Sunday, September 9, 2007

Chytilovi

So much to say about everything but I simply must talk about my host family, who I am now living with. I don’t even know where to start about them, so I’ll begin with names. They are known as the family Chytlovi, so the father is Chytil and the mother is Chytilova. My host father, Jan-pronounced Yan and with the nickname Hosta- barely speaks any English, but he’s super cute. I think he’s in his upper 50s and he’s very smiley. When I told them that I was Czech, he said something about how all nice girls are Czech. They’ve had students stay with them before, and apparently Jan refused to learn English from them but my host mother said he understands a lot of it and that he might learn it from me because I’m a girl.

My host mother, Elena, is a hoot. She’s Slovakian, as she keeps reminding me, not Czech, and she’s a very take-charge do-what-she-wants tell-it-like-it-is lady. She’s very opinionated and I think her favorite word in English is idiots, which she’s used to describe the people who built her grocery store, the people who put up signs in Prague, and various other unknown entities. At the same time, she’s a total sweetheart, and she’s very concerned with how I am and whether I’m hungry or cold or need anything. This morning she suddenly asked if I wanted to learn how to make dumplings, which of course I did, and so she’s had me in the kitchen all morning. I now have all of the many secrets to make good dumplings, but there are so many that I don’t think I could ever reproduce them. They start with yeast, but it isn’t dry yeast like we have, it looks almost like a grey, dry version of butter. She had me try some and it tasted like very sour bread. She snacked on it the whole time, which I thought was so funny, because who eats straight yeast, but she insisted that it has a lot of vitamin B and is thus good for the skin. Elena is very interested in telling me about their life and why things are the way they are, and that always comes back to communism. For example, she talked about how she always stocks up on food because in the past they could only find one thing at a time, so they’re accustomed to buying a ton of it.

My host brother, Simon- pronounced She-moan – is 16 and a typical teenage boy. He has his eybrow pierced, which Elena said was his way of asserting his independence. He watched TV with me last night and I managed to get him to talk to me a little. He and Jan are always joking, which is really cute and I wish I understood more of it. Simon is constantly text messaging or on the computer, and his mom is always complaining about it. Tim, he reminds me of you. This morning, for example, Elena was yelling at him to bring down his laundry and he was grumpy about it, but he finally brought it down, and I felt like I was back in SP. Last night we were watching music videos and the Rhianna video came on and he laughed at her and said She’s so plastic, --sorry, I can’t find quotation marks or parentheses on this keyboard-- which he was using to mean fake. I thought it was interesting that he was so critical of her makeup, etc.

This morning at breakfast I felt like I was having breakfast at grandma Kostechka’s house—we had bread and meat and jam, and Elena didn’t sit down the whole time.

We’re about to eat lunch, and my older host siblings are here, gotta go!

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