Day 27: Solitaire

Friday, June 8, 2012 

Weaving all day! Finished tapestry number 2 and started number 3! Stripes and gradients and an attempt at a fringe! I might be addicted to weaving! Yay! 

The soundtrack for this project turned out to be the album Right Outta Nowhere, by Christine Kane. Good music for weaving. Good music for anything, really. 

The power cord for my laptop inexplicably broke in my backpack earlier this week, so I've been using my laptop sparingly to conserve power. Today, I managed to get in touch with the Institute's IT expert, who loaned me an old spare cord he had. I can type again! 

After all the walking yesterday, I didn't really feel like going anywhere today. (Besides, I had weaving to do.) I'm not sure if I left the Institute at all before the trip back to Vinohrady in the evening. This is something that happens to me fairly often: I'll start making something, look up a little while later, and wonder when it got so dark outside... 

There are actually signs up in the Metro forbidding passengers to put stickers on the walls and doors (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what the signs say). Despite this, someone had looked at the lines and dots of the station diagrams above the doors... 

...And had added a little PacMan and ghosts. 

I had dinner at Bong Sen, the Vietnamese restaurant around the corner from the Penzion. I got a large amount of meat and vegetables for a small amount of money, with a white pillow of rice on the side. Delicious. It was nearly closing time, so the restaurant was quiet, nearly deserted except for the wait staff and a small girl (related, I think) whom they were helping to practice counting in Czech. I think she was better at it than I am yet. 

I have found myself returning to the Penzion later and later each day. (Still never after 11 pm, I think.) Partly, this is because I have a tendency to work and forget to eat dinner until after the Institute closes. Partly, though, it's because the later I get back, the fewer people will try to talk to me on the way up to the room. 

They keep inviting me to clubs and bars and restaurants. This is very nice of them, and I appreciate the thought. I've passed by the doors of the occasional bar and club, though, and they seem to contain mostly alcohol, crowds, and noise. If I wanted that kind of fun, I could just beat my head against a wall for a few hours. 

Dinner might be nice, if it was a quiet restaurant; after about 9 pm, though, I'm rarely in a mood to spend time with people, or talk to people, or remember that people exist. That's what I do in the morning and afternoon. All I want after sundown is to shut myself in a quiet room and forget that there's a world outside my head and the book or screen in front of it. 

I am a nearly complete introvert - always have been - and I'm happy that way. But I hate to disappoint the extroverts who invite me to places. I like these people, I really am grateful for the offer, and I can only hope that they aren't offended that I have to keep refusing it. 

Day 20: Health Roulette

Friday, June 1, 2012 

I came out of the breakfast room this morning and found one of my friends lying on a couch in a corner and looking miserable, so we talked for a while. She's been stuck in her room all week with what is (according to the doctor) some form of non-contagious flu-like thing. I think she needed to talk to someone. 

Though many of the students here have gotten sick, I don't think any two have gotten the same thing. There's been stomach flu, regular flu, strep throat, severe allergies, asthma, food poisoning, tonsilitis, panic attacks, sprained knees…

It's like the study abroad edition of And Then There Were None. Each of us will be taken out in our own unique and creative way. 

I can't wait to see what mine is. 

Day 13: Excursion, Day 2

Friday, May 25, 2012 

After an uneventful night at the first hotel, we piled back into the bus and moved on. First stop of the day:

Lace 

Visiting the lace factory in Drnovice was like visiting Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. 

We were not allowed to bring cameras inside, as the owner does not want pictures of the machines going public. Our guide kept us outside the door for a long time - it might have been twenty minutes - telling us about the history of the factory (and building our anticipation) before we were allowed through the front doors. 

No one goes in; no one comes out - but they still produce lace by the meter…

The first lace-making machines were apparently invented in England. This gave England a monopoly on machine-made lace, which they held onto by forbidding anyone to take the machines out of the country. They even managed to enforce this for a while. Eventually, though, a group of Czech workers took a machine apart, hid the pieces in baskets of grain and vegetables, strapped the drive shaft (too long to hide in a basket) under the keel of their boat, and smuggled the whole thing back home. The Czech Republic (or what would eventually become the Czech Republic) has been making machine lace ever since.

