First Photos of 2012, and a few from '11

It's been a while since I added in any photos. I got a bit wordy there at the end of the year, so here's a chance to mix things up a bit once more. We'll start off with a couple from Christmas. Sorry no people. They're a bit shy around here, and rather cautious about being posted all over the internet. Perhaps I'm just naive in thinking it's not such a big deal, but I do my best to preserve the preferences of others, so I give you a mostly person free photo post.

Here's your chance to see a bit of my mom-in-laws style. Her cookies are fabulous (and still coming out of boxes every few days to maintain the beauty of the cookie plate. It seems they make up a ton of cookies before Christmas, and then continue to dole them out over the next month or so) and the Christmas tree is exquisite. I got to help with the tree, but wisely stuck to putting only the variety she was currently hanging on at any given moment.

We had a lovely layer of snow everywhere from Christmas up through New Year's Eve. It was positively festive, but now it has been completely washed away, leaving the ground all soupy and g-ross! These shots were from one of my Christmas shopping days :)

On the day Tammy and I went to visit our friend Che, who now lives WAAAAAY out in the middle of Czech nowhere, I had flashbacks to my Winfield days with this little lunch snack. My first year I had one of these cheese buns with cheese spread, meat and tomato together with coke and paprika potato chips essentially every school day. Yes, boring it may seem to some, but I'm rather a creature of habit if the truth be known. Perhaps the very fact that my life has been so random and all over the place necessitates such food rituals. Right now I'm eating primarily a roll with yogurt every day for breakfast, and any time I prepare food for myself it's a sandwich similar to those I ate back at Winfield.

Before making this little trek, Tammy and I searched the internet to discover "things to do in Olovi" and came up with a big fat lot of nothing. For those with a vague feeling for this part of the Czech countryside, it's a little village tucked up in the forest about 11 KM from Sokolov. We really had to slog through some nasty stuff to make it to Che's house, but it was worth it to have a chance to visit with her and to see her adorable baby Kathleen ;)

Perhaps the oddest bit of the journey is what we found in the Sokolov train station:

Really not sure where all the fantasy came from, but it did amuse us, especially since my book deals with dragons...Just a little teaser as the countdown to the end of my challenge is seriously on. I'm down to just a couple of days, and am at 93,554 words and 184 pages... Here are a couple more pictures leading up to New Year's and the end of the snow. Marianske Lazne is a lovely place to be certain.

These, by all rights, should be in my last post, but I'll just tack them in here. They are the before and after fireworks photos. Seriously, an amazing display of pyrotechnics :)

And now to finish it all off, yesterday we finally had a chance to go back and see the cottage. It made me quite nostalgic for all that back breaking work during the summer I spent here. There is still a long way to go, but it's looking great from the outside. Oh, and I did manage to squeeze one person in. That's right, the one who's not afraid to pose, despite being completely not photogenic.

Hope you enjoyed the show. Stay tuned for more to come :)

