Graduation

While technically I graduated in December, there isn't a ceremony then. The advantage of the spring ceremony is, I suppose, that it doesn't conflict with winter holidays. Well, and admittedly the lilacs begin to bloom around graduation time, which is a fine thing. And several of my colleagues were also graduating in the spring (three of them actually attended the ceremony), as did a fair number of my students and my friends from gamelan.
My department does a very nice ceremony of its own on the morning of the big ceremony, but it has almost become too successful: the auditorium was packed with families and I hear that quite a few people had to stand in the hall outside because the aisles were filled. (We refrained from alerting the Fire Marshall.) While it is nice to combine the Studio, Architectural Studies, and Art History festivities, I suspect it won't be feasible to continue to do so. I was planning to take pictures at the event, but completely failed to.
Before long, it was time to race off to the main graduation, which undertakes to do everyone from every school in the university all in one long afternoon. As such things go, it was pretty standard, but despite the airconditioning in the stadium, those of us wearing caps and gowns were sweating profusely. I don't know how any wool can rightly be described as "tropical," but better tropical wool than the synthetics that most people had gotten. Synthetics feel hot in a nastier way than natural fibers, and I am not about to endure that if I have any choice. What I don't understand is why, given that academic regalia is generally worn in the spring or summer, it is not made mostly of linen. We are not living in medieval days, when academics wore heavy robes to keep warm through the winter.
Still, I think Kristen and I looked rather festive in our regalia.


Kristen and I standing around awaiting our parents.


Kristen's parents arrived first.


My family did manage to explore the campus a bit too.


I had intended for there to be quite a few photos of various people around the Fine Arts building, but that didn't end up happening.


I also meant to take photos at the wine-and-cheese party my (and Kristen's) advisor threw us, but that didn't happen either. Eventually we went home, where at least there are plenty of trees in bloom.


And that's all. It will probably be about all for this blog as well, as the blog was intended to keep people up to date on my life and research in Prague, which ended two years ago. Kristen has inquired whether Facebook has lured me away from blogging, and the answer is decidedly not; different online activities have different uses. But there are limits, after all, to how much I can say about my life these days--at least without being annoying. I like blogging, but it has to have some purpose, even if a fairly vaguely defined one.
So, if there is something to say that fits this blog, I might add it, but otherwise I think the reasonable thing would be to start a different blog. After all, this one was mostly about being a PhD student, and now the PhD is done.
Time for something new and exciting.

As the Semester Ends...

I've said it before, and my opinion hasn't changed: I've had very good students this semester. They write pretty well, most of them have some idea how to analyze what they're looking at, and all in all they've been a pleasure.
This does not, of course, alleviate the mingled pain and amusement that comes from the strange things I encounter on final exams. Even some of my best students have gotten certain things alarmingly wrong.
I am getting used to the fact that a certain number of people each semester come to the conclusion that René Magritte was a woman and that therefore I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest must be a feminist work.
I was not really expecting, however, to get an intelligent but wrong analysis of Sylvia Sleigh's Turkish Bath as being set in a gay bathhouse.
It is not okay to call collages, sculptures, and photographs "painting."
Frida Kahlo was not a Social Realist, and Alfred Stieglitz was not a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Surely I can cover more than one movement per week without this sort of confusion?
I am a bit disturbed at the number of people who have classified Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Worker (they are holding hammer and sickle) as Nazi art. It appears that even many students who correctly identified it as a Soviet-made sculpture are not familiar with the symbolism of the hammer and sickle, despite the fact that I am sure I talked about this in class. Seeing the sickle referred to as a "chisel" was also rather surprising. I don't think today's youth are using enough hand tools. Even the hammer wasn't always correctly identified as such.
In somewhat the same vein, everyone does a pretty good job discussing Grant Wood's American Gothic, but please, can we call a pitchfork a pitchfork? If I keep reading about how the man holds his tool tightly or grips his tool firmly, I may be unable to continue grading.
I realize that by mentioning these things, I run the risk of making my students look bad, but in a class of about 40, the miracle is that there isn't really all that much to complain of. Overall, I think nearly all of them have learned a lot and I am sorry to say goodbye to them.

