sweet tooth

This is what my son had for breakfast the other day.

Nutritionists would have a field day.  I'm not sure if any of the ingredients actual fall into any  recommended food group.

My son went on a sleepover at the school (lovely idea, again he was packed up with roll mat, sleeping bag etc).  The school letter said, 'prosime maminky, aby nam napekly upecene sladkosti slouzi jako snidane' - mothers please can you bake something sweet for breakast.

Bake?!

This obviously wasn't aimed at the English mum in the playground.  Instead my son got a donut and some cakes from the local store : )

Czechs don't have a word for 'sweet tooth', but gosh don't they personify the phrase.

They love anything sweet.  There are Cukranas everywhere (a kind of bakery) but they don't really sell much in the way of bread, more like slabs of cake - with nuts, chocolate, cream, coconut, sprinkles, icing, you name it.... all screaming out Eat Me!

I've been know to indulge in the odd cake or two given the chance, but what I can't stand is eating sweet food for a main meal.

It seems this isn't a problem for most Czechs.

I nearly gagged the first time I had 'ovocne knedliky' for lunch at my future mother-in-laws, it was a sweet fruit dumpling covered in icing sugar.  This was the main meal...yes followed by....desert!

And how can I forget the first time I had 'nudle s makem'.

My sister and I were visiting the in-laws family deep the Czech countryside and we were served what we thought was pasta for dinner.  But it wasn't like any pasta dish I'd ever tasted - it was bathed in butter, covered with icing sugar and sprinkled on the top was a mountain of poppy seeds.

My sister helpfully christened the dish, 'Pet Shop Pasta' as it had the aroma of a pet shop - that kind of bird seed smell.  Yummy.

My daughter has already inherited the sweet gene off her father and she's in 7th heaven, especially as the kids are allowed to take sweets to school and teachers positively encourage their sugar addiction by handing them out to the class ALL the time.

Even the doctor gives out lollies as regularly as she does prescriptions!

How can I fight that?!  I can only retaliate with plates of fruit as pure punishment ; )

Although my taste buds have got used to the eccentricities of Czech cuisine, I can guarantee I'll never embrace sugar like a true Czech.

Bitter Sweet

We’ve just come back from a whirlwind trip to the UK.  It was absolutely lovely to see everyone, to feel reassured it was all still there, and everything’s ticking along as normal. 

I do feel I need a week to recover after spending too many nights drinking, and not sleeping very much.

We ran around like headless chicken and there were a ton of people I didn’t even get to call, let alone see, but we couldn’t do it all. The kids are exhausted after fun sleepovers and the excitement of seeing their friends and it was lovely for me to catch up with people and celebrate Dad's birthday with the family.

But it’s always a little weird stepping into your old life, then popping back to your new one, never quite fitting into any of them.

We all felt it coming back, the kids didn’t want to go back to school on Monday and we all felt a little flat.  But it is amazing how quickly you have to get back into the swing of things – what with school, homework and stuff to do, it’s almost as if we never went away.

I asked my mum if indeed it did it feel as though I was far away,

‘No' she said, 'Not really, and Skype really helps, I feel as though we are in the same room’

It’s true.  Technology, Skype, email, mobile phones mean that we’re really never more than a click away.  

I can’t imagine how my parents ever let me go travelling around Asia, the only communication between us was a few phone calls when I could afford them, and letters between home and the Poste Restante.

Does the Poste Restante still exist I wonder? Or has it been driven to ground by new media, facebook, facetime etc.  I’ll never forget trying to find where my post had ended up in Indonesia, we'd gone to the main post office only to find it was being refurbished and we took a tuktuk out of town to the warehouse where the post was being stored.  I was desperate to find the parcel from my mum – it  contained 2 precious objects essential for travelling – a new contact lens and a bank card it in (I’d lost my lens partying in Ko Phangan).

Nowdays I can see my mum, chat, hang out, even if it’s virtually, and it’s amazing. 

Still it will never replace the one on one contact and with that, I’m so glad we came this weekend.

bilingual brood

I heard my daughter talking to her dad this morning – she was whining about something that he’d done wrong, or was supposed to have done.

Nothing new there.

But what was different was how she was speaking.  Her Czech was amazing (and I’m not just talking about use of vocab).  She sounded like a Czech kid - with a Prague accent to boot. 

A Czech kid, moaning at her dad.

When we lived in London my kids spoken Czech was passable, some people voiced their concerns, ‘why go?', 'how will they cope?’, ‘what will they do?’.  I never really worried about how they would communicate, I knew it could only get better, and after only two months I see it already has.  By leaps and bounds.

Last week I read a really interesting article about being bilingual.  There was an old preconception that being bilingual meant speaking two languages equally.  Nowadays experts say that’s not possible because ‘the two languages will modify each other...and that being bilingual means being able to function in each languages given the need’.

And that sounds right to me, language is a fluid live thing that’s constantly changing, and I see with my kids being bilingual means moving in and out of use of two languages - not always well, and certainly not always equally.

But speaking the language is only one element of being bilingual.  My kids have a secret key that opens up a door into another world, they can connect with a different group of people, fit into a new culture, learn about another history, and gain new perspective on life.

It’s a gift being bilingual, and even though it’s a struggle sometimes, it’s so worth it.

Now when it comes to me.  Therein lies a different story.

My kids cower in shame when I open my mouth.  They tell me time and time again, ‘mummy please don’t ask, I’ll do it for you’.
It’s ‘so embarrassing’ when I speak : (
No matter how much I try to improve, I’m always just touching the tip of the iceberg.

Oh to have a young, bilingual brain… sigh.

Love and lattes

There are a couple of things that one needs in life.

Love, warmth, shelter, good friends, food and …..lattes.

We live deep in the suburbs of Prague where finding a latte is about as common as a lesser spotted eagle.   We don't live in the gorgeous old town in the centre of the city, nor in one of the foreign ghettos, instead we have gone 'native' but that means no cute high streets and a dirth of coffee shops : (

In fact this loss has lead to the serious overuse of my expresso machine (I'm not sure a domestic machine was designed for such heavy usage).

Can you imagine my absolute delight when I discovered a cafe 2 minutes from our house?  It's brand spanking new, the paint is practically drying, and it opened a week ago.

I couldn't contain my excitement and spoke to the owner in very bad Czech, I think he understood my desperation and gave me a latte, and the kids some cake.

It's no Belgique...but hey who's complaining?

As I sit here with my latte and croissant, I think back to only 20 years ago when I first came to Prague.  I was inter-railing with friends and it had only been 6 months since the Velvet Revolution.  Prague was yet undiscovered, the streets were empty (in fact the shelves were still empty, and there were lines for bread).

Being English speaking and a vegetarian at that, meant it was nigh on impossible to communicate, let alone find anything that resembled a fresh vegetable in the land of meat - we lived on omelettes and bread. The only other languages spoken other than Czech were Russian, and German if you were lucky.

Now there is an explosion of cafes and restaurants, the golden arches and Starbucks are on every other corner and everyone wants to speak English.

Prague has become a modern city, attracting European businesses and an international community.  For many years it's been the most popular tourist destination in Europe.

For me that means choice of products, cafes and restaurants.  But the old Prague is sometimes hard to find, deep beneath the tourist trails and buried behind globalisation and so-called progress.




And when you do find it, it's magical.  I just hope it doesn't get lost completely.