Have Yourself a Merry Czech Christmas

It's Christmas morning in the Czech Republic and I've just been doing a little research. In my years of teaching here, my favorite times were always when students shared their traditions or stories of their lives. The main reason I was here, after all, was to become a part of their world while sharing my love of Jesus, the reason for the season :) The irony here, is that after all those wonderful classes learning about Czech Christmas traditions I just did a blog survey and realized that I never really shared any of them here. Now as a part of being in Europe, I wanted to make the most of the time. Whenever I had a holiday I hit the road. So every time Christmas came around with it's glorious two week holiday, I was outta here! Consequently, that meant I was either too busy getting ready to go, or too bursting with stories of my travels and all those photos, to share very much about what a Czech Christmas is like. Well, this year is different. This year, I'm going to share with you some Czech traditions along with what I actually got to experience. It is very different from the way things go with my family in the US, and naturally different from being on the road as well. So now, I give you, A Very Merry Czech Christmas. As in most European countries, the main celebration takes place on Christmas Eve. The preparations, however, begin much earlier as I have shared my stories of making Christmas cookies. In the morning on the 24th the cookies were put on beautiful plates atop festive napkins, and set in different places around the house to make them easily accessible all day long. Seeing as how we weren't going to be starting things until around 5, there was a lot of day to use up somehow. One of the things Czech's love on Christmas is watching "Fairy Tales." Some of them actually are what we would call fairy tales in the US as well, but others are just old classic movies. They even had "Elf" on in Czech, which I found highly amusing. We watched bits and pieces of different ones all morning and into the afternoon. Then Mark and I spent some time out with some of his friends to greet them for the holiday as well. In the early evening we got together for Christmas dinner. One of the Czech traditions is to buy a live carp and keep it in the bathtub until Christmas time. Then they kill it as can bee seen in this commercial. Really worth watching :) Seems Chuck Norris has a weakness after all. Thankfully, my family here doesn't do the whole carp thing, so our Rižek was either Pork or Turkey. I went for the turkey option since it's closer to my own Christmas meal of choice. This meant that we could not participate in another random tradition in which people save one of the carp scales in their wallet for a year in order to be lucky in money for the year. To begin the meal we had a toast with champaign and strawberries. Then it was time for our feast of breaded and fried filets (turkey for me) and the classic potato salad made by my father-in-law. The meal was delicious, and it was nice to sit around the table with the family. Next we gathered around the tree which Anna and I had decorated earlier in the morning. It was a sparkling vision in silver and white. Very fitting to my mom-in-laws taste. We even put up the decorations in order of kind. First white puffs, then snowflakes, silver balls of different varieties and glass ornaments. We opened presents together, and enjoyed the time of sharing. Then our little Czech Christmas was pretty much finished. We cleaned up the paper mess, put our gifts in our rooms, and spent the rest of the evening watching more "fairy tales" and eating chocolates and Cukrovy (cookies). It was a lovely evening really. We were a bit too tired to go out and find a church having a midnight service (another Czech tradition) but we did watch part of the live broadcast from the Vatican, which was interesting since Mark and I went and saw the Pope when he visited Czech a couple years ago. And so it went. Here are some other traditions I have heard from students in the past: * cutting an apple in half the round way to see the Christmas star * not eating anything all day long in order to hopefully see the golden pig which will signify luck for the coming year. * There's something about dropping molten metal into the bathtub. It actually happened in one of the movies we watched. I'm not really sure what it is supposed to signify, but it makes some interesting shapes. * Naming the carp in your bathtub "Pepa" which is the nickname for Josef That's most of what I can think of for right now. Just some nice things to add to my list of Christmas traditions. But despite all these things, the best part of Christmas for me is thinking of the reason we celebrate. What a miracle to think of how God sent a part of himself into the world to show us what love is all about. How blessed we are, despite our personal difficulties, to live in a time where we can turn to a Savior and be forgiven. Were it not for this silent night a good two thousand years ago, this world would be an even more desperate and hopeless place to live. I am so thankful to God for us indescribable gift. Merry Christmas to All, Peace On Earth and Goodwill to All People, and Oh So Much Love from the Czech Republic on this Christmas Day 2011

Christmas in Bayreuth

Christmas markets are a pretty big deal around these parts. They are especially popular in Germany. On numerous occasions I have made it over to Nurnberg to visit one of the oldest Christmas Markets in Europe. I'm not going to act all overly educated and pretend I know exactly how old it is or anything, but it's been around for a long time and is seriously huge. It's also a wee bit far away. So this year, Tammy and I decided to try a market we'd never been to that was also a little closer and still in the cheap zone. (Note: I lived over here for several years and the prices of things never really went up much, but after a year of being gone suddenly everything is more expensive. From food, to train tickets, and even the local ML bus. Inflation is not my favorite. Now let me ask you, should a ticket for a train with a heater that looks like this:

really increase? I think not.) Anyhow, we headed out on Sunday to check out the market in Bayreuth, a town just slightly farther away than Marktredwitz. We had a street map with a vague direction to go, but no real idea where to find what we were looking for. Thankfully, being the expert European travelers that we are, we managed. On the way we passed sights like this:

We passed through an ancient archway and spotted the drink booths, which let us know we were definitely headed the right direction. And then we were there.