The factory's fabled and secret lace-making machines were fascinating to watch. They use bobbins, but these are spring-loaded industrial spools of metal and plastic, not the little wooden spindles we've been using. Threading them is a complex, multi-step process that uses a little wire tool like a triple crochet hook. The guide did it in about five seconds; he then let us try, which took about two minutes. Of the few actual humans who work in the factory, one or two are there to keep the machines running smoothly, while the rest just reload the empty bobbins. 

On a machine, the bobbins are arranged on metal discs that twist them around each other in whatever pattern is necessary to make the lace. The patterns come from loops of punched cards that are fed through the back of the machine, like a Jacquard loom. (There are apparently people whose entire job is to take lace designs and translate the complex twists and crosses into patterns of punched holes. I'd love to know how they do it.) From the bobbins, the threads go up to a central pole; this is where the lace is finished, wrapped around the pole like an intricate sleeve. A ring of metal claws goes in and out to keep each twist in place. Narrow lace designs (there were some less than half an inch wide) are usually woven with several copies at once on the same machine, wrapped around the pole and joined by a single colored thread that can be pulled out to separate them later. Wider designs require the bigger machines. The maximum width, according to our guide, is about six inches. 

There was a planter full of lace flowers outside the front door. Someone asked if they grow the lace there. The guide said yes, but it only grows a few centimeters a year.

The factory is apparently only allowed to sell lace in lengths of three meters or more; anything shorter, they simply throw away. At the end of the tour, the guide showed our group a box of these cast-off ends ("three meters or less" can actually be quite long) and told us we were free to take what we wanted. 

A hundred gorgeous lace patterns, in large amounts, free, for a group of college students majoring in things like textiles and fashion design... 

The resulting scene resembled a school of piranhas in a feeding frenzy.  

The guide watched us with an amused smile for a while, then went and got an entire plastic bag full of more discarded lace and told us we could bring it back with us. It must have weighed twenty pounds. That is a lot of lace.

Predictably, there was a second lace frenzy when we returned to the Institute and opened the bag. 

...

  Gobelins 

The Gobelins (tapestry) workshop in Valašské Meziříčí is an interesting combination of factory and museum. It also has a stork nesting on the chimney.

The first few rooms we visited were devoted to the creation of new tapestries and carpets, many of them based on photographs or paintings. Many of these are designed by the owner of the workshop.

The women work with highly trained speed, their fingers twisting and tying and beating the fibers down almost too quickly to follow. 

Further in, we visited the rooms where they restore ancient tapestries. Like all the rooms in the building, these are tall, dominated by long tables and curtained windows that let in soft, indirect light.

Rolls and skeins of thread in muted shades are heaped across the tables - a weaver's palette of colors - ready for the women to work them into the worn and mouse-eaten patches of ancient tapestries. The process takes years.

They showed us some that were finished, or nearly finished, restored to their former glory with not a seam showing.

The final section was a collection of tapestries, both old and new, hung in the tall, narrow hallways between the miscellaneous rooms of the building - restrooms, nurseries, a small cafeteria.

Some of the tapestries were based on paintings; others were of geometrical designs, woven by hand with machinelike precision. 

In the last room, a sunlit cafeteria with old wooden furniture and ceiling beams, one of our group stopped to play the piano for a while. He said he was out of practice from two weeks away from home, but the pieces he played were beautiful anyway. In the sunlit room, surrounded by old furniture and tapestries and the smell of coffee, the music was the perfect final touch.

I could have stayed there in that moment all day. 

... 

Interspar 

We either missed or didn't have a scheduled lunch destination, so we simply stopped at this building in the middle of I don't know where. (I looked at the map later and found out it was in Prostějov.) It appeared to be some kind of shopping mall. It had the largest revolving door I've ever seen.

