As if it were a big secret

A very poignant piece about the South Asian community in Leeds believed to have produced the four London bombers.

In his shop, Mr. Hussain, whose Islam his children rejected as too liberal, opens the newspaper to an article about 25,000 civilian dead in Iraq in the past two years.

"People keep asking what was in their heads," he said quietly.

Goodbye Lenin Shipyard!

You can climb the Nowy Port lighthouse and peer out of the window from which the first shots of the second world war were fired; look out of that window and put yourself in the head of the German soldier who fired those shots (and then get yourself out again very, very quickly). The cathedral organ has almost 8,000 pipes, and has recitals several times a day; the sound assaults the senses. Vidor's Toccata rattles your ribcage, the Ave Maria nearly made me weep.

A nifty encapsulation of the weight of history and grandeur of Gdansk, from a very fascinating piece in the Guardian on the revivification of the Polish port on the Baltic.

Brewery Review: Pilsner Urquell Beer World

Pilsner Urquell markets itself as the world's first golden beer, but it could just as easily lay claim to having the world's finest brewery tour.

A trip to Plzen, about 1 hour, 45 minutes by train from Prague, should be a required pilgrimage for any lover of excellent beer. After passing through the Jubilee Gate, erected in 1892 to commemorate the brewery's 50th anniversary and pictured to this day on the Pilsner Urquell logo, a mere 120 Kc (about $5, half-price for students) buys you a 70-minute excursion through the history of Pilsner Urquell and an education in the art of brewing.



While the tour, like the brewery, bears the hallmarks of modernity (bright, inviting visitors center, state-of-the art films screened by DVD projectors, shiny new stainless steel brewing kettles), it preserves the historical side of the beer and the brewery, which makes for a one-of-a-kind experience.



Though the 10-minute film that commences the tour is perhaps a little campy (though a truly devoted beer aficionado might get choked up at the exaggerated drama to it), it does provide an interesting overview of more than 160 years of brewing history in Plzen. There are certainly elements that are notably absent from the film (the complicated Czech-German relationship that surrounded the first century or so of Pilsner Urquell's existence, like the fact that this most famous Czech beer is sold under its German name), but those are chiefly of interest to historians and other academic types, and don't impair the overall quality.

From the film theater, the tour moves to the brewhouse, beginning with an explanation of how Pilsner Urquell is made, aided by a colorful diagram (unfortunately it's only in Czech, though the guide describes the whole process in the language of the tour).



Then there's the obligatory visit to the ultramodern part of the brewhouse where the enormous kettles crank out thousands of liters of liquid gold every day. The most recent portion of the brewhouse was completed but a year ago.



And as if to emphasize the contrast, nearby is the original copper kettle used to brew Pilsner Urquell, thoroughly greened with age.



After that brief diversion through modern brewing, the tour ventures back in time, to the parts of the original brewery that have been preserved for posterity. Enormous cellars are naturally cool and helped to keep the enormous wooden barrels chilled in the earlier years of production.



You can even see the beer fermenting in wooden barrels via the old method.



However, the real payoff of the tour, and what makes the trek to Plzen worthwhile, is the tasting.

Generally, you get a free taste of the featured product at a brewery tour. It's normally worth the price of admission just to get the beer at the source, which is always the best place to have beer (witness Guinness and Ireland).

But most brewery tours don't give you a blast from the past, something truly vintage. As in, a glass of the stuff produced via the old methods, and served unfiltered and unpasteurized.



It's cloudier than usual, and has a yeastier taste, which makes for complex flavors. But it's quite good, and a variety of Pilsner Urquell you literally cannot find anywhere else in the world, with one exception. More on that later.

After exiting the cellar, the final stop is in a replica of the cooper's workshop, a sort of life-sized diorama featuring the real tools used by coopers at the Pilsner Urquell brewery in previous times (the brewery still employs a few coopers, but beer storage is all done in metal containers these days). It's a nice way to round off the trip into brewing's bygone days.

In addition to the brewery tour, Pilsner Urquell also operates the Brewery Museum, about a mile or so from the brewery near the city center. The museum is housed in a building where one of the original Pilsner Urquell brewers worked, and has a nice collection of artifacts and displays that chronicle the history of brewing in the world, in Plzen, and at Pilsner Urquell. Unfortunately, photography isn't allowed.

