a detail
that unmade me, and I had to admit
hat somewhere in Nova Scotia, a man was walking
down a small main street, holding a child.
He had never met me

and his teenage niece was walking beside him.
He had nothing to do with you
or me, or our love, and he was the only reason
I had ever been allowed to love you,

and there were an infinite number of other, dissimilar
reasons,
reasons brief
as surface and large as touch.

somewhere between Verona and Padua, Italy

I started playing with that line There is a night in Sarajevo... and I ended up writing that last poem, but everywhere with you instead of the I that's now there. I realized after I wrote it that I needed to claim the speaker's role, that I couldn't make myself into some you like in the other two poems.

The other two poems sound like warnings to me. Warnings to myself, I guess. A warning about things I know already but still need to learn (the first one), and a warning about things that I really have no clue about and am not prepared to deal with (the second).
This last one is something like a statement of belief. But it's not complete.

Some people say they travel to "find themselves."

I don't believe anyone finds themselves while traveling.

Venice

Padua

So this is the first part of what I have to say about my summer, and maybe in the next part there'll be some more factual information about the trip.

Then again maybe not.
If you're reading this you know me well enough not to expect some straightforward account of my travels. I'm not a good storyteller. I'm not Bill Bryson.

I want to make you feel what I feel when I'm traveling. I want you to be utterly clueless.

I want your mind to be as fuzzy as mine was that morning in Thessaloniki.

I want you to go eat some breakfast.

Ok, but first, and last, a few pictures with some actual people in them:

Zuzana and I above Innsbruck, Austria

and in Sarajevo

Eileen with a bunny

Zuzana and Eileen in Mostar, Bosnia and Hercegovina

the girls getting ready to enter the Gazi Husrev Bey mosque, Sarajevo

peeling beets at Treskavec Monastery, Macedonia

drinking Skopsko beer by Lake Ohrid, Macedonia

Uriol and Sonia in front of "La Castaña," Phaestos, Crete

Nevena (center) on her balcony, surrounded by her international "family" in Sofia

Zuzka and I on "our" balcony, Dubrovnik

and me watching the Acropolis...

More photos of Czech locations

2007-06-26T17:20:00.000+02:00

The promised pic of the Brnensky Drak. And me with my head in the jaws of a harmless cartoon version of the hideous beast: These next ones are from last weekend's trip into the wilds of central Moravia. First, a kitschy garden/shopping center near Olomouc.

Pics of Helfstyn, my favorite Czech castle so far. Its ruins are decorated by the work of modern blacksmiths, who come every year to contribute new work.

Zuza sitting in one of the biggest trees I've ever seen, in the chateau gardens in Lipnik.

Berlin

2007-03-02T10:49:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago I was on vacation, so I decided to spend it in Berlin. Berlin is the capital of Germany, a large and troubled country that lies to the west of the more important places. The city is arranged mostly horizontally, with some vertical elements. There are cars and people.

The history of Berlin is complicated. When you start to talk about it, you have to make sure the events you’re describing (a car crash, a meeting, a near-meeting) actually took place in Berlin, and not Meissen or Spreewald, or Detroit. And if you find out they did in fact take place elsewhere, you can’t automatically assume they did not also take place in Berlin.
A small circular museum in the base of the Siegessäule goes a long way toward not really explaining any of this. The graffiti in the stairwell of the statue was obviously written by amateurs, since it speaks almost exclusively of love.

Finding your way around the city can be as daunting a task as finding your way through it. There is a “north” side and a “south” side, which the locals insist are identical, mirror (or mere) images of each other, except for small discrepancies only they can perceive. However, after just one week in the city, I began to accustom my eyes to some of these differences, which are mostly imaginary.

Berlin is a huge city. It’s impossible to talk about it as a whole. Each neighborhood is a new experience and has a distinct flavor. What follows is my general impressions of each of the major districts.

Mitte: Mitte means “middle” in German, and this area is, true to its name, in the middle of not only the city, but also in the middle of itself, and in the middle of every other area surrounding it. The people here tend to be very friendly when spoken to. They occasionally listen to music. They have managed to build a large glass dome.

Tiergarten: No one ever sleeps in this part of town, since animals roam freely here, and their rustling keep people awake. Occasionally a scuffle breaks out in the foliage.

Penzlauer Berg: This district lies peacefully at the base of massive, copper-streaked mountain. I tried to rent skis here, but this proved impossible.

