Prague Expat Life

Finally, the snow has melted

Renault Scenic in the snow — My Renault Scenic on Saturday 9th January 2010 after snow had fallen for 24 hours © Ricky Yates

I previously blogged about the heavy snowfall that started in Prague on Friday 8^th January 2010 and continued right through the weekend. The photo on the left shows my car on the Saturday morning after snow had fallen continuously for 24 hours. As I remarked in my more recent post about the visit of the Archdeacon to Prague on the weekend of 30^th-31^st January, most of the snow that fell then was still lying on the ground during his visit. However, after more than six weeks of temperatures almost permanently being below freezing, finally during the past week, a thaw has set in and the snow has gradually melted.

I was warned before moving to the Czech Republic, that I would have to get used to colder continental winters. But nothing could really prepare me for the weather Prague has experienced these last nearly seven weeks. Apparently, this has been the worst winter weather that the Czech Republic has had in 17 years. Towards the end of this long cold spell, even native Czechs were beginning to express their frustration with the extreme nature of the weather.

Despite the lying snow and freezing temperatures, Prague has continued to function. The city authorities have made major efforts to clear roads and pavements and public transport has kept operating with the minimal of delays. Particularly in popular pedestrianized areas in the city centre, snow has been cleared away by loading it into trucks and dumping it out of the way elsewhere. There are still massive heaps of snow along the banks of the River Vltava which are the result of this exercise.

Dirty Snow — Heap of dirty snow © Ricky Yates

Even in suburban streets, snow has been pushed into piles in order to leave a clear path along the pavement or road. It is mainly these heaps of snow that still have not melted, together with snow lying on north facing slopes which get very little sun.

When snow falls, everything looks beautiful and white. However, as it melts, dirt, litter and scattered street debris is revealed which look highly unattractive. In particular, many dog owners have got out of the habit of cleaning up after their dogs have obliged in the street believing that the snow will cover it up. Now the snow has melted, one has to walk quite carefully in places to avoid stepping in dog s–t. It will be interesting to observe how quickly all of this mess is cleared up.

As well as the marked improvement in the weather, last week was also notable for a number of other things. Both of us had our birthdays which has resulted in our joint ages now totalling one hundred! On the intervening day between our respective birthdays, I paid the last of several visits to the dentist for the fitting of a crown to replace one of my front teeth which I broke at the beginning of February.

Looking ahead, I have an early morning meeting on Wednesday 3^rd March, following which I may be able to write a very interesting blog post. Watch this space!

Ash Wednesday – the beginning of Lent

Lenten Cross — Hand sewn cross on my Lenten stole © Ricky Yates

Yesterday, 17^th February was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent.

Originally, Lent was a period in which new Christian believers underwent a period of teaching and preparation ready to be baptised on Easter Eve/Holy Saturday, before being admitted to receive Communion for the first time on Easter Day. Fasting and prayer were regarded as being important elements of that time of preparation.

Lent was also the time when those who had been excommunicated from Christian fellowship because of apostasy or serious faults, could undergo a time of prayer, fasting and penitential acts showing that they had truly repented of their past failures, so that they might be readmitted to Eucharistic fellowship on Easter Day.

In time, it was seen that all Christian believers might benefit from a period of self-examination, fasting study and prayer, before celebrating the joy of Easter Day. This is how the keeping of the season of Lent as we now know it, came into being.

As most people know, Lent lasts for forty days, commemorating the forty days and nights that Jesus spent being tempted and tested in the wilderness, in advance of beginning his public ministry. However, if you add up the number of days between 17^th February, Ash Wednesday 2010 and 4^th April, Easter Day 2010, you will discover that there are forty seven days in total. The reason for this apparent anomaly is simple – you do not count the Sundays as these are deemed to be feast days and not fasting days.

Yesterday evening, I held a Eucharist for Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes for those who wanted to receive it. We suffered additional penance with the Church itself being particularly cold. Heating within the St. Clement’s Church building is not that good at the best of times. However, on Sundays, we at least benefit from our host congregation, the Ceskobratrské Cíckve Evangelické /the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, having had the heating on for their service starting at 09.30 am before ours which begins at 11.00am. But the CCE are not great followers of the Liturgical Year other than celebrating Christmas and Easter and therefore do not have their own Ash Wednesday service.