There were actually little shelves set up inside it, which revolved with the door.

Just inside the door was a place that looked like the missing link between food kiosks and restaurants. We stopped there for lunch. I got a ciabatta and a "měšec marcipanovy." (Google translates this as "marzipan bag.") It was surprisingly sweet and dense - like chewy, sugary clay. Not like anything I've eaten before, but delicious.

...

  Lysice Castle 

Lysice ('LISS-it-seh') Castle is really more of a palace, but the foundations of the original fortification are apparently somewhere underneath the elaborately sculpted mansion that sits there now. You can still see traces of the moat.

Past the front entrance is a courtyard lined with the coats-of-arms of various related noble families.

Judging from our guide's comments, the various owners of Lysice Castle seem to have made it a collection of the best of everything. The floors are mosaic, or striped stone, or ornate inlaid wood that we had to wear special slippers to shuffle across.

The main staircase has columns, more mosaics, and a huge skylight at the top.

The ornaments are porcelain and alabaster and inlaid marble; the chapel has a traveling pipe organ that can be folded up and brought on vacations; the garden has domed flowerbeds planted with geometrical patterns of plants, surrounded by a colonnade on which one of the previous lords liked to have breakfast every morning.

Even the bathrooms have stained glass windows - though the plumbing is from the 1940s. Practically every surface is carved, painted, or inlaid with various precious materials.

The library is paneled with a rare, swirly-grained wood…

...Which is actually an imitation made by rubbing wood stain onto ordinary wood with a special cloth. (This art has been lost in the centuries since.)

The dining room has ornate floral designs molded onto the ceiling…

...Which are actually extremely convincing trompe l'oeil, painted to match the sunlight from the windows. 

The best of everything, apparently, includes the best illusions. 

...

  Telč 

We stopped for dinner in Telč. I still had half of my lunch left, so I didn't bother to look for a restaurant; instead, I just walked down to the pond we'd passed on the way in, ate my leftovers there, and spent the remaining 45 minutes watching the sunset and sketching the view. 

It was a good way to spend the last few hours of daylight before the long evening drive to tonight's hotel. 

Day 6: Bees!

Friday, May 18, 2012 

Those of us who were interested left at 8 am today for the bee trip, an excursion to a beekeeping institute outside of Prague. It was the first time I'd seen the train station.

Also the first time I'd ridden on the top floor of one of those double-decker trains.

We took the train from Prague, past a series of beautiful little towns, to the equally beautiful little town of Libčice (LEEB-chee-tseh).

From here, we walked under the train tracks (there were tiny black-and-white cliff swallows nesting underneath the overhang)...

And took a ferry, just barely big enough to carry everyone, over to the island where the bees are. 

The countryside was beautiful. 

The institute itself - I forget the full name, if I ever heard it - seems to be focused on bee breeding and research.

Our guide was an enthusiastic fountain of information about bees. We heard about the life spans of the workers (several weeks), queens (several months), and drones (an unspecified length of time until their fatal mating with a queen); the construction and division of labor within a hive; the division of hives (young queen stays in old hive, old queen takes half the bees to build a new one); the six things bees produce (wax, honey, royal jelly, venom, propylase - an antibacterial substance they use to coat their hives - and other bees); the reproduction of queens (they lay more than their body weight in eggs every day, hence the need for the concentrated protein in royal jelly); the production of honey (which is mostly dehydrated nectar)… It was fascinating. 

One of the most complicated parts was the selling of queens. Apparently, any bee in the hive can become a queen, depending on an extremely complex set of environmental conditions during her development. This isn't surprising, as all the workers that come from unfertilized eggs are sterile clones of the queen anyway. The queens will normally kill each other until there's only one left in a colony (except in the cases where the old queen takes half the colony off in a swarm to build a new one). However, beekeepers will take larvae out of the colony and raise them in little cups, carefully monitored in isolation, to produce whole groups of queens that they can sell to other beekeepers. (The pedigrees of queens and drones are carefully recorded.)

