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I wrote about Czech pedestrians and their willingness to wait on traffic lights several months ago. This past weekend, I particularly noticed the phenomenon again. I was waiting at a traffic light, and on the other side of the street, there were a couple of Prague police officers and another couple. The couple, after checking to make sure that there was no oncoming traffic, started across the street. One of the police officers started calling after them, but they ignored her until they had crossed the street. Only then did they look behind them to acknowledge the officer. I couldn’t understand what the officer said, but from her gestures and her tone, I would guess that it was something along the lines of, "Get back here and wait for the light". The couple shrugged and went on, while the pair of officers waited for the light. I turned around to peek after crossing the street, but no, the officers did not set off in hot pursuit of the jaywalking pair.

I mentioned this to the students in one of my classes and found that the penalties for jaywalking, in Prague at least, are quite stiff. In fact, if you’re the victim of an accident that occurs when you are crossing against the light, you will leave the hospital only to be hit with a citation and a hefty fine. That "The pedestrian has the right of way" is apparently an entirely foreign concept here.

Last month, one of my students told me, in response to my usual "So, what did you do this weekend?", that she and her boyfriend had visited the Butter Museum at Máslovice.

"Wait: did you say butter?"

"Yes, the Butter Museum."

"Butter? The yellow stuff they make with milk and you spread it on your bread? Butter?"

"Yes, the Butter Museum. They have a Betlem (Nativity scene) made out of butter."

"So wait, now where is this? Máslovice? Where’s that?"

"I’ll bring you a map."

And the next class, she did indeed bring me

• a map showing where to find the correct bus stop at the Kobylisy metro station;
• a map of Máslovice, showing where the museum is in relation to the bus stop;
• a bus schedule; and
• notes about when the museum is open (Saturday and Sunday, from 10 to 12 and from 1 to 4) and how long the Betlem would be there (from the beginning of December through the end of January).

Máslovice is north of Prague, and there’s a certain logic to a Butter Museum being housed there, as the Czech word for butter is máslo. The bus ride from the Kobylisy metro station takes about 30 minutes. The countryside surrounding Prague becomes rural amazingly quickly, and the map of Máslovice was really not necessary, as there’s hardly anything there and the museum, small as it is, was hard to miss.

The "curator" is a very nice young man named David, who seemed delighted to have a native English speaker to practice his (very good) English on. He willingly showed me through the museum, explaining the exhibits, leaving my side only to collect the admission fee from other visitors and then returning to continue our conversation. There is in fact no butter connection to Máslovice: the town was named after a person named Máslovics. I asked about the Betlem: it was carved by a 24-year old actress living in Prague, but this was to be its last weekend. It was beginning to stink, David candidly observed. Only the third of the three rooms of the museum is devoted to butter, but it is full of butter making implements and paraphernalia, including butter molds, a collection of butter wrappers from around the world, and more kinds of churns than I had ever realized existed. I was particularly taken with one in the form of a child’s rocking horse. The container for the milk forms the body of the horse, so the child’s rocking can churn the butter. I thought that was particularly ingenious.

The second of the three rooms of the museum is actually dedicated to chocolate. It turns out that the person who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the largest number of chocolate wrappers is a Czech (though not an inhabitant of Máslovice), and it’s a rotating portion of his collection that is on display.

The first of the three rooms is just the gift shop/reception area. If you’re in the Prague area looking for gifts depicting cows, this is where you want to come.

The weekend of April 12-13, there’s to be a Butter Festival at which visitors will be able to participate in making their own butter. I’m thinking that it might be fun to go back for that.

I’ve heard a lot about Austrian Advent markets, and I was curious to make the comparison with the Prague markets. One of my students told me that she thinks that the Salzburg markets are much better than the ones in Vienna, so I was thinking about going there. However, it’s 5 hours by train to Salzburg, and there’s only one direct train per day from Prague, and it arrives in Salzburg after midnight. So I went to Vienna instead. Since my camera is on the blink, I bought a disposable camera, but I haven’t yet had it developed (or even used it all up), so pictures will have to wait.

Vienna itself is a pretty city, although I found it somewhat shabbier in feel than Prague. A lot of it could use, at the very least, a fresh coat of paint!

