Listening to amazing music on iradio at the moment (Jose Padilla & K. Keatch - Dragonflies on Chilltrax). Quite inspiring at 23:00, the world dark and cold outside, husband fast asleep and tired from a long day at work.
And me, just here, having time to my thoughts, myself, and all these precious words that exist all around me, which is wonderful.
Just a few days away from Sunday, about which I have something remarkable to say: spent Sunday afternoon with my husband and in-laws drinking a ten-year old bottle of wine. Can you call it vintage wine then, if it's already ten years old? That was, I would say, the oldest bottle of wine I'd ever drunk, and what a truly fine wine it was, really wonderful. Nice way to spend Sunday, as we spent hours throwing ideas about how to entertain my family when they finally visit us here in April or May.
As I get older, my parents just seem to me smarter, and smarter.
Before I moved here to CZE, I used to wonder at my father's judgement whenever he would stop all talk about my moving here, and simply say, "Oh. Well. Isn't that a Communist country?"
It seemed like such a criticism, and so I would just wave my hand at the comment and say, feeling superior, that it no longer was a Communist country, and that was that.
But I've been here in Czech Republic for nearly a year, and now my father's honest, very simply-put comment has never seemed smarter.
One year later, I realize how smart he was to say that.
It was only recently a Communist country, and only very recently has it opened up its borders to the rest of the world. As the occassional Filipino or Chinese enters society here, taking the bus, marrying one of their own, so I co-exist with babičky (grandmothers) who take the bus with me, and stare in wonder/shock/awe/surprise (and sometimes resentment, confusion, and suspicion) at me, this Asian woman who has suddenly invaded, entered their land.
I never quite understood it from my perspective, coming myself from a post-colonial country such as the Philippines, from a good family, with a good education, maids and drivers and security guards and servants at our beck and call.
I never quite understood it until one of my Czech students of English spoke about how his grandmother was so shocked, to see today's world, just fresh after a decade of the Wall crumbling down, and she sees, unwittingly, large advertisements of nearly-naked girls advertising French underwear, or bikinis.
After all, her world didn't even have any such thing as this strange wonder called advertising.
And finally, I understood what my father was saying.
"Czech Republic. Wasn't that a Communist country?"
And he didn't mean any bland, uneducated judgement by it, no political incorrectness with no backbone.
After all, my father himself is the offspring of two Chinese immigrants who escaped a Communist China to start a new life in the Philippines as well. So, I found, one year later, that he certainly knew what he was talking about.
Czech Republic was only recently a Communist country, and this world isn't yet quite used to well-to-do, educated Asians.
It's actually a rather homogenous country, the Czech Republic is. It is really, mostly white.
My father is so smart. That's all I can say at the moment, as I attempt to make sense of the past 11 months I've lived in a foreign country, where I'm not treated as special as I used to back in Manila, when servants would defer to me, and people would amaze at my perfect English, in a post-colonial, post-American country like mine.
This, here, is a new frontier for me.