The usual method is to put the queen, eight or so attendant workers, and a few weeks' supply of food in a small cage and send it through the mail. Once the queen and her attendants arrive, introducing her to the beekeeper's other bees is a complex process of its own. 

One way is to put the new queen in a small cage within a preexisting colony. (Not the cages above, which are for raising queens to adulthood. I just liked the way they look.) This protects her from the more aggressive workers who would kill her for being a foreigner. The friendlier workers will feed her instead, until her smell and the colony's smell are mixed together, and it seems as if she belongs there. The beekeeper then opens the hive up and replaces the cage's cork with a cork made of sugar. After the hive is closed and the bees have calmed down again, they eat the sugar cork, and the new queen can come out to take her place in the colony. 

Ten percent of the time, one particularly xenophobic worker will still kill the queen at this point, but it works the other ninety percent. 

The other (somewhat more reliable) way is to isolate a group of workers somewhere. In a preexisting colony, the workers can recover from the loss of their old queen; they simply take the brood of larvae they already have and raise one of them to be the new queen. They don't need or want any fancy foreign royalty. An isolated group of workers, however, has no brood and therefore no hope for the future. They eventually become desperate enough to take any queen they can find. This allows the beekeeper to introduce a new queen and let her and the older workers start a new colony. 

The bees they keep at the institute have been specially bred to be friendly; they will actually let people pick them up and pet them. They flew around peacefully while Dalibor took their hive apart to show us the honey, the queen, and the larvae, and they stopped occasionally to rest on people's clothes before flying away again. Even the people who were nervous at first seemed to be completely comfortable around them by the end, and I was surprised at how many of us were comfortable with them right from the beginning.

The queens are marked with dots, color-coded to the year of their birth. This one was born in 2008, if I remember correctly.

After showing us the hives, our guide took one of the combs out and brought it to the centrifuge in the shed next door so that we could extract and taste the honey.

It was delicious. I've never been a huge fan of store-bought honey; I like it, but there's an odd sticky taste to it that I can only eat in small amounts. This, however, was like a mix of sugar and sunshine, light and clear with hardly any color or stickiness to it at all.

I didn't want to stop eating it.

At the end of the tour, we also got to sample honey chocolate and mead. Some of us loved the mead; others thought it tasted like cough syrup. I could taste the sweetness of the honey, but the revolting medicinal taste of the alcohol ruined it, as usual. Oh well. The chocolate was quite good, though. 

We had lunch at a tiny little food stand that seemed to be one of the only other buildings on the island. It was a little red-brown building next to the ferry stop.

They had apparently made a huge pot of guláš (beef and onion stew) in advance, and they served it to our group until it ran out, which took a long time. It was delicious - thick and meaty, faintly spicy, with slices of warm potato bread to soak it up. I went back for seconds. 

We found an insect of some sort on the ferry on the way back; it looked a bit like a miniature dobsonfly, black and flat-headed with black-veined wings like stained glass. Everyone gathered around to exclaim over it and take pictures of it sitting on my hand.

We missed the train by about three minutes, so we had lots of time to sit at the station and wait. I did a quick sketch of the tracks and the trees and cliffs around them. 

One of the other students saw me sketching and recommended the work of illustrator Syd Mead, particularly his elegant way of suggesting the shapes of trees; I will definitely have to look him up when I get the chance. I recommended Tony Cliff in return. 

We met several cats today - a calico at the beekeeping institute and a golden tabby with black paws at the train station. Both were large and plump and seemed to enjoy the adoring attention of a couple dozen college students an ocean away from our own cats, though I'm sure they couldn't understand a word we said.

The ride back was uneventful, though I took lots more pictures of the towns we passed...

The cliffs between them... 

Interesting bits of railroad and river engineering... 

And some of the more elaborate graffiti.