Papers and More Papers

As I prepare to leave town for the AAH conference in Manchester (that's the original British Manchester, not one of those upstart Manchesters that seem to exist in every eastern state here), my Intro to Modern students are in the throes of preparing their class papers.
They have the option of doing either an article comparison, which is intended to hone their analytical skills, or a research paper on a topic to be approved by me. The first time I taught this class, there were quite a few research papers, some of them remarkably good. Last semester there were not very many and some of those were evidently by students who needed further guidance on just what a research paper is, but there were also some outstanding papers. This semester the research papers will again be rather few, but I think they will be good. I will be getting one on Czech cubism, one on Croatian naive painting, one on the relationship of gay sexuality to the work of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, one on Picasso's Blue Period (this is an alluring topic for students, I have noticed), one on Magritte and philosophy, one on Magritte and Dali (I wait to see exactly where this goes), one on Abstract Expressionism, and one on Malevich and Suprematism.
A few papers will be coming in tomorrow to give me something to read on the plane, but most of them, I am sure, will be appearing in my box next Tuesday.
My Realism and Impressionism students have already done all their papers, while the Czech Modernism seminar has just turned in their rough drafts, which I have not had any time to examine. I suppose I might read those on the plane too.

Baudelaire and Clark

I may complain a bit from time to time about infelicitous things in my students' exams and the like, but really I do have a very satisfactory group (well, three groups since I teach three classes) this semester.
While the number of things I need to get done (prep, grading, journal articles, etc.) tends to prompt feelings of alarm and angst, actually sitting down to grade the second batch of Realism and Impressionism papers has been quite pleasant. Nearly the entire class writes pretty well, and nearly all of them think through the material with admirable ability. In fact, nobody is having any serious problems, although I daresay some of them would like to get a somewhat better grade than they are earning. Thus, while I was a bit perturbed to find that the first two papers I read (examining Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" in conjunction with two chapters by T. J. Clark) failed to mention Baudelaire at all, those papers were generally all right in other respects. And the best papers in the class are really enjoyable, combining well-chosen quotations from Baudelaire and Clark with pertinent images and supple analysis of art and texts.
This makes me feel, temporarily, content.

The Joy of Exams

While generally speaking, I think it's incumbent upon me to encourage my students, and while on the whole they are doing pretty well, there are always times when they invite their own doom and even (dare I say it?) some ridicule.
I always do a section of term definitions on my Intro to Modern midterm. Define twelve terms that relate to modern art, for one point each--given that these are all terms covered in class and that the book has a glossary defining most of them, how hard can this really be? Yet somehow this is a thing even my best students tend to have some trouble with. I think only one person thus far this semester has gotten full points.
I thought, for instance, that this semester I had really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Japonisme, because the majority of students define Orientalism incorrectly. But apparently I really stressed the difference between Orientalism and Primitivism (also a problem area), so while no one this semester is confusing that pair, most of the definitions for Orientalism are really definitions of Japonisme. This would not be so odd if it weren't that Orientalism is such a major theme in the academic world these days and I would have thought my students (unlike me) might have imbibed the works of Edward Said with their mothers' milk. I guess Orientalism is more the province of graduate students than of undergrads. I will, thus, keep trying to make clear that Orientalism generally involves eroticization of "exotic" foreign cultures, particularly Muslim cultures but also potentially Hindu and Far Eastern cultures. At least, that's Orientalism in 19th and early 20th century art. And it's not as though we haven't looked at a good many examples.
The very term Avantgarde is, for some reason, also problematic. A certain number of people always do get this right without the slightest difficulty, but a strangely large number always suppose it's a specific movement, or that it's "a new country's art movement" or some other odd thing.
And again, despite my continued efforts to clarify the meaning of Nonobjective art, students continue to define it as "art without a focus" and art that can mean different things to different people. I think some of them probably understand the term better than they are able to define it, but very few seem to state that it's art that doesn't depict something you can see out there in the real world. They don't seem to connect it with Malevich's Black Square (which they reserve for their definitions of Suprematism) or with Kandinsky's later work. Maybe I should make them define Nonobjective later in the semester, when they've seen more examples.
Of course, there are always some definitions that are simply humorous.
"Supermatism--It was an art movement that would just use simple geographic shapes to depict their work." I actually gave partial credit for this because despite the wording, it's clear the writer has some idea what Suprematism is. Anyone (myself included) might accidentally write "geographic" instead of "geometric." All the same, I'm envisioning Malevich attempting to depict the Black Square by means of a map of Moscow or Novosibirsk.
I guess Malevich will keep us amused. And so will all that fuzzy-looking subjective Nonobjective art. At least everyone seems clear on what Pointillism is, and nearly everyone can say something reasonable about Fauvism, despite the paucity of references to the term meaning "wild beast-ism".

