Kathy's friends head back to the US...

I should have posted this yesterday, but I got sidetracked by Saudi witches and inflatable Czech students. Kathy's friends, Kim and Chris, winger their way back tot he US on wednesday morning after having been in Europe a week and a half, including stops in Salzburg and Vienna in addition to time here in Prague.

They were perfect guests and a joy to have around. I wish I could have shared in drinking the wonderful Czech beer with them but it is Lent and, alas, I have given up the devil's brew for the duration.

Here are Chris and Kim enjoying a mug of Prague's finest.

Kathy joined them in Vienna for a couple of days and one of the highlights was a trip to the naschtmarkt where you can buy some unique food (like wasabi nuts) and gift items.

The Three Amigos.

Guys' weekend - Part 2...

When we got back to the house on Saturday, Noah and I had a bike ride following our usual route - down the street to a dirt road that leads to a spa (or sanitorium as it is called here) and then back again. It's not that far, about a mile each way.

The weather was pleasant - low to mid-40s but sunny. The weather in Prague has been quite nice since a colder than nornal December and lately has been reminicient of last year's amazingly mild winter. It might be a little cooler this winter than last, but I suspect that we have had more sunshine which makes it all more bearable. The long stretches of dull grey really get old.

We went to Bohemia Bagel in the neighboring village of Nebusice (where his school is) and met several other families for dinner. They were all going to a music recital at the school at 7 PM but Noah and I decided to skip that. Bohemia Bagel just recently opened out here in the hinterland and it is great to have it here. Good burgers and fries at reasonable prices, English is understood and used by the staff (since expats are a major demographic) plus they have a kids area with free Playstation 2. Noah wanted to get there a little early to make sure he got to play some NHL 2008. Mission accomplished.

It wasn't long before everyone showed up about 15 people from four families. The kids played well together while the adults chatted. The meals for me and Noah totaled only about $20.

After we got back home we watched four episodes from season 19 of The Simpsons. I have a connection from the laptop to our big screen TV so we can watch it more comfortably. I had the big screen shipped to Prague only to discsover that it is not multi-signal and won't play the Sky TV satellite shows that are in PAL. So we can only use it to play DVDs and shows of the laptop. We have a small TV that we use to watch Sky.

After The Simpsons Noah played on the computer a bit and then I took him up to bed. We read to him every night and alst week we finished with The Hobbit and have moved on The Fellowship of the Ring.

Sunday was less interesting. We went into the city for his Sunday school at St. Thomas only to discover that there was no class this week so we had to turn around and go home (he didn't mind). We took another bike ride and then he split time between playing at a friend's house and playing on the computer. Kathy and her friends got back from Vienna about 5:30 PM and I picked them up at the Dejvicka metro.

It was a great guys' weekend - arcade games, burgers and fries, The Simpsons, bike riding, and reading a good book. I wouldn't want Kathy to be gone much, but once in a while is OK.

A guys' weekend...

Kathy hopped on a train to Vienna on Friday morning to meet up with her two friends, Kim and Chris who had left Prague for Salzburg on Monday and then went on to Vienna on Thursday.

This is Kathy's thir trip to Vienna in less than a year. We went there early last June, and then she when with her family when they came for a visit last Fall. It's a very beautiful and very civilized city no matter how many times you visit.

With Kathy gone, though, it turned this weekend into a "guys only" affair. I left work early on Friday to pick up Noah from school. We didn't do anything special on Friday night, just spaghetti and TV, but Noah seemed to like "roughing it" without mom.

The plan for Saturday was to go to the mall at Cerny Most (literally "Black Bridge). There is a pseudo Check E. Cheese's there, called Miki Land (I wonder what other kids oriented brand they are trying to rip off?). Lots of old video games that give out tickets, which you then turn in for crappy prizes. The difference between Miki Land and an actual Chuck E. Cheese is that you can get a lot of crappy things with the tickets you win instead of just a few crappy things. We had gone there not long after we moved here (maybe October of 2006) and Noah has wanted to go back ever since.

A sign for Miki Land sign greeted us outside of the mall as we entered, and we stopped at a KFC for lunch to get our energy level up for all the gammes we would be playing. Unfortunately, when we got to where Miki Land was supposed to be we found a bowling & billard pub instead. Miki Land was gone - perhaps sued out of existence by Disney.

Noah was crushed, and his spirits weren't raised when the foosball game we tried to play in the new place wouldn't work. It had suddenly gone fron a "best weekend ever" to one of the worst.

