Tag: Na staré fa?e Bar-Restaurant

Celebrating my 60th birthday

Standing on the end of the Baba ridge on my 60th birthday © Sybille Yates

As many readers of my blog will already know, today Sunday 26th February 2012, I celebrated my 60th birthday. As I wrote in a previous post, just like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, in 2012, I am also celebrating my Diamond Jubilee.

Overall, I have quite positive feelings regarding reaching this landmark. As I wrote previously on this blog, in October 2011, I passed the age my father was when he died. Over the past year, I’ve shed around 10 kg in weight and feel fitter now than I have for a number of years. I can still keep wicket in a forty overs-a-side cricket match and just over half a year ago, I successfully climbed the highest mountain in the Czech Republic.

The one thing I have become aware of during the past year is how much greyer my hair has become. But whilst the hairline does continue to recede and the hair becomes increasingly thinner on top, I still have more hair than I can ever remember my father having.

I firmly believe that God has a great sense of humour. This was very clearly brought home to me when I sat down on Saturday 25th February, the day before my birthday, to say Morning Prayer. The Psalm set was Psalm 71. In particular, two verses brought a smile to my face as I read them. In verse 9, the Psalmist pleads,

‘Do not cast me away in the time of my old age;

Forsake me not when my strength fails.’

And further on in verse 18 he cries,

‘Forsake me not, O God, when I am old and grey-headed,

till I make known your deeds to the next generation and your power to all that are to come.’

The ‘old and grey-headed’ bit did somewhat ring true. But I also liked the challenge of the second half of the verse – my responsibility to make God’s deeds and power known to the next generation. It is a reminder to me that I still have at least a further five years of full time ministry ahead of me before I can consider retiring. And even when I am retired, so long as my health permits, I intend to apply for ‘Permission to officiate,’ to whichever Anglican bishop’s jurisdiction I am then living under.

So how did I celebrate my birthday today? Well, I had known for quite some time that my 60th birthday would fall on a Sunday – a working day. Of course, as all clergy have heard ad infinitum, it is the only day we work! But any proposed celebrations became much further curtailed when two days beforehand on her own birthday, Sybille went down with a hacking cough and cold.

Then this morning started off even more inauspiciously, when the first sound I heard as a woke up at around 06.45, was our elderly black and white cat Oscar, being sick somewhere. Fortunately, it was only on the floor of our bedroom and therefore fairly easy to clean up. A little while later, as Sybille awoke, I was greeted with ‘Alles Gute zum Geburtstag’. But not wanting to pass on her infection, Sybille decided that her best course of action was to stay home, rather than accompany me to Church.

However, it was at Church this morning that the highlight of my day occurred, not least because it caught me completely unawares. In the absence of our regular organist, Professor Michal Novenko, the organ was being played by Larry Leifeste, a Texan who moved to Prague with wife Celieta, in August last year and have both joined the St. Clement’s congregation. Since then, Larry has very happily deputised on the organ, whenever Michal has been ill or away.

I duly announced the first hymn from the back of Church as Hymn 190, ‘Forty days and forty nights’. But instead of striking up the tune ‘Auf der Tiefe’, to which the hymn, so appropriate for the First Sunday of Lent, is set, Larry instead started playing ‘Happy Birthday to you’. The congregation soon twigged, (several of them already knew it was my birthday), and they duly joined together and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me as I walked up the aisle.

Early this afternoon, after I got back to the Chaplaincy Flat, Sybille said she felt well enough to walk up the hill through woods behind the Podbaba complex, to Restaurace na Staré Fare where we ate a late Sunday lunch. By the time we had finished eating, there was sunshine and bright blue sky, in contrast to the mixture of rain and snow of the morning. So before returning home, we walked out to the end of the Baba ridge where there is a wonderful view across Prague and where my 60th birthday photo at the top of this post was taken.

 

A visit from the Archdeacon

Left to right; Rev'd Petr Jan Vinš, Archdeacon Patrick Curran and me © Sybille Yates

One of the things anyone taking on being an Anglican Chaplain in the Diocese in Europe is warned about, is the fact that you will be working in relative isolation. In England, most Anglican clergy meet their nearby colleagues at regular meetings of the Deanery Clergy Chapter. These meetings provide an opportunity for mutual help and support as well as being a safe environment in which to sound off about difficult parishioners! Likewise, if you want to talk an issue over with your bishop or archdeacon, they are usually no more than a one hour journey away and a meeting can be easily organised.

Here in Prague, my nearest Anglican colleagues are in Warsaw to the north, Budapest to the east and Vienna to the south-east. As I have blogged previously, I only usually see my colleagues once a year at our Eastern Archdeaconry Synod. Actually, my nearest Anglican colleague is probably the Chaplain in Leipzig, but then he is in the Archdeaconry of Germany and Northern Europe!

Another contrast with England is that my Archdeacon Patrick Curran is not only Archdeacon of the Eastern Archdeaconry, but also Chaplain of Christ Church, Vienna. In England, most Archdeacons have no other responsibilities other than being Archdeacon. Some, including my previous Archdeacon Julian Hubbard, also have a role in the Diocesan Cathedral. But as Cathedrals have numerous ordained staff, duties are rarely very onerous.

Whilst Archdeacon Patrick does have a non-stipendiary colleague, Rev’d Aileen Hackl and more recently has been joined by a part-time curate, Rev’d Jady Koch, he still has an unenviable task of heading up a large chaplaincy in Vienna as well as trying to oversee our Archdeaconry which stretches from Poland, Czech Republic and Austria in the west, all the way to Vladivostok in the east and including all the former Yugoslavia together with Greece and Turkey.