Alternative Focus at Silver Eye

Readers in the Pittsburgh area might want to go and check out the Alternative Focus exhibition at Silver Eye Center for Photography. The show, up until June 14, features pinhole photography by Jesseca Ferguson and Tom Persinger.
The two photographers use the same basic technique of lensless photography to achieve very different effects with disparate subjects.
Jesseca Ferguson assembles still lifes using objects she has collected, prints the result using various older photographic techniques, and then incorporates them into assemblages in which old papers and book covers become background to the photograph. I liked the general effect, but was a little disturbed that in some of the works she had used old handwritten documents (letters?), all of which seemed to be in Polish. As a historically minded person, I wanted to know what these documents said (I can read a little Polish and recognized a lot of words, but not enough of the documents were visible) and to feel sure that these weren't anything anyone would ever want. I had the feeling that somebody's interesting account of immigrant life was probably irretrievably cut up and glued up, and this bothered me. As a collage artist myself, I'm always torn between enchantment at the effects people achieve with old materials, and anxiety that they could be ignorantly tearing up valuable books, documents, and photos that simply happened to be available cheap. One man's junk is another man's treasure, but it could be treasure in one way to one person and treasure in quite another way to someone else.
Tom Persinger's photographs, which were what I had come to see, are scenes of forests and swamps. The pinhole process requires longish exposures, so the images are not crisp (leaves move a little, water refuses to be still), but have a rich, almost velvety look. I'm not sure how much of this is the result of the pinhole technique and how much is his printing process (I think they were all silver gelatin prints). There was a time when I was fairly serious about photography, but I only got as far as learning the basics of doing my own prints, so I'm ignorant about the benefits of different printing processes.
One Tree, 2006, copyright Tom Persinger
You can see more examples of the photographs here.

Biking to the Animal Shelter

Via Kristen, who gives me all my blog ideas these days, I point my readers in the direction of Claudia's bike challenge. The idea is to bike somewhere at least once a week that one would normally drive, although it looks like most of the readers are already avid bikers or don't even own cars in the first place.
It has been so rainy that I doubt many people in Pittsburgh have taken up this challenge with success, but now that we've gotten a little sunshine, I'm on the bike. I don't think my three jaunts to and from school count since I normally take the bus, but today I biked over to the Animal Rescue League and on the way back I bought groceries, so that certainly counts.
While I was at the shelter, I had time to let Bingo and Basil out for exercise (I would have let out another rabbit or two, but it was hard to persuade Bingo and Basil that it was time to go in). Bingo, as usual, was a whirlwind of activity. His hormones haven't had much time to subside, so he promptly sprayed me (Ms. Spots was intrigued to find his scent on my pants when I got home). Basil is quiet only in comparison to Bingo; they both ran around tirelessly, but Bingo is more frenetic. The three does in the bottom cages got all upset when Bingo was out, but Jubilee and Harley were nicer about Basil and mostly didn't try to bite him when he came by. I think they rather like him. Bonnie, aka Babs, hates any rabbit who ventures near her cage, so she tried to bite both of them.
Sophia is in an upper-level cage, so she mostly ignored the excitement below. She remains tentative about me; so long as the cage door is closed, she's interested, but if I open the door, she hides in the corner. She did let me pet her for a few minutes, though, and clearly needs and wants more attention.
Two new rabbits have arrived, and both seem very nice. One is a white rex who was just neutered, and the other is a brown lionhead. Both were very grateful for the petting.

