EUROPE 2009 - FRIDAY 1 MAY

jokomp3.blogspot.com - On Friday, May 1, I awoke after a wonderful sleep at Edita’s parents’ house in Okříšky, in the Czech Republic. Since I’m an early riser, I got to enjoy the quiet of the Moravian morning as I poked about the backyard and photographed things such as Edita’s mother’s hens:



Once I discovered that I was locked out of the main house (remember that I had bunked in the other half of the duplex) and not wanting to wake anyone by knocking, I photographed some more! After a while I heard the children inside and knocked on the mudroom door. Edita’s mother came to let me in, tsking in Czech and showing me to the kitchen where a wonderful feast of homemade goodies was laid out.

Since the Czech word for “coffee” was one of the first ones I learned, I soon had a steaming cup in hand and settled in with the children to watch TV. They were watching a “clay-mation” show called “Pat a Mat - a je to!” (“Pat and Mat - and that’s it!”), a famous children’s show from the 6o’s or 70’s. Each little episode lasts about 8 minutes or so and in it Pat and Mat solve a problem while simultaneously creating at least a dozen more.

I’d heard of the series but never seen it. It was delightful! Two Slovakian men created and produced the series back when there was still a Czechoslovakia. Now it’s known as a Slovakian creation. There are about 50 episodes altogether, I believe, and they are mostly wordless, so anyone can enjoy them.

You can see a few details about the series at www.patandmat.com. You can also find episodes on YouTube.com if you search for “Pat and Mat”. “Laundry Day” is one of my favorite episodes. I especially like the way they end most episodes: with a handshake and a forearm bump. They’re cool.

After about 5 episodes, eventually everyone wandered in for breakfast and shortly thereafter Libor, Edita and I set off for the city of Brno as planned. The kids would stay at the grandparents’ for the weekend. We drove about an hour or so to Brno on a beautiful, temperate, sunny spring day.

Spring in Europe is always an enormous treat for me. I remember my first year in Germany in 1988 where it seemed that, literally overnight, ALL the spring flowers and fields burst forth with blooms and blossoms so that I was greeted on Easter morning with a veritable cacophony of color, fragrance and texture everywhere I looked. So I was especially looking forward to this trip since it had been a while since I saw springtime there.

I was not disappointed. Everywhere I looked flowers abounded. Here are some of the flowers I shot at Hilde’s on my first few days in Europe this year:





























Also, in Germany and in the Czech Republic, both from trains and cars, I saw square after square of vibrant yellow fields, creating a checkerboard effect in the rolling landscape of otherwise green fields.



These fields were of rapeseed (Raps in German and Å™epkového in Czech), which is pressed for its oil that’s used in cooking. It’s so extensively planted that I could smell it in the air when I was near it, an odor that was not offensive, but a bit rank and a tad oily in nature.

In researching this plant for my journal, I discovered canola oil is made from it. In fact, I was surprised to learn that there was no such thing as a canola plant per se until recently; instead, “canola” is an acronym coined in the 1970’s and stands for “Canada Oil - Low Acid.” I guess the term “rapeseed” was found to be detrimental from a marketing standpoint.

Why “Canada”? Probably because of the location of development of a hybrid of rapeseed that makes it better for human consumption. Now the plants are known as Canola plants, and they were cross-bred from rapeseed plants. One last FYI: the word “rapeseed” comes from the Latin word rapum, which means turnip. Rapeseed plants, turnips, rutabega, mustard, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are all related species.

Another stunning spring flower that pervades the Czech Republic is lilac. Lilacs were blooming literally EVERYWHERE. Along every sidewalk, in every garden, manicured or not, in every park, at every tourist site. More than one person told me that, when the Russian soldiers came to Czechoslovakia at the end of WWII to liberate them from the Nazis, Czech children waved lilac branches in greeting and celebration. It seems to be a prevalent story associated with lilacs. My personal association was that my grandmother had a huge lilac bush in her yard when I was little and that I hadn’t enjoyed that wonderful fragrance in many, many years.

Well, that’s it for this time. Stay tuned for my next journal where I’ll describe my encounter with neonazis and some of the most beautiful towns I’ve seen to date.

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