Today is 31st December – New Year’s Eve. In Czech it is known as Silvestr as we discovered last year when the car park attendant at our local Billa supermarket wished us ‘hezky Silvestr’ as we gave him our ticket at the barrier. Sybille immediately knew what he meant as today is Silvester in German. And the reason for the name? In the Roman Catholic Church, today is the feast day of St. Sylvester/Pope Sylvester I who died on 31st December 335.
This post is really just a quick update on the things I’ve written about in my three previous December blog posts.
Weather
Not only did winter, with considerable snowfall, come early to Prague this year – it hasn’t gone away! We had a white Christmas with snow already on the ground and more fine powdery snow falling as we travelled to Church for our Midnight service on Christmas Eve.
Yesterday, rather than being cold and cloudy, it was fine; cold but sunny. So we went to visit one of Sybille’s favourite places – Prague zoo. The weather was perfect for the polar bears, North American bison and other animals used to snow and below freezing temperatures. However, I did feel somewhat sorry for this emu though I believe he was outside by choice.
Since well before Christmas, we’ve been planning to take the car to our good friend Adrian of Nepomuk in order to have four new ‘winter tyres’ fitted and a couple of other minor things fixed. But unfortunately, the weather has been so bad we just haven’t felt able to undertake the journey. Therefore, the poor ‘Carly’, as it has become affectionately known, continues to sit outside covered in snow.
Our broadcast service on BBC Radio 4 on 26th December had been very well received. As well as complimentary emails from various persons, known and unknown, one other very interesting statistic has emerged. Our Church website normally gets 10 – 15 hits a day. On Sunday 26th December it got 153 hits!!! If you haven’t yet heard the broadcast, you can still do so during the next two days by visiting the Radio 4 Sunday Worship website.
Christmas Carp induced flooding
We’ve dried out and all the electrics are working. However, we are still awaiting a visit from our neighbour’s insurance company’s appropriately named ‘liquidator’!
This post should have two sub-titles. One is the well known English saying that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’. The second is ‘It could only happen in the Czech Republic’.
The traditional Czech Christmas delicacy is carp. They are raised in fish ponds, particularly around the town of Trebon in southern Bohemia. Then in the week before Christmas, carp sellers set up stalls in the streets of Prague where you can choose and purchase your carp as they swim around in large tubs of water. The picture above is of one such stall and you can see from the picture on the left that the price this year was 79 Kc per kilo.
You can have your chosen carp killed and gutted on the stall and this ‘delightful’ practice will often leave a stream of carp blood running down the nearby street gutter. But many people, especially those who buy their carp a few days before Christmas Eve when the price this year was cheaper at 73 Kc per kilo, take there carp home still alive in a bag of water. At home, the live carp is allowed to swim in the family bath until the time comes for it to be cooked and served.
On the afternoon of Tuesday 21st December, Sybille and I were both working in the Chaplaincy flat office when Sybille remarked that she could hear water dripping. Having checked that it wasn’t our shower which does occasionally drip, she looked around and discovered that what she had heard was water dripping from the ceiling in one corner of our hallway, adjacent to the doorways that lead into our two bedrooms. It was obviously coming from the flat immediately above us so Sybille shot upstairs to see if anyone was there. The flat above ours is occupied by a father who we now know is called Mr Tuma, together with his two teenage sons. Fortunately, one of the sons was at home and who does speak a reasonable amount of English. He was already aware that water had overflowed in their flat and he assured us that he had already stopped the flow. But then followed his incredible explanation of what had happened.
His father had bought a carp and they were keeping it alive swimming around in the bath until Christmas Eve. Their bath is like ours and has a lever tap, (as in the adjacent photo), which is raised to let water in and then is moved from side to side to increase or reduce the temperature of the water. Whilst the son was elsewhere in the flat, the carp had leapt in the bath water, flicked the tap lever and turned the tap on thus causing the bath to overflow! Hopefully, any reader will now understand the title of this piece and my suggested two sub-titles. It really was beyond belief!
Assured that the source of the water flow had been stopped and leaving a tea towel to catch and soak up the remaining drips from our hallway ceiling, we went off into the centre of Prague as we had previously planned to do. Unfortunately, when we got home a few hours later, we found more water on our floor and when Sybille tried to turn on our bedroom light, it threw the trip switch for the electricity for the whole flat.
