Live and Learn

On Friday, March 24th B.J. and I were invited to the Arts and Drama school in the castle here in Letohrad by one of the drama teachers who attended our Discussion Club kickoff meeting earlier in the week.  It was the graduation of two of their students and there was a production of a Moravian morality play from 1894. The plot depicts pressure put on a young woman for an arranged marriage and the aftermath of an unhappy union and its tragic end.  We had a complete synopsis of the play and had a wonderful time although we understood, by count, five words. (Later we found out it was in the Moravian dialect so we felt better about the five words..... uhhh, you can take that or leave it.)
It turns out that Adela, the drama teacher in the middle of the picture with the flowers, is also a language teacher so we have set up an hour and half each week for lessons. I guess timing is everything.

On Saturday, March 25th, as we were walking up the street from our apartment we saw a beautiful black and white cat lounging on the stairs.  We called the usual “kitty, kitty, kitty”; got an ear flick and cold stare so we went on our way.  Later in the day we came upon the Pomikalkovi family; Ales, Veronika, Ondrej, Daniella and Sam. They were on their Saturday morning family outing.  We chatted and asked Daniela (8) how you call a cat in Czech.  She said it was “Che, Che, Che” (yea, I know, you gotta hear it).  We thought that was nice but wondered how you get ‘kitty’ from that. We thought nothing else of it until we were on our way back to the apartment and passed by the house with the black and white cat still in the same position on the back stairs.  Well, I tried the Czech version.... and the cat bounded up and rocketed to us for a scratch and rub. Just goes to show you a little language goes a long way.

Monday, March 27th and we have been cordially invited to the Pardubice police station, actually the immigration enforcement section of police. It seems we had not followed all the in-country visa requirements of reporting in with the police within a specified period of time.  There was a bit of

confusion earlier when our very efficient 'handler', Renata, had talked with the police on the phone, there was a misconnect in that the information they gave her was for someone from another EU country. Soooo, when she went down on her own last week to clean up some paperwork they sorta, kinda requested our presence!  It all worked out swimmingly though, we had some very nice police representatives who shepherded us through the process and waived any cash penalties.  And we had a wonderful afternoon in Pardubice!