Czechmatediary

During one of the celebrations of the 18. anniversary of the Velvet Revolution the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, had a speech on what circumstances have played a great role in the birth of communism in the former Czechoslovakia:

1. The first breaking point became the anti-Nazi demonstration on November 17th 1939, when one of the participating students, Jan Opletal, was deadly wounded. His funeral became an excuse for the Nazis to begin with a massacre of Czech intellectuals. All of the Universities were closed, 9 student leaders were executed without any kind of a trial, and 1,200 students were taken to the concentration camp in Sachsenhouser. This date, according to Klaus, was the beginning of German attempt to erase the Czechoslovakia off of the map of Europe. (more…)
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So this is the deal: my blog statistics have been showing I have a lot of Canadian loyal visitors that seem to like my web site. Well as a token of appreciation I wanted to do a post specifically for you guys, regarding the Czech activities in Canada. I searched the internet for quite a while and low and behold, there is not much out there for you guys except the web site of Czech embassy in Canada So I thought to myself: what could I do to help my poor fellow Czech-Canadians?? And I decided to make a new category called the “Czech contacts in CANADA” (on the sidebar) so, please, don’t be shy and enter yourself in if you live in Canada! HOW? Into the “comment” box enter your 1/name, 2/e-mail address and 3/what city in Canada do you live in. Good luck!

Nazdar vsichni (hlavne vy, kdo zijete v Kanade)!! (more…)

So my husband and I had the urge to enlighten ourselves as a couple and went to a marriage seminar called “How To Argue So Your Spouse Will Listen: 6 Principles for Turning Arguments into Conversations” by Sharon Morris May. The class was so great that I decided to write a post about it; true, this post doesn’t have anything to do with anything Czech per say (unless May’s ancestors come from Bohemia, which I wouldn’t be surprised….I swear, if asked, 95% of Americans tell you that their grandma was Czech) but I think that anyone could benefit from these advices…. (more…)

Sign-up for this blog via E-MAIL and receive a full-on professional PDF report called the “Survival Manual for Czechs/Slovaks living abroad”!! Because you simply just cannot survive without it…..

Also: 

This may not be the greatest thing EVER but it’s still pretty darn cool. It’s called a ‘reader’ or an RSS feed. Do you still not know what that is? Are you confused? Perplexed? Well, that no longer needs to be the case…

What a reader can do for you is this- Do you have a bunch of websites you check everyday? And everyday you click on each one, wait for it to load, look for something interesting, blah, blah blah… Well what a reader does is provide a way for updated content from your favorite websites to come to you. What we use here at the Czechmatediary empire is a Google reader so that is what we suggest you use as well. Here is a brief video that explains it for you…

Explain please!

So, for all you lovely peoples that love Czechmatediary and whom we also love and want to share Czech love with everyday, sign up for Google reader (or any reader really…) and add us to your reader! Subscribe! Help Bohemian power rise up once again and rule the world!!!!!

Sign me up!

I was born in Prague where I worked the potato fields until I was almost 19 years old. Then I moved to the US where I live now. The End.

Just kidding! Let me be a little more specific about my life. The trouble with me is that I have both sides of my brain working so that means that I have always liked math as well as drawing (see some of my doodlings here) and music. So, when someone would ask me:”What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wouldn’t know what to say! Well, first I wanted to be - as the 98% of all the other girls - an actress. I did try out for the University of Acting in Prague but didn’t make it to the last round. So, after some soul searching, I decided to try out for the University of Business. After all, my mother always wanted me to be a diplomat (!!), so why not? As I was waiting for the exam results my father’s American friend (let’s call him Mac) came to visit us. The summer before Mac’s visit I worked as an Au pair in England to improve my English skills for the upcoming high school final exams (I guess here the equivalent of that would be the SATs). Because of this nannying experience I was able to communicate with Mac very well. One day all of us were went for a walk around town and Mac made me an offer. He said if I tried out for a scholarship at their local college I could live with his family for free. The thought of me going to AMERICA was just insane! First of all, my dream was to go to Italy (!) and second, America was so far! But I did apply for the scholarship and low-and-behold - I got it! By that time I also found out I was accepted to the University of Business as well.What to do?? After some time of thinking everything over I decided I would go to the US just for a year - to master my English skills. (more…)

The number of obese Czechs is 3 to 4-times higher than it was around the 1850’s. This steady increase in weight stalled during the 1980’s and in the beginning of 1990’s when the price of food had increased considerably. After this stall, Czechs are currently happily gaining weight again because of:

1. cheap food, where the prices are increasing in a slower rate than the average wages
2. less physical activity (especially in the countryside where only the minority is currently involved in any kind of hard physical labor)
3. increase in number of automobiles (more…)
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The Czech Republic currently has about 340 Jewish cemeteries from which the largest ones are located in Prague-Josefov, Mikulov and Trebic. Prague also owns the oldest tomb stones made in the 15th century. What is so interesting about Jewish cemeteries? Compared to the Christian cemeteries, these, according to the Jewish rules, cannot be messed with at all. That means that if in the past there was a need for more space to bury their “new” dead people they couldn’t just enlarge or expand the already existing cemetery lot. The only thing one could do is to bury the old graves under a bunch of soil and start over again, with a new layer of graves on top of the old ones. The old tomb stones were pulled out of the “old layer” and put into the “new layer”(isn’t that wild??). The tomb stone writings were originally written only in Hebrew; at the end of the 19th century some Czech words were added in. In the 20th century the writings were written strictly either in Czech or German but most of the sentences would end with 5 characteristic Hebrew letters. (more…)

Did you ever think about how animals sound to the human ear in various countries and the influence the native language has on the ‘interpretation’ of an animal’s…words? I did some research on those differences between the USA and Czech and I have to say, they are DIFFERENT indeed! For instance, what about the rooster sound? Or the frog sound? Are we really talking about the same animal here? AND… do you think if an American frog were to meet a Czech frog they would be able to understand each other?? Now the Czech owl, on the other hand, would probably have much easier time to chat with her American cousin (see below). She may just be a little confused about her slight “accent”:

CZ: Premysleli jste nekdy nad tim, jak rozlicne zni zvirata v ruznych zemich? Zde je list americkych zvirecich zvuku, ktere se odlisuji od zvirat ceskych. Je to opravdu zajimave, zejmena jak “mluvi” kohout nebo zaba. Jsou to opravdu ta sama zvirata??? Myslite, ze by si americka zaba rozumnela se zabou ceskou, kdyby se stretly?? Ceska sova, na druhou stranu, by si asi dorozumnela lepe se svou americkou “sestrenici”; pouze by se asi divila jejimu podivnemu prizvuku:

1. Cow: MOO vs. BUU
2. Rooster: COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO vs. KYKYRIKY
3. Dog: WOOF vs. HAF (more…)
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If you are signing up for the “Czech contacts in the USA” don’t forget to LEAVE YOUR E-MAIL as well (plus the city/state where you live) otherwise people have no way of contacting you!

Thanks!

PS: If you would like to re-enter your contact WITH the e-mail go ahead, I will erase the old one of yours

Jestlize se rozhodnete zanechat vas konakt na postu zvanem “Czech contacts in the USA” nezapomente zanechat take e-mail, aby vas mohli lide zkontaktovat!

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