Czech Food – very, very heavy on meat, dumplings and potatoes, and sauerkraut

     The most popular meal is "veprove s knedliky a kysele zeli",  pork cutlet with Czech dumplings and red or white cooked cabbage, slightly sweet/sour and crunchy.  The dumplings, called knedliky, are either potato made with flour or a light white bread type with pieces of baguette, made into long rolls of dough and boiled before slicing with a thread (knife ruins the airiness). 

     Cooked vegetables and salads are not popular.  Most meals come with forms of cabbage, fresh or cooked, and fresh cucumbers or pickles.   Potatoes come in at least 10 choices, but most popular is boiled and  buttered and piled high.  Summary – not much color except for red cabbage, heavy on the heart.

     Besides lots of pork & chicken, you find pizza and pastas, along with all shapes and sizes of sausages.  Anywhere you find music and beer, you find grilled brats with bread and mustard.  

     At home Lonnie and I are living on pizzas, cooked German spaetzles, soups and always ham and cheese sandwiches on wonderful bread rolls.  The stores always have bins of freshly made breads and many aisles of cheeses (European crossroads location).

     Desserts are delightful creations covered in chocolate, each less than $0.50, many with an artificial rum-flavored chocolate filling.  Lonnie started practicing his Czech by ordering zmrzmlina (ice cream) cones at the KFC.  Yes, in the mall there are long lines for KFC and it is not cheap.  McDonald’s is also here with drive throughs.  A common lunch is a slice of fresh rye bread with half boiled egg, mayonnaise and curl of sliced ham, found at all of the sweets counters.   Also, long bread rolls with cheese and ham.   This country is ready for Subway.  Think how good it would be with real crispy vegetables!!!

Czech language has a bigger alphabet

     When I used the dictionary to look up words, I learned that the vowels a,e,i,o,u also appear again with an accent, or dots, or curve on top, giving you 13 vowels.  There is an extra letter ch that appears after h, and extra forms on c,r,s z , so when you think you can not find a word, rethink the alphabet and try again.

     Most menus are only in Czech and German, so we have quickly learned to read Czech foods.  Here are some examples to show you why we have not learned to SPEAK anything except the common courtesies and smile a lot:

pstruh – trout

cokoladova – chocolate  (I thought it was coca cola!)

mrkev  - carrot

hranolky – french fries

houskove knedliky – bread dumpling

bramborove knedliky – potato dumpling

veprove, sunka, kure, hovezi, ryba  - pork, ham, chicken, beef, fish

dusena zelenina  -  steamed vegetables, we practice a lot

     An average meal costs under $15 for both of us.  They have practiced fish farming for centuries so trout is very cheap.  Our local Czechs insist that a bill is rounded up to the next 5 crowns, i.e. $0.25, and you do it immediately when you pay the bill, never on the table.  Wait staff are paid a living wage here, like any other paid position, and they do not expect a tip, but a few crowns are welcome.  Lonnie still leaves 10%.

     In the first 6 weeks I only had 4 people that I could talk to:  Lonnie’s colleague and host Pavel, the girl at the tourist center (daily visits), and the girl at the ticket box office helped with concerts, and Lonnie.   So it took a while to get our many questions answered and I learned to play mp3s at home.  I admit that I was getting homesick.

     Then we discovered Skype ($10 to set up account) and could talk to family through our computer at $0.021/minute.   Every phone call has been clear except one.   Only problem is the time difference – when it is time for supper here, 5 pm, it is 9 am in New Mexico.