I’ve been in Prague for a few days. It has been a terrific experience but completely draining. I taught a class on Friday with simultaneous translation, which is about 4000X harder than I ever imagined. I barely made it through the first hour without crying. Imagine every little bit of mumbly, deprecating self talk you do when things aren’t going well being translated into Czech. As you say it.
Such as:
“This worked last night when I rehearsed.”
“Hmmm. Love it when that happens.”
“Oh-my-fucking-god-I-suck-at-this-kill-me-please”
I should have worn dress shields. By the third class, I was tempted to light up a smoke. It would have been the forth cigarette of my life. The good news is that nobody would have noticed it was weird since the Czechs smoke e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.
My final night in Prague is a Friday. I have very little currency left after the ATM fiasco upon my arrival and I want to save it for Saturday morning when I have a few hours to shop at the flea market**. So with frugality in my heart and a spring in my step, I head out to wander the old town and get a bite to eat.
I stumble into a shop that sells matryoshka dolls. Embarrassingly enough, I’m a savvy collector of these precious nesting dolls, so I know that they aren’t made in the Czech Republic. They are made in Russia. However, they are hard to find in the US outside of catalogs and maybe it would be cool to have one that was hand painted with scenes of Prague. So I head in.
I am constantly disappointing people with my head-math skills. Once we get out of the single digits, I cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide. I’ve given up the battle and have hired expensive tutors to ensure that my children do better in life. I don’t want them to be so crippled that they always tip in even dollars… that they cannot make change when running the cash register at the coffee shop in an old folks home… or they “estimate” the difference between 988 and 320 as “about 400”.
My problem with head-math was rather apparent when converting CZK to USD on the run. The CZK is worth something like $0.042, which makes for lots of zeros and odd divisors so I had just taken to throwing down my Visa Card and hoping for the best.
This store had a wide selection of dolls which I figured to be in the $60 range based on some quick but likely flawed head-math. I found a really nice one on the top shelf which they quickly pulled down for me because “it looks so much better in the light”. With graceful, fluid arm movements, the proprietor opened up the doll to reveal twelve layers, from a gorgeous foot-tall purple and gold doll featuring the Charles Bridge down to a teeny tiny microscopic nugget. I didn’t catch the price, but the most expensive thing I had seen so far was about $100, so I told her to wrap it up.
They moved with lightening speed, ushered me politely and appreciatively to the cash register and wrapped my new doll with utmost care. I felt pampered. Delighted. Excited to find such an interesting souvenir. I saw a lot of zeros on the cash register, but I always see a lot of zeros when koruny are involved, so I didn’t think about it much.
I tottered down the street to Ambiente Pasta Fresca, a favorite Italian restaurant amongst travelers from my company. I snuggled down next to a fireplace with some calamari and a bowl of sinfully delicious homemade pasta. Out of curiosity, I pulled out my blackberry and switched to calculator mode. I tapped all of the numbers and zeros and decimal points from my souvenir receipt and nearly puked a bowl of sinfully delicious homemade pasta all over the unsuspecting patrons sitting to my left.
I won’t tell you how much it cost, because it is far too embarrassing.
This is the part of the story where my friends always say “What did they say when you took it back?”
Perhaps the most embarrassing part of the story is that I didn’t take it back. I was so ashamed, so crippled by my own dumbassitude of not asking for the price or running the numbers KNOWING that I cannot freaking multiply 7 X 6 in my head let alone divide all of those zeros by $0.046 that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk into the store again.
In my defense, let it be noted that walking into the store again would have required bolt cutters and some broken glass. Apparently, 30 seconds after my too-white-teeth-and-sneakered-obviously-american-and-stupid-ass strolled out of the store they shut off the lights, pulled down the grates and hit the road. I’ll bet they sell one of those puppies every three freaking years.
You can’t tell me she isn’t pretty, though.
**We will see that this is a misguided notion in another post.
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