My other act of penance in advance of Wednesday evening was having to produce copies of a completely new service booklet containing the liturgy. Having been in Prague since September 2008, this was my second Ash Wednesday in the Czech Republic. Before moving here, I bought an external hard-drive and copied a whole load of material off the Shelswell Benefice computer belonging to my former North Oxfordshire parishes. This material included various service booklets for special days in the Christian Year including Ash Wednesday, all of which had been put together by my former part-time Benefice Administrator, the wonderful Becky Adams.

Last year, I printed off copies of the Ash Wednesday service booklet that we had used for a number of years in my previous parishes. All I did was alter the cover so that it said ‘St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Prague’ instead of ‘Shelswell Group of Parishes’. But when I came to use it I discovered to my horror as I led the intercessions, that the text required me to pray for ‘Her Majesty the Queen and the High Court of Parliament’! Such a wording is somewhat out of place in the capital of a European republic with a congregation that only has a minority of Brits within it.

We should all learn from our mistakes and I certainly did from that embarrassing one. Whilst the St. Clement’s congregation is part of the forty-fourth diocese of the Church of England, not quite the entire liturgy of the Church of England is suitable for using in a continental European Chaplaincy.

The third member of our family

Oscar on the duvet — Oscar striking an interesting pose whilst asleep © Ricky Yates

As I have written previously on this blog, not only did Sybille and I move to Prague in September 2008, so did our adopted cat Oscar. From time to time we get enquiries as to how Oscar is adapting to his new life in Prague. So I decided it was time to devote a blog post specifically to Oscar.

Like most cats, Oscar spends the vast majority of his time either sleeping or eating. I took the photo on the left this morning, when he adopted a rather interesting pose whilst sleeping on the double bed in our guest bedroom. Of course, as far as Oscar is concerned, it isn’t the guest bedroom, it is Oscar’s bedroom! Whenever we have visitors to stay overnight, we have a major exercise in advance of their arrival, removing cat hair from both beds in the guest bedroom.

The big difference for Oscar between living in a detached Rectory in North Oxfordshire and living in a second floor flat in the suburbs of Prague, is that he can no longer go outside and explore and supplement his diet with field mice and baby rabbits. Instead, he has become a ‘flat cat’. Overall he has adapted fairly well to this change, helped by the fact that in cat terms, he is now quite old. He will celebrate his thirteenth birthday next month. However, it must be said that quite frequently, his behaviour is what you might expect from a far younger cat. For example, he still quite regularly chases his own tail!

If you want to know more about Oscar and his life history, then I am instructed to provide a back link to Oscar’s own blog. It does need some updating but then, like everything else in Oscar’s life, he relies on his human slaves, (aka Sybille and me), to do it for him.

One of Oscar’s most recent habits has been, not just to sleep on top of the duvet on one of the beds in the guest bedroom, but under the duvet. Sometimes there is little more than a large bump in the duvet with a small amount of black and white fur protruding. The two photos below are good examples of this latest trend. You have to admit that he does look remarkably cute!

Oscar under duvet 1 — Oscar under the duvet © Ricky Yates

Oscar under duvet 2 — Oscar under the duvet © Ricky Yates

Flooding in Prague

Flood level 2002 — The height of flooding in Prague over the last 300 years © Sybille Yates

Prague is a beautiful city. One of the reasons it is so beautiful is being situated either side of the River Vltava. However, with the beauty of the riverside location comes the inherent danger of flooding. Unfortunately, over the centuries, this is something to which Prague has not been immune.

The picture on the left is of the wall of a building in Mala Strana, just south of Charles Bridge, and shows the height reached by floodwaters on several occasions during the last 300 years. Bearing in mind that I am quite tall, (1.87m or 6’ 1½”), and that where I am standing is well above the normal river level, it does illustrate the immensity and devastating nature of the flooding that engulfed Prague as recently as August 2002.

Apparently, there is an historic Prague expression, “The 100 Year Water”. As you can see, if you do a simple mathematical calculation, there actually was a 112 year gap between the last major flooding of 1890 before the flooding of 2002. And whilst the expression has no scientific evidence to support it, going further back, there were 106 years between the floods of 1784 and those of 1890.

Flood level 1880 (2) — Flood level marker 1890 © Ricky Yates

Flood level 1880 (1) — Flood level marker for 1890 with normal river level in the background © Ricky Yates

The two photographs above show the location elsewhere in Mala Strana, of another marker of the height of the serious flooding in 1890. Here I was able to get a backwater/mill stream of the River Vltava into my picture which I hope will indicate the difference between the normal river height and where the floodwaters rose to 120 years ago.