Life's Little Mysteries

Life is, of course, full of things we don't understand. Things like what's inside black holes, the nature of time, and why toddlers emit ear-splitting shrieks when excited.
At the moment, I am baffled as to why, in late May, Pittsburgh continues to experience such chilly weather. My recollection is that usually Pittsburgh goes from frigid to roasting in the space of about a week, and that this occurs sometime in April. When last I lived here, I concluded that T-shirts and long-sleeved shirts (staples of my wardrobe in Northern California) were nearly useless here because it was always either too hot or too cold for them and you went from turtlenecks and heavy sweaters almost directly to sleeveless tops.
This year, however, is determined to be different. Apart from a few warmer days here and there, we keep having days that start off around 40 and struggle to make it past 60 degrees. Add on the tendency toward rain, and I feel like I'm living in Britain. I'm all for the lush greenery and the flowers, and I don't mind a fair amount of light rain, but I'd like it to warm up just a few degrees and refrain from sprinkling during the times when I might want to bike to and from school.
Another mystery is that of today's email from a former student. I am happy to hear from former students, but I would prefer them to give some explanation why they are contacting me, beyond a vague desire to "keep in touch." I suppose that a simple desire to keep in touch would suffice coming from students I have actually gotten to know very well (or even whom I didn't know that well but who were outstanding students or who I directed to seek counseling) but when all I really remember about the person is his/her name and that they were in a one-credit class I taught around six years ago, and all they say is that they'd like to keep in touch, well, I can't help wondering if they even remember who I am and are confusing me with some other acquaintance in an ancient address book. I mean, why not at least say "I was in your BLANK class in BLANK year. Even though your class was a requirement, I enjoyed it and have fond memories of your (wonderful/stimulating/peculiar) lectures. These days I'm (working/traveling/in jail)." I could then say something like "Nice to hear from you. I enjoyed teaching your class. I'm still in Pittsburgh and getting ready to teach X, Y, and Z. I hope all goes well for you in your work/family life/travels/penal servitude." Of course, the better I know the student, the more personal my response will be. But I know that I could have made a difference even to people I don't remember very well, because there are certainly people who made a difference to me who are unlikely to remember much more than my name or face.

Spring in Pittsburgh

While it's not usually very warm yet (last week we had a lot of temperatures in the 40-degree range), spring has been firmly settled in Pittsburgh for about the past month. And this gives us lots of greenery and blossoms to enjoy, at least in my neighborhood.

Pittsburgh Dangdut Concert Videos

A little searching around on Youtube reveals that videos from our gamelan/dangdut concert have hit the Web. Thus, you too can experience the Dangdut Cowboys almost as if in Bellefield Hall.

This first video emphasizes the dance group in front of the stage (sorry, the videographer was stage left and I was stage right). It doesn't get the entire song, but some of the saxophone does get highlighted. For the rest of the song (sung by our fearless leader), proceed to the second video:

The third video is from further back and center, and is more memorable for the music (guest artists Ening Rumbini and Rita Tila on vocals) than the visuals unless you really want to watch carefully for occasional glimpses of me dancing off to the left. And I really mean only occasional and identifiable to the initiated, because everyone is very small in this video.

But... it turns out there's a higher quality version of Video #3 for true fans or those absolutely determined to see me dancing off to the left. I think you have to go to Youtube itself to watch that, but underneath the video window you can click on "watch in high quality." The visuals were significantly sharper and if you have good speakers I suppose the sound is as well. On the other hand, the high-quality version was a little too much for my high-speed bandwidth and kept stopping and starting. I'm not sure how high a speed is required to watch it uninterrupted.
There do exist a couple of full-length videos of the concerts, but I don't think they'll be showing up on YouTube.

First Republic Women

I've now returned from the weekend's jaunt to Northwestern (just outside Chicago) for the annual Czech Workshop. There were two full days' worth of interesting papers on all things Czech, ranging chronologically from (if memory serves me) the 19th century to the present. Mine was on First Republic visual imagery of women in periodicals and fine art, and without further ado I give you a few of the pictures I showed:

Mysteries of the Animal Kingdom

The rabbits can always come up with something to entertain, charm, or frustrate me. Or just baffle me. Why, for instance, did they avoid jumping on the couch for quite some time after I put the cover on it (the busy pattern, perhaps?) but have now decided the couch is just as fun as ever to sit on? Ms. Spots, who was not greatly interested in the couch before, has recently decided that the cover needs digging and pulling on. I had begun to think she was limiting that kind of play to the two old rugs in the kitchen.
Orion prefers bedding, and evidently the stronger the scent of his human, the better (this seems to put him into a state of strange ecstasy). I would not really care about his interest in bedding if he didn't chew on it, but as he likes it even fresh from the laundry, there is not much to be done to keep him away.
Then there is the lapine passion for nuts. Nuts are not a normal part of the lapine diet; rabbits are not squirrels, after all. But perhaps wild rabbits eat more nuts than we realize. Someone ought to research this, assuming it has not already been done. Something has to prompt rabbits to go gaga over nuts. If Ms. Spots were the only one who craved nuts, I would put this down to her adventurous palate, but Orion, who is a picky eater, will wrestle with her for a nut. It is true that only Ms. Spots goes into a wild frenzy of dancing and begging and pleading when she perceives that nuts have come onto the scene (do not try to eat peanuts, walnuts, or mixed nuts around her), but she is a more extroverted character who acts everything out just in case some lamebrained human didn't get the idea.
On a less entertaining note, this evening I discovered the first carpet beetle larva of the season. It was in my bed, apparently having been feasting on my wool blanket. I was disgusted and hope that it is some sort of late-hatching survivor of the 2005 infestation rather than the product of a new cache of eggs. None of the anti-carpet-beetle information I've seen reveals what the eggs look like, only the larvae and adults. The little abominations had better not be in any of my winter clothes that I've been so diligently trying to clean and protect. Let me say it to the carpet beetles of the world, yet again: carpet beetles belong outdoors helping rid the world of excess old fur and feathers. There is no need to come inside and eat my sweaters and blankets and paintbrush bristles and silk scarves.

Pre-Concert Life

For obvious reasons, I have no concert photos, but several of us got good documentation of the backstage life of the Pittsburgh gamelan, which ranged from the studious to the exuberant. Yuko, our TA, was on the more studious end of the scale.

Ben, another musicology grad student, believes firmly in photographic documentation. I believe that at this moment he was documenting Rob.



Rob was so impressed by our guest artists' makeup skills that he got himself done in David Bowie style.

Lydia was not so pleased with Rob's new look.

Jordan, however, thought the new Rob was an improvement.

Our guest artists soon went back to their own preparations.

Margot doesn't usually wear makeup, but as a featured vocalist she agreed to deck herself out.

Of course, many of the performers take a calm and low-key approach to the whole thing, as does Ben from CMU and also Sachem and Margarita.



Kim has done gamelan for years, so he had no fears of forgetting his part.

The performance itself was a wild success and we persuaded many audience members to join us in dancing in front of the stage toward the end of the show.
Don't forget, we perform again tonight!

Gamelan Concert Tonight

We're onstage at Bellefield Hall in Pittsburgh (across from the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel) at 8:00 tonight and tomorrow. These are the university gamelan's major performances, which normally include Indonesian guest artists. Tickets are $10 general admission, $5 students/seniors, free with Pitt student ID, and you can read all the official details on the Music Dept's blog.
Our dress rehearsal went until about 1:00am last night but despite its length it was pretty good as such things go. Most of the students only perform in the first half of the program, so it was our first chance to hear what the guest artists were planning without us. The first half focuses on traditional Sundanese gamelan while the second half is more of an introduction to different kinds of recent Sundanese popular music. By the end of the dress rehearsal, those of us not onstage were having a wild dangdut dance party, so I feel confident that the audience will have a fine time too.

Past and Future Luck

Interesting possibilities lie ahead. Some of them are pretty much there for me to take; others remain uncertain, dependent on factors somewhat or even largely outside my control.
To be sure, this is always the case, but it seems particularly true of late. Will the journal article I just revised be accepted? ...depends on whether the editors and anonymous reviewers think the changes were sufficient. Will I come up with a truly scintillating topic for the intriguing call-for-papers that arrived in today's email? ...we can only hope so since my research gives me several possible angles. Projects for next year? ...this area remains in the planning stages.
There was a time when I wanted particular things intensely. Now, we often hear that in order to get what you want, you have to really want it, and to some extent this is true. Many things in life require wanting something enough to put in the effort to get it.
But when I think of the things I've wanted the most desperately, and put a lot of effort into getting, on the whole these are not things I ever got. (Or at least not yet. I suppose some of them could still surprise me, and I hope one or two of them will.) I'm much better at getting things I want less intensely and that require either little effort or only reasonable diligence.
And at some point I found that I had moved away from wanting specific things intensely and on to wanting whatever would be the best outcome. This is especially true of situations involving other people, because what I want most might not be best for everyone involved, but it's an approach that also feels well suited to waiting for results of applications and such. Applying for funding, I might think I preferred a particular fellowship, but I'd figure that what I wanted most was whatever would really be best, and that the best outcome might not be obvious to me.
In general, I'd say my life has been full of very good luck, but it has felt particularly lucky since I took to hoping for whatever was truly best. There are things I once wanted and didn't get, and that I subsequently realized wouldn't have been all that great. One of those failures to get what I wanted brought me something much better.
It feels a little vague just to hope for whatever will truly be best in a given situation, but I've learned that it works pretty well for me. And so, looking into an only partly defined future, I feel confident that, with the right attitude and an openness to the possibilities, my luck will be pretty good.

