Early conclusion to the blog, (at least for the pictures portion)

So my blog has been a little barren the past couple weeks, not due in any part to a lack of activities I've been undertaking, but unfortunately due to the fact that my Google Nexus One was STOLEN by gypsies while I was walking through the middle of downtown. Efforts to recover it since (cops, visiting local pawn shops where the thieves likely unloaded it), have all proved to be rather fruitless. That phone was my main communication device (both phone and online), music player, gps when I got lost, and most relevant to this blog my only camera. So in terms of posting to this site unfortunately I simply don't have any visual content to entice you loyal readers to keep coming. Though the situation does give me a reason to cover a topic, I had thought I would steer away from, the gypsy situation in Europe (next post).

Man, I'm going to miss the hell out of this phone :'(

The whole month in general has been something of a loss as it's been marked with:

• My wallet being lost the week before my phone incident (though it was returned to me a couple days later ID and cards intact but missing about $250 in cash). 
• Saying bye to my "European BFF" who has gone off to Argentina to be with her bf (a former trainee like myself), both of whom I'll admit openly to missing a great deal. 
• An overload of incidences regarding minor annoyances at miscommunication/ incompetence
• Some other emotional junk that I won't get into on such a public posting

Events of the last few weeks that deserve mentioning, but have no pictures to share about.

• Czechoslovakia Independence day = free day off work = visit Olomouc, to see fellow trainee, Chris from New Castle to have him show us around his stomping grounds and a couple UNESCO sites like the famous column in the center of the city. Also because of the holiday we got free entrance to a historical art museum, which had some amazing religious relics and really audacious property of the former elite.
• Telc, quaint little village though some Czechs insist that it is a city had a lot of Gothic charm and a lovely park behind a château.
• Vienna part deux
• St Martin's day, and the traditional roasted goose dish

Burcak festival > Columbus day

So this past Monday while making a call into New York, I was shocked to find the offices were closed due to Columbus day. I normally wouldn't think much of the holiday back home, but it was still a small shock to think it had completely slipped under my radar. Missing out on the day just seemed like a little reminder of how disconnected my current life is from the current going-ons of people back home. 

However, while young students, government workers, and some bankers might have gotten the one day off in the U.S. the residents of Brno were treated to a week long harvest style festival in the city square. Free city entertainment is always a win in my book, and one of the reasons I really enjoy living here! 

With the start of Fall the wine growers of the region have a traditional drink, Burcak, that they make from newly harvested wine grapes that have just started fermenting. The concoction derived from said early wine making stage is a drink that tastes like grape juice and soda with the tiniest hint of alcohol.. It's the perfect way to combat the cold snap the region is experiencing, (my return from from Indonesia was marked by leaving +30C degree weather to having a high of 12C and low of 2C), without feeling like an alcoholic. I treated myself to a 1L bottle that should be able to provide me a nice glass with dinner for a week or so.

Acappella quartet, performed some Christmas Carols and pop hits like ABBA

Warm Honey Wine, perfect after dinner treat

$3 USD for BBQ meat and beer :D

There's actually chickens, rabbits, and geese in these cages, but it's too dark to see them in the photo

Another of Brno's new sculptures. This large black phallic object is actually supposed to be a functioning clock/calendar.

"Burcak is very young grape juice that is just starting fermenting. It is high in sugar and low in alcohol, but throughout fermentation the ratio between them is changing in favor of alcohol and wine is being born."
http://www.maniactourist.com/cool-places/prague-wine-harvesting-festival-tasting-the-burcak.html
I found this blog about a man visiting Prague who was enjoying the Burcak drinking festival there. However as he mentions the tradition originated in the Moravian region, where Brno lies, so I think it's inferred that the festival and Burcak I got was better ;)

New header

You may also notice a new banner I put at the header of my blog linking to freerice.com. For those of you who tend to have a few minutes to waste surfing the net playing internet games I recommend this site where that gaming can be put to good use feeding the world's hungry! Win win at no cost to you, just for playing the fairly educational trivia games on the site you're also performing a good deed :)

I'm personally going to use it try and refresh my Spanish vocab, which is in a pretty sad state these days as evidenced by the Spain trip I have still yet to collect photos from my friends to create a post for.

A Not So European Intermission

For what people may actually come to my blog you may have noticed that I have not posted anything in the past few weeks. This was because I was in fact not only out of the country, but out of the continent for a my cousin's wedding in Indonesia. There's a lot of great things to say about the country (enough to create another blog, so I don't want to put a lengthy post here), but reliable and fast internet is not one of them. So for my reading faithful you get the compilation of photos I took after I've already returned. 

I used Picasa because it beats muddling through facebook picture interface, and annoying privacy settings that keep some of my friends from seeing my pics, because they're not friends with my other friends. 

I’m still waiting for pictures to be sent to me that were taken by the professional photographers at the wedding ceremonies. I'll perhaps edit this post or put up another post as they become available.

Bali: hotel, beach, wedding

Bali

Bali wedding dinner photos taken by my cousin

http://picasaweb.google.com/yunkins/DYDinnerBanquet?authkey=Gv1sRgCLvY3LTdxYLG4gE&feat=email#

Bandung: family hometown

Bandung

Jogjakarta: solo tour

Jogjakarta

Kuala Lampur Airport

Kuala Lampur Airport

End of Summer

I know I haven't posted in awhile, mainly because I had myself a big ID reunion in Spain a couple weeks ago that I wanted to discuss, but I'm waiting on my friends to post all of their pictures to link them all in my post before I go into it. Hopefully I can write it up in the near future, even though at this point it's already been a couple of weeks since I came back.

