Crazy Jane:

The Kind of Awesome Thing We Get Up To Around Here

I don't want to boast, people, but this past weekend, we went to Slovakia, to the very feet of the High Tatras, to see one of my students get married, and then party on, Slovak-style, in beautiful Poprad.

Our journey there was the most horrible train journey ever, during which we waited on the tracks for about three hours starting at 2am while police cleaned up the aftermath of an incident between a train and an individual, while we kicked it in a horribly uncomfortable shared compartment with a truly uncouth, massive underbite-having lady, her cross-eyed, over-bite having daughter, and a sullen metalhead who spent all 11+ hours working on ONE WORDSEARCH PUZZLE. On the bright side, I read the entirity of Alexander Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask, and it ruled, natch. As a consequence, though, we arrived in Poprad dreadfully sleep-deprived, and with brains so addled that we really and truly went to the WRONG CHURCH, thereby missing the actual ceremony. Very uncool, and very frustrating, baby.

Once the "Oh my God, I can't believe how lame we are!" nightmare ended, we found ourselves staying in a 600 year old building -- now a charming pension -- in Spišská Sobota, the most historic part of the town. The square our hotel was on had a beautiful shady park and late gothic church with a magnificent golden altar, and was lined with charmingly multi-colored rennaissance houses. The pension was one of them, and also hosted the devastatingly brilliant wedding party, complete as it was with a mind-boggling array of beautiful little homemade Czech and Slovak wedding sweets, and old ladies and men dancing traditional dances and singing Czech and Slovak folk songs.

My student was the groom, and sometime around midnight, he waltzed me drunkenly all around the hall, alternately bellowing and translating the songs. The best one he sketched out for me contained the following exchange: "I love my girl because she brings water to my horse" to which the girl replies, "I don't like your horse, I'm afraid of him!" and her swain counters that she needn't fear his horse, because his horse knows that she is his girl.

Is this place GREAT, or what?

The next day, Jack, Monkey and I kicked it in the park, joked around, ate in Slovak restaurants, and then hit up another all night train journey sans couchette -- NOT the way to travel -- and got back into Praha at about 5am, after which we went directly home, blocked out the sun, and slept our heads off.

And that, my friends, is that.

Oh, the Hora!

So, last week I had a bit of a holiday, so, together with two guys I kinda like -- my ridiculously handsome son, and my totally dreamy boyfriend -- I visited a couple of the places here in the CZ that I had never been, and ended up soaking up a bit of ye olde medieval Catholic horror.

First, we visited The Loreta in Prague, where we saw, along with the skeletons of two saints, fully clothed and augmented with wax heads and a particularly bloody crucifix, a very gruesome depiction of St. Agatha of Sicily, who, vowing to save herself for God, denied a suitor who later tortured her and had her breasts cut off. In the church, she is depicted in her ecstatic martyrdom, offering her breasts, on a plate, to some fat cherubs. The scene was augmented by a statue of the ugliest, most deformed cherub I have ever seen mooning over her plate of breasts with one of his smiling cherubic colleagues.

There was a statue of another holy virgin in the cloister who, forced by her family to accept betrothal after vowing chastity, prayed to God to help. Soon afterwards, she grew a beard and was crucifed. Depicted as she is, bearded on on her cross, the statue is often mistaken for some kind of kinky Christ-in-drag situation. All I'm sayin' is: CREEPY. Being a holy virgin is definitely not for me, man.

After that, we went to Beautiful Kutna Hora, where we saw the extremely spendid Cathedral of St. Barbara, which had a magnificent and huge fresco depicting St. Christopher carrying the Christ child over a river, fish swimming around his feet; absolutely beautiful! Then, we went to this place:

That's a chandelier made of every bone found in the human body. It's in the ossuary of a little chapel in a suburb of Kutna Hora where, after some monk returned from the Holy Land with a handful of dirt from Golgotha, became the IT place for rich people all over Bohemia to be buried. Then, the black plague. Apparently, there were so many bones that one of the monks, a brother Rint, was commissioned to "do something creative" with them. The ossuary is home to the bones of some 40,000 people, including Hussite warriors with all manner of gruesome head injuries. Mr. Rint signed his name in BONES on the wall. Yeah, it was creepy, too.

We topped it all off with a visit to Brno, the second biggest city in the CZ with a population of something like 350,000 people. There, we saw a church that had an architectural flourish on the belltower depicting either a couple having sex, or siamese twins; reportedly, the jury's still out on which. And, to top off a particularly macabre weekend of Catholic sight-seeing, we visited a Capucin monastery with a cold, dank crypt containing the half-decomposed remains of some 150 people, and let me tell you, it was the creepiest of all. After our visit, I was particularly grossed out by the feeling that dust from the crypt was all over the inside of my nose. UGH! No pictures, sorry.

So, yeah. This is just to let you know that, apparently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, even back in the day, people were totally obsessed with sex, violence, and death.