However, appended to the museum is a pub, Na Parkanu, recently reconstructed, which is the only place outside of the brewery tour where you can find unfiltered Pilsner Urquell. The fare included standard Czech pub grub, at fairly reasonable prices, and is a nice way to finish off a visit to Plzen, washed down with some of that liquid gold, no less.

What's nice about the Pilsner Urquell brewery is also that it's not nearly so heavily trafficked with tourists (particularly the obnoxious British men in town for stag parties) that you find at breweries in Prague.

All in all, it's an outstanding presentation of a unique and pioneering beer, done in a way that preserves its rich heritage, and worth a day trip from Prague.

A step forward

Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek is catching a lot of flak from President Vaclav Klaus, among others, for his plans to provide symbolic compensation to ethnic German anti-fascist fighters who were wrongfully expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War.

Paroubek, a Social Democrat, is the first Czech prime minister to speak publicly about the need for some type of reconciliation with the nearly 2.5 million expelled Germans, known as Sudetens because most came from the border Sudetenland region annexed by Hitler in 1938. The annexation was supported by most ethnic Germans, and that support was among the chief reasons they were expelled, stripped of property and citizenship. A few thousand Germans who could prove they fought the Nazis were not sent into exile, but most of these relocated to Germany voluntarily after the war.

While the main Sudeten German organization, Landsmannschaft, is right in certain respects that the proposed compensation illegitimately divides Sudeten Germans into good and bad categories, it seems more important that Paroubek is perhaps putting his own neck on the line a bit to make any sort of attempted reconciliation.

Exhale

Phew. The NHL lockout is officially history. The Board of Governors (the "owners") unanimously approved the new CBA, which means come October the puck will drop for the first time in about 16 months. Just in time for me to be swamped with classes and work, but an improvement all the same.

Game on!

Museum Review: Museum of Communism

You would think this would be one I'd enjoy tremendously. A museum geared toward the history of communism in the former Czechoslovakia. It should be my dream come true.

But the Museum of Communism in Prague proved something of a letdown.

For starters, by focusing on Czechoslovakia, and really on the Czech lands, the museum limits its scope too narrowly. There is indeed a long and fascinating story of communism to be told in the Czech lands, one that begins earlier than most countries and continues into the present. But so much of communism was transnational; indeed, it was conceived as a truly international, worldwide movement, one that would leave no corner of the globe untouched. And by and large, it succeeded in a certain sense in realizing this vision. Communist regimes may not have taken root in every country, but the permeance of communist doctrine and the Cold War that centered around it was vast. Plus, as a country at the heart of Europe and considered integral to the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia belongs in that wider context of bloc relations and Cold War tensions. There's some of that, but it's more cursory and leaves much to be desired.

In addition, the museum takes a very narrow, exculpatory view of Czechoslovak history and communism's role in it. By and large, communism is presented as a foreign phenomenon, imposed on poor Czechs and Slovaks by a power hungry tyrant in Moscow, and is treated practically as one, long, undifferentiated whole of misery. While that may be an accurate picture in certain respects, it's not a very satisfying characterization on the whole, and this is really where the interpretations presented disappoint. If your knowledge of Czechoslovak history and the communist phenomenon are rudimentary at best, and more thank likely this is the case with most visitors, then you'll come away with this kneejerk "communism bad!" view that doesn't enlightened as much as it just stokes the flickering flames of Cold War-era emotions.

Thus, I didn't get the sense that communism was both quantitatively and qualitatively different in Czechoslovakia. The story of interwar Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy and prosperity is there, but not emphasized are the other unique facets of it; the fact that Czechoslovakia was also an anomaly in the region because it gave legal status to the Communist Party (CPCz), and that the relatively large industrial working class of the country found the ideas of communism receptive to a certain degree.

Also absent is a stronger treatment of the impact of the Second World War in making Czechoslovakia particularly fertile ground for communism. The defeat of fascism, resistance of communists, etatization of the economy, experience of occupation -- these all gave communism a popular resonance, perhaps unmatched in any other country. And the elections of 1946 -- the only largely free postwar elections in the region until after 1989 -- revealed this appeal: between the Communists and the very left-leaning Social Democrats, some variant of Marxism or socialism enjoyed a democratic majority in the Czech lands. The appeal of communism was markedly lower in Slovakia, but that's also missing from the museum.