Friedrichshain: This area has been entirely given over to soap advertisements which fill the windows and are nightly projected in red light onto the sidewalks. Other forms of nostalgia are popular, too, such as boat journeys. The swan you see in this photo is named Bertrand, and he’s become something of a local mascot. He has been trained to recognize the false advertisements from the true ones.

Tempelhof: I noticed a lot of yellow buildings in this neighborhood.

Spandau: Performance artists have made this area completely unlivable.

Schöneberg: The people in this remote southwestern district have perfected the art of staring. They gather in groups on the streetcorners and stare at the sky. When you join them and follow their gaze, they laugh at your white-smeared face. Shopkeepers stare at you as you walk in the door, and then stare at an item on their shelf (an expensive bell, or a hammer) creating an invisible, irresistible force field. Dogs stare too, as they offer their white crotch to a ash or a linden. Doctors stare. Women on the U-Bahn stare at you using only their eyes, or some other unremarkable part of their body, and you realize how stupid all those people were who told you about things like decision-making. There’s no freedom in this world. There’s this stare, and this neighborhood is its center, the world capital of pure direction, pure visual will. Down one of the side streets, an old man sits in a wheelchair in his street level flat, a bare light bulb hanging over him. He can't move anymore. His neck is low and turned. He stares all the time at something blue, but it’s not a TV. It’s a wall calendar, a wide blue panorama of mountains and jagged ice. In the sky above the range, in big white letters it says ALASKA, and below that, JUNE. And then the inevitable grid of days. This old man’s stare is the one that started it all, I think. Because it’s not June 1998, obviously, anymore, but the flowers beneath the glacier are in bloom. That one piece of history hasn’t changed for as long he’s been watching.

So these are the neighborhoods I visited, although there are probably more, if you can find the U-Bahn stations that lead to the late-evening trains that will get you there. But I definitely don’t recommend taking the U-Bahn anywhere. That far underground, things start to get dicey. Any city could be over your head.

A Christmas poem

2006-12-26T17:10:00.000+01:00

Notes Toward a Christmas, 2006

There are lights. Hair.
On the street corners, fish
move in heavy, slow

possession of their vats. Hands take them and they go,
unresisting,
to be weighed. There is cold.

There are countable strands
of breath. Everything
has substance.

In the smokestacks of the world, a switch
is off,
attentive,

ready
for the paperwork, the painted surname
on a suitcase, unused,

the country of origin,
age.
Shoe size.

The tour guide at Auschwitz is a pretty blonde.
A tour of the world,
she says, would be similar,

but shorter.
This is still happening.
People ask me, and I tell them,

this is happening right now.
On the train,
in the train’s forgetfulness

between two countries, you flash
your passport.
You are light as air in this new world

but the border
is earth,
is long,

and has substance. Everything that has substance
can be burned. A cloth star,
a new year.

On the corner, one loose strand of your hair
falls into the water,
and you don't notice. There are lights. The dark fish, somewhere

between the vat
and your hands,
has been switched for a brighter one.

25 December
Brno, Czech Republic

Brno Sweet Brno

2006-12-26T16:22:00.000+01:00

Christmas Day was bright and sunny here, so I decided to head out and explore the hills near my neighborhood. After hiking for awhile I made it to the top of a ridge, and looking back, I could see spread out against the hills the spectacular swath of paneláky (Commie-era apartment blocks) that are characteristic of Czech cities in general, and Brno in particular. Keep in mind you're looking at only a thin section of the city here. I'm lucky enough to live in a small, pleasing-looking panelák on the very edge of town. I don't envy those who live deeper inside the suburban jungle. But as you can see, on a sunny day, from a distance, the paneláky can look quite shiny and serene.

Auschwitz

2006-12-26T15:13:00.000+01:00

The site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp is about an hour and a half from Kraków (see previous post), so many tourists make a day trip there. I met a Canadian woman named Christine at the hostel in Kraków, and we toured the site together. I'm not going to blab on about my visit there. It was what you might expect, and it was also very different from what you might expect. Here are some pictures. The blurry one of me was taken in front of the so-called "Death Wall" where some 5000 prisoners were executed.

Kraków

2006-12-26T13:47:00.000+01:00

The week before Christmas I hopped some trains and went to Poland. Everyone says Kraków is the place to be, and after spending a few days there I have to second that. It was the capital of Poland for many centuries, and around every corner there's some stunning building to drool over. At the same time, its architecture (and its people) haven't completely lost that post-Communist awkwardness that makes this part of the world so odd and charming. Don't ask me to explain what I mean by that. I think you have to be here to understand.

