On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 12:40, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

Oh c'mon, Tim, at least tell us who the 'historical figure' was & where this happened!

David "Hyphen" Jaques-Watson ..at.. Beowulf Down (Tavonni/Vilis/SM 1520) wrote:

It's a blue circle that says “Rik Mayall punched his friend in the balls on
a bench near this spot”, accompanied by a hologram of the event.

Hah!

Well, as you asked...

After my week of Erasmus training in Brno, I spent a long weekend visiting the village of Bolatice near Ostrava about two hours away by train.  I happen to have a Czech friend who lives there with her husband (a Ukrainian) and their two daughters.  They Lenka and Vlad (yes, really) were a tad worried about me staying as the 4 year old apparently doesn't take to strange men and I might have been looking for a hotel if had proved a disaster.  Needless to say, I managed to win her over by the end of four days! (Helped by a) gifts and b) an effort to learn as much of the language as I could which amounted pretty much to animals, colours, body parts and a few other things - ideal for a four year old!  Her 6 year old sister I never had any trouble with - she wanted to come home with when I flew out...  Anyway, that's by the by.

On one of the days I was there they decided to take me to a nearby zamek (stately home, or chateau if you like) - as opposed to a hrad, or castle. [1]  Planning to have a tour and a picnic in the grounds, I promised to be on my best behaviour [2]  Vlad is a keen and pretty skilled photographer but he'd never got photos of the inside of the building because photography was forbidden.  When, in the first room, I got told off (in Czech) by the guide for snapping some pictures, which I didn't understand, Vlad dutifully translated for me.  A couple of Slovak girls were stopped as well.

However the guide twigged I was English and in (not bad) English asked where I was from.  I explained Portsmouth not expecting much recognition and his eyes lit up and explained he had a painting later in the tour that would interest me.  Turns out it was of the Duchess of Portsmouth from way back and was Camilla's grandmother or something.  (Camilla as in Prince Charles' wife).  Anyway, I was his best friend after that, he said I was free to take whatever photos I liked and Vlad could too.  (Vlad was very pleased about that!)  I noticed the Slovak girls were taking pictures too after that, which I guess was only fair.

His tour (in Czech) was very good I assume, and I followed along with a folder of laminated sheets which had an English (sort of) version. [3]  Lenka filled in any gaps that weren't in the printed sheets and chivvied me along so I didn't read *every* word of the folder.

That would have been the best memory except that in the penultimate room he proudly showed off a trophy wall with a giant tortoise shell and a narwhal tusk.  He asked if anyone knew what the latter was and as no one else was forthcoming, I offered narwhal.  But it just so happens that one of the animals I know is unicorn, 'jednorozec' [4] (a "one nosed thing") so in my best Czech I added "or a unicorn" which, given they knew I didn't speak Czech, brought the house down.

If you want to visit virtually: https://www.zamek-radun.cz/en

Oh, and the Erasmus training was a week of librarians on an excellent programme at Masaryk University for which the organizers said 'there's this chance to visit Villa Tugendhat for this concert of modern music' which was 4/5 in my previous post.  What I didn't say in the encounter table entry, distracted as I was by recalling my evening out with a gorgeous French lady on the training week who was the only other person interested in the villa along with myself, was that the concert was very weird.  It basically consisted of half a dozen string players (violins, cello, etc) and an oh so serious conductor, playing long drawn out notes for, say, 20 minutes at a time.  very avant garde.  Marik and I wondered what on earth we'd got into.  Never let it be said I don't know how to show a girl a good time.  :-)  Still, it was a talking point.  We walked back to the city centre together to meet up with the rest of the 'gang' and have a meal in a pub with pivo of course, when we passed an outdoor stage in a park.  We approached from behind and it turned out the voice we could hear belting out songs (from some distance) was the same one that had been keeping Marik awake at nights from the apartment across the street from her hotel.  Turns out it was an opera singing practising for this very performance of a Janacek opera in the open air!  To wind Marik up I suggested we sit and listen to the last 20 minutes or so and then took her up to the stage to ask for the singer's autograph...  :-)    I *think* Marik took it in good spirit.  (She's come to visit since and suffered being dragged round HMS Victory and the Mary Rose in Portsmouth dockyard.)

Carpe diem, I say...

tc

[1] I was a bit mean to poor Ema when I first arrived.  I produced presents for everyone (including grandparents) carefully giving them to Ema to hand out.  Of course, I 'ran out' at last before she'd had one herself and then I 'remembered' it in my bag.  I produced my best Czech: Do you like snakes?  I asked  Do you like castles?  Or do you like games?  Had, hrad and hra being a nice test of my vocabulary.  (Snake, castle, game).  I had a game for her of course. 

[2] The last time I'd been in the Czech Republic for a conference, one of the conference outings was to a zamek and the tour guide's English was so poor that even I was struggling to follow her and almost all of the other ~25 delegates on the tour were speaking English as 2nd/3rd etc language and struggling even more.  After a room or two of this I could see the poor organizer's planned afternoon going out the window so I suggested, as the guide was only reading from a (poor) English script anyway, that maybe I could do it for her while she pointed things out.  Initially dubious, it's what happened and I had a lot of fun 'translating' the script into something understandable.  Which is how I came to give a tour of a Czech stately home after just a day in the country...

[3] I do wonder if there might be a job in going round all the stately homes/castles etc of the Czech Republic and offering to tidy up the English versions of their tours which seem to be poorly translated if valiant efforts...

[4] Another long story as to why I know this. [5]

[5] OK, OK, to save time... although I have a feeling I might have told this here before...  in the early days of learning Czech I'd got a vocabulary list of basic animals (farm, pet, zoo, wild etc) and had made a colourful mindmap to help learn them.  To this I added, in the corner, a dragon and unicorn as another chapter of my Teach Yourself book told me about the heraldry the Czechs are big on and included those two examples.  A little while later, showing off the mindmap to a Czech student I'd buy coffee for in exchange for some pronunciation practice, he laughingly challenged me over the fact that I knew the word for unicorn but not even basics like the word for 'street'.  Which was true.  So I learned the latter as well. 

Anyway, I got the last laugh as I reported back to him later.  Lenka, the friend above, was showing me around Prague and for three days I'd made the poor suffering soul stop at every 'knihkupectvi' we'd come across.  Bookshop.  I couldn't even read the books, but bibliophile that I am, I still loved the places.  Anyway, on the last day, we were crossing a big square when I saw over the far side of the square a sign.  "I know what it is!  I know what it is!": Knihkupectvi Jednoroznec!

Virus-free. www.avast.com

-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=BaPDIeUHz13dek9B2ktEomMEXihjwLY8