I always love checking out the little booths and seeing what the popular ornaments are for the year. Being in Germany, and having prices in Euros, it was a bit out of my comfy range, but it's fun just to look. There are also the architectural gems that make it even more interesting.

We also discovered that they don't get a lot of American tourists around these parts. When we were looking for a hot drink, some men working in a booth tried to woo us with their wares. When we explained that we didn't speak much German, but English instead, they were very curious to learn where we were from and what brought us to their little town. When we half way explained, the older man who spoke some English decided that we should have a free sample of their special Christmas brew. It was a unique concoction that mixed red wine, rum, and citrus juice and I believe some cinnamon, all warm and toasty in a cup. I'll admit, I was rather glad it was a free sample, and there was no further pressure to buy, which was nice. It also did really warm me up all the way through, which was very useful on such a cold wintery day. Tammy needed her traditional market sausage, and I decided on a baguette with garlic butter, tomatoes, and melted mozzarella cheese. Tasty little snacks to help us along our way back to the station. The market was rather smaller, and much less crowded, than we had anticipated, so it only took us a couple hours to feel like we'd done the town. We jumped the next train back to Marktredwitz and when we arrived there we learned we had a while until the next train back to Cheb. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, we walked around through the streets of M. It was actually quite snowy there, but we were still able to enjoy the market they had there, as well as visiting a cafe. (Note: in Germany everything is generally closed on Sundays, especially in smaller towns. Despite Christmas being only a week away, even the shopping malls are closed.) The cafe we found open was one my friend Nicole and I visited several years ago on another day waiting for a train. It's a bit of a stuffy place in a hotel. The set up is odd and if you order a pastry you have to pay extra to sit inside and eat it. The usual set that takes a coffee there on a Sunday afternoon is rather cautious of strangers. The elderly ladies either ignored us or looked at us as though we had clearly stumbled into the wrong place. Ah well, at least the cappuccino was tasty.

It's only about a five minute walk back up to the station, and we thought we were doing just fine, but when we arrived we watched the train pulling out. The very train we were supposed to take. If we'd realized we should hustle it would have been no problem. Instead, we had another 45 minutes to spend in Marktredwitz. So how did we spend that time, you ask? Well, we went and had our photo taken with Santa. Isn't that what all the 30 something women you know do on a Sunday afternoon? Seemed reasonable enough to us. There is joy in being able to just enjoy life sometimes. And believe, the Santa and photographer greatly enjoyed our amusement. The picture is supposed to be e-mailed to Tammy, so I don't have it just yet, but when it comes I'll try to post it too. We did finally make it safely back to Cheb, where all things remained as they should be. We had pizza at Jakubska, and spent the night relaxing in her Skalka flat. Come Monday morning, she still had to go to work. The school system here isn't quite as set on always giving a two week holiday, so I think she works until the 23rd and only has off until the 3rd. Not so cool. My walk back to the train station was quite lovely. I decided to go down by the river and enjoy the place I've walked so many times. I wasn't disappointed.

And who knew there would be a tribute to me right there on the graffiti wall?

It was like it was my special day or something :)

Bravery Really is...

