How time flies. I blink and a week goes by. I've worked practically every day over the past week, except of course on the little known holiday Christmas. It's a big thing here. Who knew these crazy Czechs were Christian. Or Catholic. Or whatever. There is this tradition here, which trust me when I say it is weird. The Czechs buy a live coy, put it in their bath tub in their flat (most flats have but one tub), and let it live for a couple days before Christmas, swimming around in the small volume of water that is provided. And then, on said holiday, it is promptly eaten.
My first question to all of this, was where did they shower, or bathe, when they had their very own carp enjoying its last days? Do they not bathe? Or worse, do they shower with that thing swimming around, nipping at their toes? I am still at a loss.
In the days leading up to Christmas (actually, we noticed it the night we came back from Dresden), they set up large tubs in the street, filled with hundreds of coy. Their, in the freezing weather, men pull one coy out after another, gut it, stick it on a scale, and sell it for a price. Poetic, I know. Thousands of innocent coy lost their lives over the last week. The Czechs, in their bountiful knowledge, tell us that the coy live for over fifty years if they are left to themselves. The Czech nation, obviously, is one of the leading mass murderers of these long living fish.
It has also been told to me that the women bake cookies in the whole month of December. And bake they do. Non stop. The Czechs are still backwards in that way, where women are still solely in the kitchen. Which, for us Americans watching on the sidelines, note how really fucked up society is here, but they dont seem to mind. At least on the outside. Plus, they're baking cookies and forcing them on you. How could you go through a feminist movement while baking cookies? I've never heard of such a thing.
Anyway, I don't feel like going into the social implications that my earlier paragraph just wrought. Better to tell of our Christmas! We had a Mexican Christmas, to be sure. Jamie and I cooked chicken fajitas, drank homemade eggnog (pretty good actually), and laughed. I'm sure we did other things too. That eggnog was pretty strong.
We each opened a present on Christmas eve. I got Jamie books, and not only because I got a large discount at a certain bookstore. No, these were books I really thought she would like to read. She got me a wallet, the very one that I had exclaimed upon laying eyes on it, "I wish I had a new wallet!" She took that to heart. Good girl. She got me a tie too, which I wore on Christmas day. Very nice gifts. It was pretty funny, because the next day when we saw our fellow American friends on the street (it rarely happens), they told us in detail how they made enchiladas for Christmas dinner. What a coincidence we said, we made fajitas! A good laugh, that was.
By the way, Pavel, my manager at Anagram, had no bloody idea what fajitas were. I said fajitas, he thought I said vahitas, which is ridiculous, and even after I corrected him, he was still wondering. So he said, is it like burritos and I said yes.
Close enough.
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