Life under communism is a major emphasis of the museum, with its recreations of a communist classroom, workshop, grocery store and interrogation room. The picture is bleak; endless propaganda, rigid discipline, scarce consumer products. Undoubtedly, this was a part of everyday life for many. But there's another facet of this story that's still missing: some people benefited in these early years, often because they belong to the party, but their reasons for joining the party are unclear.

Justifiably, the Prague Spring is presented as a moment of hope crushed by a foreign, chiefly Soviet invasion. But even in this, there's something missing that would enhance the drama and make the point of the museum more powerfully. Although the Prague Spring was a short-lived period of optimism, the frustrated desires it unleashed and the profound hope it released caused the invasion to be felt as an even greater tragedy than it would seem from the museum's display. This is regretable.

"Normalization," the period following the Soviet invasion when hardline control was reimposed to a degree, is also glossed over in certain respects. The normalization regime of Gustáv Husák was hardline, but not Stalinist. The quiescence of the population was bought more with material concessions than with brutality, although the latter certainly still existed. But the relative material boon in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the negative consequences of the turn inward by many Czechs and Slovaks, doesn't receive any attention.

Overall, the interpretation of communism presented reflects two reinforcing biases on display. The first being the fact that the museum is owned by an American living in Prague, with his own outsider view of the Cold War era, the second being a Czech desire for exoneration of culpability in the communist experiment.

That said, the museum isn't without its redeeming qualities. A rather impressive collection of vintage propaganda posters and reproductions is worth the price of admission alone. Likewise, the odd bits of statuary, along with mock-ups of the communist store, etc., and a moving video about the police repression of student protesters that ignited the Velvet Revolution, all combine to make this a place worth seeing, even if it must be taken with a grain of salt.

And in spring, more of the same

One nice thing about living in Seattle: the predictable weather pattern (namely, frequent bouts of rain) means that I don't have to tax my limited Czech vocabulary on an exercise like today's, wherein we had to describe the weather in each season where we live. I know how to say "it rains," to which I needed only to append comparative and superlative forms of "often."

Of course, the frequent showers here have made Prague seem disturbingly similar to Seattle. It'd be nice if it would just shut up already and be summer.

Actually, I shouldn't complain too much. It was sunny the past two days (unfortunately I had to spend the lion's share of yesterday in the dungeon, er, basement, babysitting the mystifying washer/dryer machines while they ostensibly cleaned my cltohes). It was even sunny the bulk of today. Unfortunately, it decided to start sprinkling in the late afternoon while I was enjoying the previously nice weather by reading on the hill in back of the dorm. I think it even stopped by the time I made it up to my room.

Yup, just like Seattle. Or Chicago for that matter. All of which is to say, most descriptions of the weather in a locale aren't so locally specific as we might think.

Irony of ironies

So, today we began to learn a Czech song, "Rekni, kdo ty kytky jsou," which happens to be the Czech version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

As we were learning the lyrics today, I couldn't help but get a goofy-looking grin on my face as I realized that the U.S. government is paying for me to learn an antiwar song.

It's good to know your tax dollars are going to a good purpose.

Hallelujah! part deux

I scored general admission (AKA floor tickets) to see Nine Inch Nails in concert September 23, in Seattle!

I've been waiting a mere five years for the opportunity to see them live again and had long since pledged to do whatever it took, pay whatever I needed, to see them, and to get the best possible tickets. So this is pretty sweet.

Actually, I bought two tickets, so if anyone is interested and will be in the Seattle area that Friday night, you ought to let me know. I'll sell the extra ticket for what it cost me (a shade over $50 after obnoxious mishandling, inconvenience, etc. fees).

In a related story, I am really excited about seeing Nine Inch Nails again. (And this isn't the sort of artificial buzz generated by the Czech beer next to the computer.)

Hallelujah!

"The NHL and the players' association reached an agreement in principle Wednesday on a six-year labor deal, ending a lockout that wiped out last season."

Of course, this is only an agreement in principle, meaning that the players still have to ratify it for it to become final and allow us to get our hockey jones for the first time in more than a year, but I'm holding my breath. Gulp.

Priorities

Last night I had a quiet dinner alone at the restaurant next door to my dorm, here in Prague 2. It had stopped raining by the time I went to dinner, but despite that, the weather had been pretty lousy, so I wasn't feeling like doing much. Plus, I thought it best to stay close to my room in case the heavens should once more decide to drench the city.