Your Luck Quotient: 75%

You have a high luck quotient. More often than not, you've felt very lucky in your life. You may be randomly lucky, but it's probably more than that. Optimistic and open minded, you take advantage of all the luck that comes your way.

How Lucky Are You?

Tax Time and How We Distract Ourselves

I did, actually, pretty much do my federal taxes today, and they would be done if I didn't have to check a couple of things before I send them off. As in, it would be nice to know whether I should have a W2 form (my pay information stated that I would get one).
But it was a pretty nice spring day, so the apartment was filled with light, so I also busied myself with various spring tasks such as packing winter sweaters into ziplock bags in the hope of foiling any carpet beetles that might be looking for a meal. I didn't think to try this before putting them in storage when I went to Prague (I simply soaked them in very soapy water to drown any of the beasts), but it is surprising how much sweater will fit into a 1-gallon plastic bag. It's not hard: fold the sweater around some sort of rectangular object, such as a piece of cardboard, shove the result into the bag, withdraw the rectangular object, and repeat multiple times. Well, and seal each bag.
I also assembled a second metal shelving unit for the basement storage. Apparently these are only sold at specific times of year, as I couldn't find any during the winter and now Target has lots, or it did a few weeks ago when I bought the thing.
In a less springlike fashion, I tried to catch up on some OCR projects (it is one thing to scan a document, quite another to check the character recognition). While I am glad that ABBYY can handle multiple languages in the same document, I am always stunned to find how many more languages I should have specified. A book one expects to be all in French proves to have huge chunks of Greek (not that I expect to search on anything in Greek, but still). Almost anything on surrealism proves to have words in every imaginable Indo-European language, so that if recognition is set to French, Czech, and English, the German and Spanish characters cause problems. It's a big pain constantly correcting umlauts and Spanish characters as all this requires switching the Windows keyboard. We were in French? No use, there's a umlaut. Can't keep it in German, though; there's a Czech name. Ugh, there goes Miró again (although he can be done with the Czech keyboard if one recalls just how to get that ó; it's Bun~uel I don't know how to type). And I have a Kupka text in French that has endless French names for Greek, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian deities. I knew that Kupka was a medium, but not that he was obsessed with ancient gods. Oh well.
In the meantime, I am intrigued that various friends who seldom write to me have chosen this weekend to email. They all claim to have writing deadlines, so I daresay this explains their interest in finding out what I'm up to. After all, my forthcoming gamelan concerts must be far more interesting than whatever copy they are expected to turn in to their editors. No matter, I'm always pleased to hear from them...
... Just as Ms. Spots is always excited to smell enticing foods like walnuts on my hands. I think my responses to the emails were somewhat more restrained than were her ecstatic reactions to my hand during the dinner hour (walnuts had been added to my supper). But I suppose I could always inquire whether my correspondants are hoping to get me to rub my face passionately all over their hands. (Then again, that might not be a good plan. They might not write back for another year or few.)