Someday I'm going to speak Czech. I wish that someday was now. I wish it was a language a bit more closely related. A language I could just fall into. I could spend all my time being frustrated with the fact that I sound like a toddler at best when I try to choke out as word or two here and there. Sometimes that is exactly what I do. Other times I say, sure I'll go shopping with you all day my dear parents-in-law, without the company of my husband. (He had to stay home and keep an eye on Katcha, who does happen to be doing better. She's walking around and eating and drinking, and even went outside a couple of times today which is definitely a relief for all of us.) As soon as we were in the car my phone rang. Just a little quick question from my Love, but it was enough to alert the parents that I do have an operational phone now. Which led to them asking for my number. I'm not quite sure what we would be able to say if they did need to call me, but it was a nice gesture all the same. And I even managed to tell them that my phone is very old because I bought it when I lived in Hong Kong. I felt relatively pleased with the exchange. It was very nearly an actual conversation with at least a couple complete sentences. We headed out toward Plzen, but made a cemetery stop first. I came out here once before last summer. There is something so powerful about visiting a family grave site. I'm not sure how many years it has been since Mark's grandmother passed away, but it is obviuos that his father is still very much attached. A Christmas bouquet was placed beside the headstone, and an electric candle, that flickers like a real candle, was added to the glass candle box. Czech graves are quite different from the ones we have in America. They are often more like little stone boxes and they're set so close together that there is now way of knowing where the body actually lies. We stood a moment, admiring the new additions, and then said goodbye. An emotional experience, even though I never met the woman. After that it was shopping time. It was the final shopping weekend before Christmas, so there was plenty to get done. Our first few shops were busy, but not over the top. I've been in American malls at this time of year. I've experienced the frenzy. It wasn't really like that here. There wer lots of people, but they weren't so frantic. Christmas is a big deal here, not like in Hong Kong where it's more like just another excuse for grand displays and materialism. They get really into it, but I feel like the focus is more on making millions of Christmas cookies, and preparing for the big day than it is about spending every spare moment shopping. Or at least not until after lunch. We took a break at the classic food stop, the York Hotel. Lunch was nice. Being the conscientious Czech parents that they are, they insisted that getting a small salad and krokety did not a proper meal make. After scouring the menu for things they thought I might like, they know I like pizza and pasta, they accepted my choice of a salad with chicken. At least it involved meat. We returned to shopping and it seemed the floodgates had opened at last. The parking lot of the next place we tried was ultra full. Full to the point that after ten minutes of driving around we totally gave up and drove off. We had better luck at the next couple places (did I mention that Plzen has a LOT of shopping malls?) but there were definitely bigger crowds. There are some people who get all antsy about Christmas shopping, but I'm just not one of them. I actually enjoy being out in the crush and rush. Probably partly because it does remind me of Hong Kong on a normal day. I also just love looking at the rows and rows of fresh clean things. I suppose you could call it some twisted materialism, but I don't even need to buy anything. I just like to see it. I like to see things and get ideas about how it must be to have stuff like that. Totally bizarre, I know, but there it is. In the end, I know everything I'm getting for Christmas, but it was all fun anyway. I also know what Mark is getting, and I just have to enjoy that he, who doesn't like surprises, doesn't know, while I, who do like surprises, knows. It's a bit odd, but sometimes you just have to accept doing things differently, right? By the time we got home it was about 6PM. It had been a long language overload sort of day. I didn't succeed in talking as much as I would like, but I was there. I spent the whole day struggling to understand, and trying to make myself understood at least every now and again. It will get better one of these days, I'm sure of it. Just not sure exactly when that day will be or how it will be achieved. For now I just have to be content with the small things and thankful for every victory in overcoming the language barrier.

Making Christmas, Making Christmas, Making Christ-mas, It's Czech This Time...