In the meantime I guess I can discuss the winding down of Summer, and Fall lifestyle that seems to have quickly taken over. Since the beginning of September that Summer weather of 26-32 degrees Celsius has disappeared seemingly overnight and given way to 8-16 degrees cloudy weather. Frankly with how heavy Czech cuisine is (no Summer friendly fruit or smoothie dishes), and the nature of most of my clothes brought for the purpose of dealing with the cold, the temperature drop has been a welcome change.

Antonio climbing one of said new "modern/" ugly sculptures in the city

With Fall also comes a push to complete the construction projects around the city before the university students return, and the season opening for the local classical theater companies (drama, ballet, opera.) The city has nearly completed the construction around the construction that had diverted a lot of the tram lines around the city earlier this year, and has dotted the city with new sculptures (much of which I consider crap, but eye of the beholder right?)




My first excursion with the Brno trainees to the local ballet company was quite the revelation. The theater is quite stunning, and a student ticket at a measly 55CZK works out to less than 3 dollars for a 2 hour performance! In the US for the same thing I could expect to have spent at least 10 times that.



Pictures of the theater

Theatre

Synopsis of the ballet I saw can be found here:
http://www.youri-vamos.com/coppelia_en.php

Pax Americana and Imperialism

Lately being one of the few Americans in my social circle, conversations take a serious turn, and despite being a liberal Californian I am asked to account for why the US has done the many notorious things it has. None of my explanations I could offer work into nice short sound bites, and often I hold my tongue for lack of desire to perform a lengthy lecture on history and philosophy. Yet, without going into said lecture suffice to say, I firmly believe that there is a quite complex web of reasons for why the US needs to exert its military power internationally (especially in the role of posturing to maintain regional peace), while such actions are certainly towards its own benefit and gain; it often benefits the rest of the world by the similar margins. My point being that Americans, while the argument can be made that we have our own selfish reasons, do things that benefits the global community, because no other superpower to serve as an alternative to do so, and thus the US has a moral imperative to use said superpower status to its full capacity to bring about common good when within its reasonable power to do so.

However while I've been a believer of the Pax Americana, and the US being a "disinterested" party utilizing military force for the betterment of the global community as a whole. This video of debate between Buckley and Chompsky from over 50 years ago has forced me to wonder whether the US should really bother. The hard truth is that perhaps our military ventures have been largely imperialistic. Chompsky does not really offer any better condition we should strive for, as his best techniques like Socrates has been merely to point out what we think to be commonly held truths to be not as truthful as we would like to believe. It can be inferred that the only moral application of force is in the defense of our own borders. However I don't really believe there's any practicality to the thought of regressing our forces to such a stance.

Full video of the Chompsky Buckley debate


A more recent speech on the same topic with references to Suharto, which I imagine holds some relevance for the members of my family who grew up in Indonesia.

Restaurants

I wanted to wait for sometime to pass before discussing this topic to give an impartial view. After being here since late March, having tried a wide range of what is available at the grocery store and restaurants, sometimes paying more than I reasonably should have to test whether the cost was justified in the resulting quality, I feel I have enough data to discuss this point. This isn't a discussion about Czech cuisine, a possible sequel to this post, which is full of interesting dishes with some ridiculously labor/time intensive recipes that are shared throughout the central European region. This is more a criticism that offers my hypotheses as to why restaurants here are in the state they are in.

I think the biggest factor regarding the satisfaction, both in regard to taste and presentation, of food here is quality control, or rather the absence there of. I don't see myself as a food snob, and I won't fault a restaurant for not delivering culinary gold. Especially for the type of restaurants a person frequents week to week, whether in the US or anywhere else in the world, what the customer expects is the precision/repeatability of the quality of the dish. A person goes back to their favorite Chinese, Indian, Italian, Sushi, etc place not necessarily because they get an orgasm in their mouth each time they go there, but because it hits a certain sweet sweet spot for them on the opposing scales of good taste and affordability, and it hits that spot nearly every time they go. If a favorite restaurant consecutively disappoints one usually assumes a new inferior chef has taken over the kitchen, and the disappointed customer stops going back.

This paradigm does not work for most Czech restaurants, because they really lack repeatability of the quality of what they serve. If I enter a restaurant one day to try it out, I may get one of the best meals I've had since my arrival, memorize this dish as a favorite, and tell myself to make a repeat visit. I may return the next week or even the next day order the same exact thing, and have it fail so badly at matching what I had ordered before I would swear I was in another restaurant.

My coworkers and other Czech people I've met all seem to have similar views as myself regarding the nature of the restaurant business in the Czech Republic (insisting that a proper tasting Czech meal can only be found cooked at home.) Anecdotally they blame the years of Communism, for the government standardization of menus, sourcing of grocery ingredients, and the general apathy when it comes to service that Czech culture in general has been slow to warm up to 20 years after its conversion to Capitalism. Perhaps the latter is the most telling as many restaurants seem to be carbon copies of one another yet there is no sense of competition to outdo each other to maintain customer satisfaction and gain repeat business.

A complaint to the wait staff to see the manager is often met with a shrug or a "I am the manager" sort of response most American waiters probably only dream of being able to say, but know they could never get away with for fear of losing their job or a good chunk of their business. Fear of such a penalty is so unlikely in the Czech Republic you could call it an impossibility. Taking it out of the tip isn't much of a punishment, because this is a country that doesn't expect tip to begin with. The standard fare is simply to round your bill to the nearest 10 Czech crowns, and the difference is considered tip which equates to about 50 cents or less. Even with the surge of expats in recent years who have been rewarding a much generous 10% of their bill, myself included, few restaurants except those that cater towards tourists or have more cosmopolitan owners have utilized this carrot to give themselves and their staff the motivation to match global standards.

See below a link to various dishes I've had some good, most average, and some which can only be described as WTF? failures.

Food