In the floods of 1890, three arches of Charles Bridge were destroyed as shown in the historic photograph below. Fortunately, the floods of 2002 did not destroy any part of the historic bridge though they did leave it seriously weakened. Over the last two years, major renovation work has been undertaken to it, both above and below the waters of the Vltava, to strengthen it and restore it to its former glory. Hopefully, this work will be completed in the next few months, thus allowing locals and visitors to walk freely across it without having to negotiate their way around scaffolding and fenced off sections.

As for “The Hundred Year Water”, I don’t think I will be around to witness it in the early years of the 22^nd century!

karluv_most_1890 — The damage caused to Charles Bridge by the floods of 1890. Image source; in public domain therefore assuming fair use.

Happy first birthday to my blog!

Prague Rooftops — View across Prague © Ricky Yates

This week, my blog celebrates its first birthday! I published my first blog post on 4^th February 2009. Entitled ‘Episcopal Taxi Service’, it described the events that had taken place in the previous week at the end of January 2009. So now seems a good time to look back over my first year of being a blogger.

In one respect, the blog is more than two years old as my wife Sybille kindly bought my domain rickyyates.com more than a year earlier in December 2007. She did so at the same time as purchasing a domain for my son Phillip to help him promote his skills as a caricaturist. Not only was phillyates.com available but rickyyates.com was too. So she purchased them both as very unusual but highly useful Christmas presents to us both.

When I started the blog, I had two groups of people in mind. One was my family and friends back in the UK who wanted to know how I was getting on in my new home, new job and different circumstances in the Czech Republic. Rather than write individual emails or letters I could say instead, “Just look at my blog”.

My other initial intended audience were my former parishioners in the Shelswell Group of Parishes in North Oxfordshire whom I had served as Rector from January 1993 until September 2008. The Benefice of Shelswell (to give the group of parishes their correct legal name) produces an extremely good monthly magazine entitled ‘Shelswell News’ which is delivered to around two thirds of households in the parishes who in turn, pay £7.00 a year for the privilege of receiving it. In the first few months after my arrival in Prague, I wrote a couple of newsy pieces about my new life in the Czech Republic. However, I was very aware that I could not always continue doing so.

One unwritten, but very important rule for Anglican clergy is that, once you have ceased to be Rector/Vicar of a parish or group of parishes and have moved on to a new post or have retired, you do not interfere or remain involved in any way, in the life of your former parish(es). This is order that your successor can begin their ministry without any outside interference. So in the March 2009 edition of ‘Shelswell News’ I wrote saying, “In future, if you want to know the latest news from Ricky & Sybille in Prague, visit www.rickyyates.com”.

However, I was always conscious that, sooner or later, my new parishioners at St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Prague would also find my blog and start reading it. Therefore, after a couple of months, rather than trying to hide it, I decided to add details of it to my ‘email signature’. Now, although hardly any of the congregation ever leaves a comment, I do know that it is quite widely read by congregational members. And yes – I am extremely careful not to say anything rude about any of them!!!!

Over the past twelve months I’ve managed to write 72 posts. On average, that is one every five and a half days – quite an achievement I reckon! Initially I relied on photographs or artwork legitimately downloaded from the internet, to illustrate my posts. Or I asked Sybille to photograph something for me so I could use it on my blog. Or I scanned the relevant item. But in June 2009, I bit the bullet and bought myself a relatively simple point and shoot digital camera and since then, the blog has almost exclusively been illustrated with my own photos. The exception is when I’m in the photo when I have to rely on my wife’s expertise.

I still get frustrated at my inability to quickly turn my thoughts and ideas into blog posts. I’m a stickler both for factual accuracy and correct spelling and getting both right takes time. And, as I’ve commented previously, I also try to spell Czech words, personal names and place names correctly, using the appropriate diacritics only to discover most web browsers turn some of them into ?????. Aagh!!!

My other frustration is the number of people who read my blog but never leave a comment. I do get comments, usually far too many of them. But most are spammers trying to promote online pharmacies, or sites offering pictures of so called ‘celebrities’ in various stages of undress, or comments that bear no relation to my post, trying to build back links to their own dubious websites. When someone clearly has read my post, then even if I don’t necessarily agree with what they say, I approve their comment. But sadly, such comments are few and far between.

Therefore as my blog enters its second year, if you enjoy reading it, don’t be afraid to say so. If you disagree with me or want to amplify what I’ve written, leave a comment. It will help me as I seek to articulate more of my experiences as an expat Anglican clergyman living in Central Europe during 2010.