Despite the distances and the workload, Archdeacon Patrick does try to visit each of the Chaplaincies within his Archdeaconry, once every three years. Although he was in Prague on 28th October 2008 for my licensing service, he had not made a Sunday visit here since the time of my predecessor John Philpott, who retired in April 2008. Therefore, he kindly agreed to make a weekend visit this past weekend, travelling by train from Vienna on Saturday 30th January and returning by train on the afternoon of Sunday 31st January.

Patrick’s visit got off to a slightly inauspicious start. Prague has four different mainline railway stations and the through train from Vienna to Hamburg stops at two of them. Patrick got off at the first station – we were waiting to meet him at the second! But realising what he must have done when he did not appear where we were expecting him; we made the reverse journey and eventually found him.

Although Archdeacon Patrick was only with us for twenty four hours, he still managed to pack in a two hour meeting with my Church Council and a private meeting with the Churchwardens, before Sybille and I shared an evening meal with him in one of our favourite eating places, the Na staré fare Bar-Restaurant, up the hill behind where we live.

Archdeacon Patrick Curran with Pastor Eva Halamová outside St. Clement's Church, Prague © Sybille Yates

On Sunday morning, he was the guest preacher at our Sung Eucharist as we celebrated the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple or Candlemas as it is commonly known. This was followed a very enjoyable soup and sandwich shared lunch with a large number of our congregation, held in the meeting room on the third floor of Klimentská 18 which, like the Church itself, we borrow from our host congregation, the Ceskobratrské Cíckve Evangelické / the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren. After lunch, we successfully delivered him to the correct railway station for his return four hour journey back to Vienna.

As you will see from the photo above, we were also joined for our service by the recently ordained Old Catholic priest, Petr Jan Vinš who is a fluent English-speaker. It was an extremely rare event to have three ordained clergy present for a service at St. Clements! Archdeacon Patrick also enjoyed meeting Pastor Eva Halamová who leads our host congregation. She is pictured here in her Geneva gown, alongside Patrick who put his coat over his cassock because it was so cold! The snow that you can also see in both photographs,  is part of what fell on Friday 8th January and has yet to melt.

Spring comes to Prague

Forsythia in full bloom (c) S.Yates
Forsythia in full bloom © Sybille Yates

Apologies to those who follow my blog that I haven’t posted anything for just over two weeks. I’ve got three excuses. The first is suffering from bloggers block – not really knowing what to write about. The second is we’ve just had Holy Week & Easter – a somewhat busy time in my profession and about which I will write in due course. And the third is the complete change in the weather we have experienced here in Prague meaning that it has been much more fun to be outside rather than sitting before the computer!

On the night of Saturday 28th – Sunday 29th March, all across Europe, the clocks went forward by one hour. Here in Prague, we are now two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Central European Summer Time (CEST) which remains one hour ahead of the UK who are now on British Summer Time (BST). However, calling it ‘summer time’ did seem rather odd bearing in mind that in the week before the clocks went forward, we’d had several snow showers! But in the week following the clock change, as March became April, suddenly Winter became Spring. In fact it was almost more like Winter became Summer!

For the past twelve days or so, we’ve had clear blue skies during the day with ever increasing hours of sunshine and temperatures into the low twenties Celsius. And as each succeeding day has a few more minutes’ daylight and a few minutes less darkness, the change is quite astounding. You see and experience it in so many ways.

Out of the ground have sprung a whole array of spring flowers in a variety of bright colours. You see them in the flowerbeds of public open spaces, in window boxes hung on balconies and in the private gardens of those lucky enough to have ground-floor flats or houses. Forsythia is flowering bright yellow and all those trees that should have blossom, have blossomed!

We often walk up the steep tarmac path called Pat’anka that leads from our flats complex up to a fascinating suburb of late 1920s/early 1930s Bauhaus houses above. We walk to exercise our legs, enjoy the wonderful view across the city at the top of the hill, visit the Albert Supermarket, as well as to enjoy some occasional liquid refreshment in the Na staré fare Bar-Restaurant. In just one week, the wooded slope that the steep path traverses has gone from bare trees and branches to every shade of green imaginable.

At the back of the Na staré fare Bar-Restaurant, there is a wonderful shaded courtyard which we had previously only ever seen through the window. For the past ten days it has been furnished with tables, chairs & sun umbrellas and we have enjoyed eating meals there al fresco. Likewise in the city centre, every bar & restaurant that can, now has tables and chairs outside so that customers can enjoy the warmth and the sunshine.

It is not only nature and the Hotel/restaurant/bar trade that has suddenly gone into Spring/Summer mode, so has most of the resident population. Throughout the winter months, most Prague women have dressed in jeans or trousers with leather boots. Very rarely did you see a skirt, no doubt because it was too cold. Suddenly, skirts are everywhere and only occasionally are they of the mid-calf or below variety. Nearly all the younger ladies, together with quite a number of the not-so-young ladies, wear them knee length or above, often considerably above!!! Many men are in shorts whilst the builders working on the final part of our flat complex development opposite are bare-chested & displaying their six packs as they fabricate steel mesh & pour concrete.

Whilst it has been wonderful to finally be able to enjoy this amazing city in warmth and sunshine, there are two downsides. After three months (January – March) of being able to walk freely through the historic areas and across Charles Bridge with relatively few people around, the tourist season has now re-started with a vengeance. We are threatening to start wearing tee-shirts declaring ‘I’m not a tourist, I live here!’ And today I found the first two unwelcome visitors of a different kind in our bathroom – mosquitoes! Unfortunately, one of them found me first. I have a lovely bite on my left forearm!