First line of business this morning? Making Czech Christmas cookies with my mother-in-law. Now I woke up around 7:30, thinking I should still have a decent amount of time to get ready for the cooking plan, but by 8:30 when I'd finished my journal writing and getting dressed, she already had things well in progress.
Perhaps before I get any farther under way I should explain a couple of things.
Thing One: The Czech Christmas Cookie Tradition
Czech's really go all out with their holiday cookie making. Yeah, we like cookies and other sweets at the holidays in the US too, but here it's a big deal. When I was teaching my students would start talking about how they were already making cookies for Christmas a good month in advance. The cookies, or cukrovy, are really something special. Most people make a number of different varieties, I think we have four or five here this year. They're tiny little delicacies, more mouthfulls than the American variety, and are passed out as gifts and shared at parties and consumed in mass quantities at home.
Thing Two: My Mother-in-law
She's really quite a wonder. She's a full time nurse and an immaculate house keeper. After a long day at work the first thing she does when she comes home is to clean. As spotless as the place looks to me, she always seems to have this need to make it even cleaner. She reminds me a lot of my Grandma in that sense. Everything she does, she does to perfection. Cooking, cleaning, and her other passion - shopping - are all perfectly executed.
So back to my story, I got up thinking I could really learn something today about making Czech Christmas cookies. I was all set. I had my iPad prepared to write down recipes and serve as a translator when necessary, as well as taking photos to better illustrate what was going on. However, there wasn't really anything left to mix up when I got there. I still got to help, but it was beyond any point of actually learning what went into them, so in the future I guess I'll just have to look up recipes and figure it out on my own.
The first thing she had me do was pipe a nougat paste onto some nutty crescent cookies. At first I thought it was going to be a filling, but once they were all topped with the cream she put them out on the balcony (this is what she uses instead of refrigerator space) to cool and harden. Later on in the afternoon they were topped with a chocolate drizzle, but I missed out on that bit. At least I played some small part in their creation.
Okay, so I've just discovered that for some unknown reason my iPad doesn't want to let me upload photos to my post. I'm really not certain why, I mean I even figured out how to do it on my phone, but for now I guess this is going to be a rather bland post. I have some fun photos too :( Ah well.
Guess I'll just have to make do with words. The next cookies we worked on were my favorite ones. They are pretty similar to sugar cookies. I was responsible for rolling them out and cutting the shapes. It was fairly easy at first, but as the dough got softer and softer it became really difficult to get it to hold together. The very last shape Anna had to do for me because after I don't know how many pans of cookies I just couldn't make the last one come out in one piece. They only cook for about five minutes until they're lightly brown. She was in charge of the cooking and cooling bit, and she commented on how thankful she was to have me helping because it really makes it easier to manage it all.
Two more things I should add:
Thing One: my mother-in-law speaks no English.
Thing Two: despite having already baked cookies all morning there was no evidence of any dirty dishes becasue she just keeps it that clean. This isn't any huge American kitchen. I can just hear the annoying chicks on House Hunters complaining about how small the galley style kitchen is and how they'd never manage to do anything there, but she does it all and keeps it spick and span. Yes it can be done.
While keeping the cookies cooking, she also boiled off the skins of a huge bowl of almonds. She talked about making a final kind of cookies, but if she did them today it was while I was out with Mark and his friend so I wasn't involved.
The cookies we were working on had to cool and were later filled with jam and closed together, then were finished off with chocolate drizzle on top. The first pan we cooked I'd just been cutting shapes at random, but then she pointed out that there have to be an even number because they're little sandwiches. We really managed to communicate quite well, or at least she communicated and I did my best to keep up. She also made sure to separately bake the ones I didn't roll out thinly enough from the ones that were the proper thickness. She didn't actually point it out to me, but I noticed and was glad she was the one in charge.
In the end, we have a great little collection of cookies. She told me that most Czech women these days don't take the time to make the cookies and buy them at the store instead. We both agreed that the store bought variety are not nearly the quality of homemade.
Overall, it was a great practice for me, even though I still have no idea how to make them on my own. The plan is for me to continue cooking with her to learn how to make other traditional Czech dishes. Next time I'll just have to be sure what time she's going to start so I can actually be awake for it. :)

