January 25, 1998

Home on the Weekend

It has been a really nice weekend.  The family upstairs left Friday for the weekend.  Our kitchen window actually looks into the entry.  By propping the entrance door open I can see the whole back yard from our kitchen window between the window in the entry and the open entrance door.  No dogs barking at imaginary intruders.  Shep could stay out for as long as he wanted.  In fact, we have spent the whole weekend at home. 

Hanka’s parents sent a bag full of home grown apples over a few days ago.  They were getting soft so I made an Apple Crisp.  We want to plan a trip to the Canary Islands or Portugal for February now that we have someplace for the dog.  So we spent time on the computer emailing a couple of travel agencies here in Praha and on the web.  We received photos from people plus I have gotten two rolls developed since we have been here so I got them labeled and put into an album.  We’re not sure yet if it is every Saturday, but for the second time we found an old musical that was not dubbed  into Czech around 3pm.  This particular movies starred Tony Curtis and Olivia DeHavallen (spelling?).  I made a big dinner last night, meat loaf, baked potato, vegetable.  I took some leftover chicken and made a chicken and potato soup for lunch today.  It has been very enjoyable and relaxing weekend.

A few last questions to us

Someone figured we would be eating Rice Czechs and Wheat Czechs and wondered if we wrote Czechs to buy merchandise and if we play Czechers to pass the time.  Ah-h-h such humor.  Roddy, Jack wanted to point out we do have spell czech and that the dog can speak Czech better than we can.  Of course bow-wow is the same in either language.  We did stump Mike yesterday on the phone.  We asked him in hockey, what they call it when someone does/gives a body check.  He didn’t know what word or phrase they use so he is going to ask his father-in-law as he is a big hockey fan.

Hockey

Speaking of Hockey, we took in a hockey game with Mike on Friday night.  The Czech Rep. has a league from various cities within the country.  Praha has two teams.  The one we went to was for Praha Sparta.  I thought of both Craig (as he lives in Sparta, MI) and Mark D. (Mich St. University’s nickname is The Spartans) from work when we were picking an evening to go.

I’ve only seen Grand Rapids Griffins play hockey and kinda watched it a couple of times on TV.  These guys were definitely better than Grand Rapids.  A lot of finesse plays more passing of the puck.

One player from Sparta had an opponent coming towards him from an angle.  He completely stops the puck in one move.  I mean the puck literally stopped right now, there was no sliding.  He fakes a move, heads towards the opponent, and then turns away from him.  The opponent follows him not realizing he doesn’t have the puck.  It was only a second or two, but long enough.  Another Sparta guy comes up from behind and skates off with the puck all by himself.  It gave them clear sailing for a considerably distance unopposed.

The clock counts up not down like it does in the states.  So when there is two minutes left to play the clock reads 18:00.  It took a little getting used to.  They do just as much shoving, I guess it’s called checking, and they get plenty of penalties for tripping and all that.  But, they have less fighting (yea).  The couple of times that a shoving match would start, they quit as soon as the ref got there.  I don’t think it is tolerated.  They ejected one guy for an illegal hit of some sort.  We didn’t even know it had happened until we were walking to the tram to go home and talking to a Canadian and his kid that had also been to the game.  They mentioned the ejection.

Between periods they had two teams of little seven or eight year olds play for a few minutes.  It was hard to judge age with the uniforms and helmets on.  They skated out onto the ice then went through some skating drills, backwards, side steps.  More than I would ever think of doing on skates.  Kids start with skating classes around five years old.  Even after they start actually playing hockey they also continue with training in skating.   One kid scored.  The team got so excited, they were hugging and jumping around him.  Kid probably didn’t sleep all night, just kept thinking about his big play. 

The Czech national hockey team is made up of the best player from this league.  The national team in turn then plays European cup games.