Since Polish is similar to Czech, I thought I would have a fairly easy time understanding basic signs and phrases. Unfortunately, I underestimated how preposterous Polish is. First of all, written Polish seems to use twice as many letters as Czech, making the words incomprehensible. What's more, Polish has several sounds that Czech doesn't have. So while Czech is universally recognized as unpronounceable, Polish is just plain absurd.

Still, my biggest culture shock wasn't the language (especially since Kraków is teeming with English speakers) but the massive, new, gleaming-white mega-mall that's the first thing you see as you walk out of the train station (see the bottom picture). It's three floors of shopping glory, and you can follow an endless stream of people pulsing out of the old town and into its big glass doors. Even for a boy raised in the glow of North American consumerism, it was overwhelming. I can't imagine what the older Polish generations must feel as they ride those blinding escalators, something like the crazy vertigo of a whole half-century passing in the span of a decade. Like a big whoosh.

I've been busy lately so I haven't posted anything.

2006-12-12T12:30:00.000+01:00

As you can see from the subject of this post, I've been pretty busy lately, so...I really haven't posted anything.

2006-11-21T14:05:00.000+01:00

More "pics" from the "city" of Wien. See previous post for more detailed information about this area.

Wiener

2006-11-21T13:51:00.000+01:00

This weekend I visited my 13th country ever, Austria. The capital of Austria is Vienna, which in the primitive native language, "Austrian," is called Wien. A Wiener is someone from this city. Wiener schnitzel is the local food, and it is like country fried steak but with an "Austrian" name.
Here are some pictures from this land.

2006-10-31T13:12:00.000+01:00

Let's try this again...

2006-10-31T12:42:00.000+01:00

Out of the arms of AOL, into the groin of some other evil. But at least you can post comments now. Enjoy.

Volver

2006-10-31T12:19:00.000+01:00

In the opening shot of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film Volver, the camera glides through a dusty graveyard in La Mancha, weaving a path among the graves. A technicolor army of Spanish mothers, daughters and grandmothers have descended to fuss over the headstones, pruning the flowers, buffing the names and dates to a gold shine, furiously sweeping the stones and sending up puffs of white dust. Suddenly, the humor and color of the scene is blocked out as the camera ducks behind a gravestone. The title of the movie appears in huge and bold red letters across the back of the speckled gray granite. The red on gray color scheme looks tacky. Something about it seems irreverent, and yet it’s passionate in the way that true reverence must be. When I went to see the movie a few days ago, I laughed out loud at this first shot, even though no character had spoken yet. The visual elements of the scene—that juxtaposition of gray death and lipstick-red, the diligent frenzy of the women, the solemn campiness of it all—is classic Almodóvar. And I love it. I’ve seen all of his movies, except for his very first one (if anyone can find me a copy of 1980's Pepi, Luci, Bom, I’ll be your best friend forever). I think a great artist, by one definition, is someone who can dive fully into his own personal and idiosyncratic world, and come up with images and characters and colors that make anyone, from anywhere, want to be a part of his secret and universal world. Almodóvar’s movies are so very Spanish, so very gay. I’m not gay, or Spanish, but his movies make me want to be, if it means getting to live in his world of kinky and morbid beauty. I feel an actual pain when I have to leave the glow of one of his films. I’m jealous of the dumb men who get to blunder around amid the fierce and theatrical and gorgeous women in his movies. Maybe he feels the same way.

Going to see a Spanish movie in the Czech Republic was an odd experience. I remember going to see Amelie in Spain. There I had to rely on the Spanish subtitles. Here I had to rely completely on the Spanish audio. I was very proud of myself—I actually understood most of it. It made me homesick for Spanish. It made me want to say all sorts of crude and beautiful things in my second language. I came out of the theatre wanting desperately to find the nearest Spanish speaker, so I could say things to them like Qué coño quieres? (“What the cunt do you want?”) and Este microondas está bien jodido. (“This microwave is sufficiently fucked.”) I haven’t learned these useful, everyday expressions in Czech yet. And to add insult to homesickness, I was disappointed when, after the film, I asked my friend Martina (who went with me to the movie) why the Czech subtitles always translated the characters’ goodbyes into the standard Czech word for goodbye (and hello), ahoj. “Well, weren’t they just saying goodbye?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, “but they said it in tons of different ways. They said goodbye with adios (to God), hasta luego (see you later), un beso (a kiss), un besito (a little kiss), and on and on. I don’t think any character said goodbye the same way twice.” “Oh,” she said. “In Czech we just say ‘goodbye’.”
Spanish: 1 point, Czech: 0.