Bees Near Merklín

My parents are on their way home now, so I anticipate that they're getting even tireder while I'm taking a short rest. But then, I did all the driving and spoke Czech at great length nearly every day while they were here. We agreed that overall the trip had been a good idea, despite its tiring aspects.
I believe it is appropriate to note that we were much taken with a joke related to us by friends in Kutná Hora. The father of the family, now long dead but fondly remembered by all of us as a man of very dry wit, used to insist upon accompanying guests out to the car or other means of transport. While this is a courtesy often practiced in both the Czech Republic and the US, his remark about it was that you had to make sure the guests were really gone (especially relatives). Therefore, I was careful not just to drive my parents to the airport, but to go in and make sure that they got safely checked in and over to the passport control area. If they are not now gone from the airport and somewhere over the Atlantic by now, there is not much I can do about it. But since there has been no distress call from the other side of the passport control booths, I think it is safe to say that they will be in the US tonight, and will probably soon reach my sibling's lair as planned. My guests are safely gone.
It does not appear that I took all that many pictures during our wanderings, presumably because my mother was taking her share and I felt absolved of the need to record everything. However, I did take some in a garden near Merklín (the Merklín near Přeštice, not the other one). This garden belongs to a family whose activities include beekeeping. Since my family used to keep bees as well, we could not miss out on seeing the Czech beehives.

My family had, at maximum activity, about five hives. They were white in color and sat down near the road amidst the trees. These five or so hives produced enough honey for us to eat, sell, and give as presents, and my mother assures me that we have not yet run out of honey from those hives. We were astonished, then, to see that there were about fifty hives in this garden, which are tended by about three people. We liked the multicolored hives.

Of course, it is not enough just to look at the beehives, attractive though they may be. The honey also has to be sampled and the bees themselves admired.

First the bees have to be lulled with smoke. Otherwise they become upset when the hive is opened and the frames removed.
Once the smoke has settled them down, the bees sit on the frames in a relatively placid manner. It has been many years since I was involved in the honey-removal process, so I have forgotten most of the details, but in this case we simply scraped away some of the wax and scooped up some of the honey to eat. As it is early in the season, the honey was light and of a very subtle flavor. Later, as more trees and woodland fruits flower, the honey will be darker and stronger.
While at the garden, we saw quite a number of different things, including the centrifuge used for the honey, the remains of a small brick factory, and some mallard ducks. However, I did not photograph most of these things.
I did, to be sure, photograph a wary barn cat for the benefit of Kristen and other cat fanciers. We were much amused at the sight of green eyes in the dark under the barn door, and the gradual emergence of a small head.
Eventually the entire cat appeared, but it did not really want anything to do with us.

Butterflies at the Botanical Gardens

On Sunday I took my parents up to the city botanical gardens in the mistaken notion that going to see the exotic butterfly exhibition could hardly be very tiring.
I didn't realize that there was a significant walk uphill from the bus stop to the ticket kiosk and then another significant hike to the greenhouse where the butterflies were. My parents have always liked to walk, but it seems that recently my father has gotten an arthritic hip that requires a very slow pace and, from time to time, stops to sit down. This was not noticeable at Christmas.
Fortunately, the weather was splendid and everything along the way was either bright green or blossoming. We went slowly and enjoyed the view.
The exotic butterflies, which are bought from a breeder in Stratford on Avon (not just the birthplace of Shakespeare, but exotic butterflies?!), gradually hatch out and fly around the greenhouse eating fruit and sitting on various plants. As it was a Sunday and the last day, the place was absolutely packed, but everyone was clearly having a wonderful time locating the various butterflies and photographing them.
While perhaps my parents wouldn't have had to come to Prague to see something like this, they did enjoy it and also got to see lots of different scenery between my apartment in the south and the botanical gardens in the northwest.

The End of Class

Whatever my complaints about my Czech class, I do think a few more case endings have now stuck in my head. And I never had any complaints about my classmates! They have been a very congenial group. Several of us formed a habit of going out for beer and supper every Tuesday after class, and after our final class session, the whole class except for one rather shy person went.
We and the next class down (who joined us at the pub) were thoroughly international, representing Portugal, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and possibly elsewhere. I was the only American.

Clara, Esther, and me.

Ozgur and one of the Spanish students. Notice the food. This restaurant is very popular with students because its portions are gigantic. One entree will generally feed two or three people. They also have a lot of snack-type offerings which are a meal in themselves.

Our Portuguese dentist, Spanish student, and Ozgur.

Irina, Zana, Henrique, and Ozgur.

The whole gang.

Esther, Rita, and Clara. These three, who knew each other from a previous course, brought all the rest of us together.
I find that (in an international situation, at least) the classmates are the most important element of a language class. Some teachers are better than others, or more congenial, but the tone of the class depends most on the group's interpersonal dynamics. A group that enjoys conversing together and practicing outside of class makes all the difference.