More water had found its way through from the flat above and chosen the easiest route to exit. This was the respective holes where the electric wiring for main light in each of our two bedrooms passes through the ceiling. And because under each light is a saucer shaped frosted glass shade (IKEA’s best!), water had gathered in the saucers and then overflowed onto the floors and beds below.
We once more called on our neighbours and fortunately by now, the father was at home. Mr Tuma speaks better German than English but in a mixture of the two languages, gave us the details of his insurance and profusely apologised for what had happened. He also assured us that the offending carp was now dead!
The next day he called again, this time with a phone number and reference number for us to make our claim on his insurance policy. We were also presented with an attractive 2011 calendar and a very nice bottle of wine and yet more grovelling apologies. Fortunately after 24 hours, everything appeared to have dried out and all our electrics are currently working properly again. We are now awaiting a visit from the insurance company’s ‘liquidator’ to sort out getting the damage to plaster and paintwork put right.
The one final funny part of this story of Christmas carp induced flooding in our flat came when Mr Tuma gave us his business card with his name and contact phone number. As he sheepishly admitted, it also revealed what his occupation is – Water Engineer!
Update November 2012 – The post below was written by me nearly three years in January 2010, just after my second Christmas in Prague. It continues to rank very high in Google & other search engines for anyone using the search term ‘Christmas in Prague’. Therefore, if you have just arrived here because of doing exactly that, rest assured that much of what appears below is still true, three years on. And if you are in Prague over Christmas 2012, details of our Christmas services can be found here.
Having arrived in Prague in September 2008 in order to take up my post as Anglican Chaplain, it meant that Christmas 2009 was my second Christmas here. Therefore this time, I had a far clearer understanding of what I might expect to experience over the festive season.
Most Anglican clergy in the UK, see their largest congregations over the Christmas period. It was certainly my experience in North Oxfordshire that I could frequently have up to 25% – 30% of the population of one of my villages in Church either for a service of Lessons and Carols or on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day. Historically, the Church of England always used to use the number of Easter communicants as a means of measuring its numerical strength. But whilst these are still counted, increasingly the largest Church attendance figures are registered at Christmas services.
I have often reflected upon why this should be and have concluded that most people find the infant lying in the manger, very non-threatening over and against an adult man being put to death upon a cross. There is comfortableness about Christmas whereas Easter provides a real challenge. However, the Prague Anglican Chaplaincy currently maintains the more historic pattern, as my largest congregation since being here is still all those who worshipped at St. Clement’s on Easter Day 2009 as I have described in a previous blog post.
The reason why this should be the case arises from the nature of the regular congregation. The majority are English-speaking expatriates. Thus the Christmas-New Year period is seen as an occasion to return to their own home countries in order to celebrate the festival with their wider families and friends. This is further exacerbated by the fact that many in the congregation either teach in one of the various international schools in Prague and/or have children who attend one of these schools. The three week Christmas school holidays, together with summer months of July and August, provide the only real opportunity for a trip back ‘home’.
Therefore, like many UK Churches, our service of Lessons and Carols was somewhat displaced into the Advent Season and was held on the evening of Sunday 13th December. This allowed nearly all the regular congregation to attend as it was before the beginning of the Christmas exodus. Additionally, we were joined by a number of other regular worshippers – those who regularly attend Church once a year for the Carol service!!!
Despite so many of my regular congregation being away over Christmas, I still held a Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve. There were a scattering of regulars in attendance, together with various visitors spending Christmas in Prague, including a number of South Asian young people staying at Sir Toby’s Hostel. On Christmas Day morning at 11am, there were many more members of the regular congregation in attendance for the Family Eucharist. These were mainly ‘English-speaker married to Czech’ couples and their children who form a growing part of the congregation and bring an ever-increasing stability to it. As at midnight, numbers were also boosted by numerous visitors to Prague.
During December, Prague attracts many visitors because of its Christmas markets. These take place in various parts of the city, particularly in Staromestské námestí/Old Town Square. The markets are predominantly aimed at international visitors and we both particularly enjoyed seeing two more examples of ‘Czenglish’ that appear below.