Like my previous summer in Prague, my infatuation with Czech food ebbs and flows. To me more precise, four years ago it rapidly peaked, then plummeted, provoking a roller coaster of reactions that led me to make my sole foray into vegetarianism about halfway through the summer. (There's only so much roast pork one can eat before one wants nothing to do with meat in all its various forms.)

This time around, it's been somewhat similar. My enthusiasm for Czech food was pretty high when I arrived; after all, I hadn't had anything approaching authentic Czech cuisine since I last went to the Czech restaurant in Chicago about a year ago, and it had been four years since I had last been in the Czech Republic (and about three and a half years since I abandoned vegetarianism and became omnivorous once more).

And so it began. I had the national meal -- veproknedlozeli (pork, dumplings and sauerkraut) -- at my first meal, with a couple of tankards of beer. And it continued. Have you ever craved smazeny syr (fried cheese)? I was by about the fourth or fifth day in Prague, since I hadn't managed to find any yet. Mmm. Then there was the pork schnitzel, roast duck, sausage, goulash. Good stuff, although it pales in comparison to Hungarian goulash. As does every other pretender claiming the title of goulash. All washed down with a stein or two of excellent Czech beer.

After a couple of weeks of that, though, it starts to get wearisome. I mean, how much fried cheese can one person eat before it gets old? (Answer: about three meals.)

Anyway, so in a quest for vegetables, etc., I steered clear of the traditionally Czech and Central European food last night. I ordered a cup of garlic soup (OK, that's technically a Czech dish, but it's not fried and there's no pork in it) and a small Greek salad, both of which were quite tasty. And to drink? A beer. (Oddly enough, I don't know that I could ever tire of Czech beer, at least not here.)

Altogether, my bill, with tip, came to a whopping 120 crowns (for reference $1 is approximately 25 Kc), or just a shade under $5. Not bad at all. In fact, that's perhaps comparable to similar fare at a restaurant or cafe in the U.S., though probably a little cheaper.

But the striking thing, and the belabored and delayed point of this anecdote, was the composition of the bill. Before tip, it cost 109 Kc, inclusive of taxes. But the breakdown went thusly:

Salad: 55 Kc
Soup: 35 Kc
Beer: 19 Kc(!)

You can understand why I drink so much beer. It's per local custom and culture, but it's also literally the cheapest beverage on the menu. A beer (.5 L) will typically cost about 20 Kc, whereas a non-alcoholic beverage, say water (.33 L) will normally run almost twice that, somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 Kc.

Not to mention, the beer tastes a hell of a lot better.

The British are wankers! The British are wankers!

Today's day of fun and travel featured a trip to the Staropramen brewery in Prague's Smichov neighborhood, conveniently located on the opposite side of the river from my current lodging.

It was a good time, though my enjoyment was certainly impaired by the preponderance of British men on holiday (several of whom appeared to be in Prague for stag parties). There were probably 20 to 30 people on the tour, one of whom was a woman. All those British men were on their typically boorish behavior (this has been quite a probably for Prague in recent years with the advent of bargain flights from the UK).

Basically, the best explanation I can think of for male British visitors to Prague is that they're like American frat boys, only about 5 to 10 years older, so they ought to know better, even more so than frat boys should.

So during the tour I got to enjoy catcalls at any mention of alcohol, and lots of inappropriate comments and questions for the poor young Czech woman who was our guide. It was almost enough to make wish I had gone on a Czech-language tour, suffering through the language barrier as best I could, if only because it would've spared me 60 minutes of Britishness.

Praha 911!

While I appreciate police corruption and/or incompetence the world over, police in the Czech Republic have to be in the front running for the dubious distinction of most pathetic cops in the world.

A few weeks ago Czech police bungled a raid on a billionaire businessman, Radovan Krejcis, whom they found in his villa but then managed to escape. Many believe the great disappearing act was made possible by the utter stupidity of the Czech cops:

Police have been reluctant to provide details of the operation, but according to some press reports, Krejčífi — who is accused of plotting a murder, fraud and criminal conspiracy — escaped through a window after asking to go to the bathroom.

Later versions of the story, reminiscent of scenes from the Keystone Kops, had it that it was a policeman who went to the toilet, allowing the businessman to flee.

Another variant was that Krejčífi, 36, left through a door that was unguarded, and that his bodyguard was waiting for him in a car behind some bushes.

Meanwhile, the Czech News Agency quoted unnamed witnesses as saying that it took the police up to 10 minutes to notice that Krejčífi was no longer in the house.

Breathtaking.