On Saturday, I visited the main market, in front of the City Hall. Like the markets in Prague, the most heavily trafficked stalls were those selling food and drink. In Prague markets, though, the non-food stalls mainly sell the usual touristy junk that you find in the souvenir shops around, for example, Old Town Square. The Viennese market, on the other hand, actually had stalls where you might reasonably buy genuine (non-souvenir) gifts.

One of the things that the Viennese markets do that I really like is when you buy a drink (coffee or hot wine or hot punch), instead of giving it to you in a paper cup, they give it to you in a mug, for which you pay a 2€ deposit. When you return the mug, you get your deposit back. Alternately, you can choose to keep your 2€ souvenir mug. However, the information booths also sell (clean) souvenir mugs for the same 2€ fee, so why put the dirty mug in your purse or bag? It put me in mind of Grandma’s adage, "Never steal a dirty ashtray".

"Never steal a dirty ashtray"

The story that Mom always told in illustration of Grandma’s adage goes like this: once she and Auntie Jo were out having lunch somewhere with Grandma, and Grandma took a liking to the ashtray. However, since all three were smokers, by the end of their meal, the ashtray was thoroughly dirty. So, when it came time to pay the bill and leave, Grandma handed the ashtray to the nice young waiter, explaining that she didn’t care to put the dirty ashtray in her purse and asking him to please bring her a clean one. The nice young waiter dutifully went away and returned shortly with a properly cleaned ashtray, which Grandma promptly stowed in her purse. Mom never said, but I do hope that they gave that waiter a healthy tip!

Since I was downtown for the market, I took advantage of the proximity to visit the Hofburg Palace as well and saw the Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum (the museum dedicated to Empress Elizabeth) and Imperial Silver Collection. I also wandered in the gardens while it snowed picturesquely on me. I think it would be lovely to visit in the Spring.

Sunday, I went to visit the Schloss Schönbrunn, which I liked even better than the Hofburg. The grounds are more expansive than the Hofburg’s, and again, would be well worth a Spring visit. When I bought my ticket to tour the palace, I hadn’t realized that there would be about a two-hour delay between the purchase and the time I would actually be allowed to enter (the tickets are stamped with the admission time). Fortunately, there was a little Advent market in front, so it wasn’t too painful to while away the time.

BTW, this posting (from another, food-specific, blog) describes the food at Prague advent markets very well. Plus, there are pictures of the market at Old Town Square.

The traditional Christmas Eve dinner in the Czech Republic is carp, breaded and deep fried, served with potato salad. In anticipation of this dinner, fish mongers with tubs of live carp appear on street corners and plazas a few days before Christmas Eve, and people line up to buy their carp. I’m told that some Czechs take the carp home live and kill the fish themselves. Most people, though, let the fish mongers do the dirty deed. And so the fish sellers scoop a carp out of the tub and give it a few sharp whacks on the head with a mallet before beheading it. (People take the fish heads, too, since fish soup is also a traditional accompaniment to the dinner.)

I suppose that if one isn’t vegetarian, it’s just as well to be reminded of exactly what is entailed in the eating of fish or poultry or meat.

And every time I saw this transaction taking place, I was reminded of Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY[/youtube]
Indeed, I’m sure that if Lehrer were Czech, he might have come up with something along the lines of Clubbing Carp for Christmas.

You can also buy carp filets at the supermarket, and indeed, I even saw some frozen breaded carp all ready for cooking, but very few of the Czechs with whom I’ve spoken admit to going that route.

No pictures for a while, folks. My camera, a Canon PowerShot A70, has blacked out on me. From Googling around, it appears that this is a known problem that Canon has agreed to fix. Unfortunately, I can’t reach any English speakers at Canon in Prague to help me, and Canon in the US refuses to do anything. Snarl.

After Christmas, I’m going to have to recruit one of my Czech friends to help me deal with this. Snarl.

In the meantime, I picked up a disposable camera, and I hope to post a few pictures when I get them developed. It’s really weird to be taking pictures with a (more or less) conventional camera again, though, and I’m not sure how well they’re going to turn out.