Christmas Stateside

I have to say it was truly a blessing to be able to be home for the holidays this year. It had been a long time since I was able to celebrate with my parents, and it was definitely time. I really enjoy hearing Czechs talk about their Christmas traditions, and then telling them about mine. It is one of the times when I really get to talk about what is meaningful to me during the holiday. I must admit that there are a lot of times when I don't exactly feel like a missionary. When I worked with orphans it was all so obvious. I was helping the fatherless. I was giving them love, and caring for their most basic needs. But here? In Europe? What am I really doing?
If there was someone out there calculating how useful a ministry is, they would no doubt look for numbers and statistics of conversions, or even of clearly spiritual conversations. And in truth, were someone to do that with my ministry, they would come out with ridiculously low numbers. We won't talk about how ridiculous, but in so much as evident results are concerned it would be negligible. And yet I don't feel like my time here is wasted. Quite the contrary in fact. The way I do ministry it's doubtless never going to have dramatic results, but I honestly hope that the people I come into contact with are able to feel that I really do care about them. If nothing else, I hope they're able to see that my heart belongs to Jesus, and that through His love I come to love them. I'm sure I'd fail to pass mission board questions about how I intend to dramatically effect the people I come into contact with. I've never been the type to force issues, or make people talk about things they aren't comfortable with, but I try to offer them a friendly smile and an open heart. A place they can turn to. I'm not sure if it works, but I do believe it is worthwhile, and that God has had me in this place for the past three years in order to be that friend to my students. I don't know how this will look in the future. I won't hold my breath for future letters telling me the impact I had on their lives, and how I turned their hearts to Jesus, but I do want to continue praying for them, even after I return to the states. I do want to continue to love them, and I know that God is able to speak to the needs of their hearts and to bring me to mind if they ever want to talk about these things.
(sigh)
I guess recently I've just been thinking a lot about my purpose here, and how effective what I'm doing truly is, and when I took this moment to write, it all sorta came out. I'm the last person to write a book on how to reach the nations, but my heart is true in desiring to reach out to be people God puts in my life.
That being said, I love having the chance at Christmas to tell them how my favorite thing about Christmas is being with family and thinking together about how amazing it is that God sent His son at Christmas. I also tell them of our traditions on Christmas Eve (they're always really excited that my family celebrates on the 24th like they do here) and how I love the time we spend singing Christmas Carols and reading the Christmas story. They all quietly accept the things that I say, and only freak out when I tell them that we generally eat Pizza for Christmas dinner on paper plates. I tell you, it's the quickest way to get at the presents, and when you have a crew of excited kids bouncing off the walls, easy cleanup is a MUST!


This year at Christmas we had quite a few craft projects that we did as well. It's interesting to see how Julie's creativity has increased since she became a mother. We had some laughs over her childhood art and craft attempts, but this year she was the one who had us doing things like making these colorful snowflake decorations. We gave the yellow snowflake to David...
We also decorated about a bazillion sugar cookies. It brings back recollections of my Grandmother and her classic cookies. We followed her recipe and while they were really good, they'll never quite compare to her fabulous treats. She just always had a way of making things turn out better. Sort of like when she would come to visit in my childhood, and despite spending endless time cleaning the house prior to her arrival, she'd always manage to somehow make it look better in a matter of minutes after entering the house. Magical.



And now, for a small competition and an attempt people to actually comment on my blog, I'll ask which of the little sugar cookie men is the best...
Being the poser that I am no post would be truly complete without a portrait. Here I am with our lovely Christmas tree, made marvelous because my mother is a decorating genius. Despite the fact that every year she ceases to be completely happy with the chosen tree, she always manages to turn it into a work of art. So here I sit, along with before and after shots of the presents underneath.


The whole time I was home was really a blur. There were games with the kids, conversations with sisters, shopping trips, and endless treat making. We even managed to have a lefse day, which made me really excited. I hadn't had lefse since Christmas in 2005! That's a long time ago. Although I learned that Cheryl got a lefse griddle this year, so if I do Christmas in Alaska again we can do things differently ;) It was all pretty magnificent. For those not aware of the wonder that is lefse, it's a Norwegian treat that everyone should have an opportunity to experience. They're kind of like tortillas, but they're made with potatoes, and you butter and sugar them and then roll them up into a sweet melty delicacy. Upon returning to Czech I happened to mention to Karina that we'd had lefse and she turned a little green with envy seeing as how she's also of the lefse eating tradition. Basically, once it becomes a part of your life you never want to let it go...


Some other highlights of the trip:
Getting to finally meet Peaches, the fabulous one dollar horse that has finally made Julie's lifelong dream come true.

Seeing David for the first time in 2 and a half years. There were some complications with his pass at first, but in the end it worked out so we were able to pick him up on the 30th and spend as much of New Year's Eve with him as possible. He always has an agenda, so it wasn't exactly all family all the time, but it was still nice to see him again, all safe and sound. As you can see, I seemingly shrink every time I'm around my nephews. You know, there was a time when they were all little babies in my arms. Crazy what a few years can do!

And now I'll end this post with a little sisterly love. It's rather blurry, which is unfortunate, but it's definitely a large part of what this holiday was all about :)