We walked around to see if Miki Land might have just relocated to a different location within the mall, but that didn't appear to be the case. I was scrambling to salvage the day and so dragged him into a sporting goods store to look for a soccer jersey or ball. He found jerseys he liked, but they were over $100 and I didn't want to pay THAT much to cheer him up.

We were just about to head home, dejected and defeated, when I remembered that there were movie theatres on the top floor of the mall. And where there are movie theatres you often find video games. This time I had called it right - there was a decent sized arcade up there with a variety of shooting, racing and sports games. He immediately perked up.

The mall at Cerny Most

I gabbed $20 in change from change machine and gave him a handful of 10 crown coins. He gravitated to a soccer game and basically was rooted there for the next 90 minutes. This soccer game, like just about every other game in the arcade, was not new. To give you an idea of how old the socer game was, you could fight for the World Cup playing as Yugoslavia.

90 minutes and about 300 crowns later we headed home. It's not quite as easy as back home. First there was the 2 block walk from the mall to the metro station. We grabbed the metro (on the yellow line) to the Mustek station where we switched to the green line and on the end at Dejvicka. Then we hopped in our car parked on the street (to save the $2 cost of parking in a lot) and 15 minutes later we were home. All in all about a 50 minute trip from the mall that is probably less than ten miles away as the crow flies.

I'll finish the detail of the guys' weekend tomorrow.

Jane Mansfield's boyfriend...

Every once in a blue moon you meet someone who is either one of the most interesting people in the world or one of the world's best BSers (although I suppose it is possible to be both).

I went to Jama (American pub just a block from Wenceslas square) on Monday after work. Lent starts today and I give up alcohol and sweets - both as a sacrifice to offer up for my religion but also as a diet (I plan on someday writing a book entitled "The Lenten Diet"). Anyway, I wanted an evening of beer before the 47-day alcohol drought.

While I was there this old Czech walked in and my friend fom work, Luke, introduced him to me as Vance. After a minute Vance stepped away to greet someone else at the bar and Luke informed me that Vance was a very interesting guy - that he used to work in Hollywood and knew a slew of stars. Luke said he would talk about Sylvester Stalone or other stars as being his friend and people would think he was just pulling their leg. But then he would produce a photograph with the him and the star to back up his claim. This had happened enough that the general opinion was that much of what he claimed was true.

When Vance came back to our table he took a DVD out of a plastic bag and showed it to Luke. Vance said he bought it because it was a movie with his old girfriend - I took a look at the DVD box and it showed a shapely Jane Mansfield.

For the younger among you, Jane Mansfield was a movie star in the 1950s and early 1960s akin to Marilyn Monroe. Here is some general information about Jane Mansfield from Wikipedia:

Mansfield won several beauty contests while living in Texas, including Miss Photoflash, Miss Magnesium Lamp, and Miss Fire Prevention. The one title she turned down was Miss Roquefort Cheese, because it "just didn't sound right." Frequent references have been made to her very high intelligence quotient. Mansfield advertised her I.Q. as 163, spoke five languages, and was a classically trained pianist and violinist, but such intellectual abilities were inconsequential to her career. Mansfield admitted her public didn't care about her brains. "They're more interested in 40-21-35," she said.

Throughout her career, Mansfield was compared to the reigning sex symbol of the period, Marilyn Monroe. Of this comparison, she said, "I don't know why you people [the press] like to compare me to Marilyn or that girl, what's her name, Kim Novak. Cleavage, of course, helped me a lot to get where I am. I don't know how they got there." However, Jayne received her star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame prior to Monroe, was Queen of the Fox lot in 1957, and was voted the top international sex symbol numerous times. It is often stated that Jayne was given the title "The Poor Man's Monroe", however Jayne was the darling of the press when she lived and it was only after her death that such comparisons would be made.

A famous photograph of rival Sophia Loren "sizing up" Jane.

Though her [movie] roles were becoming increasingly marginalized, in 1964 Mansfield turned down the role of Ginger Grant in the television sitcom Gilligan's Island, claiming that the role, which eventually was given to Tina Louise, epitomized the stereotype she wished to rid herself of (but never completely managed to do).

Vance says he was a helicopter pilot for movies, and we talked a little about "The Whirlybirds", an early 1960s TV show about a couple of real men helicopter pilots. As far as how he met Jane Mansfield, Vance said that they met in Iceland when he was stationed there with the US Army. Jane was a star in one of Bob Hope's USO tours that performed there. Somehow he was able to meet Jane who gave him her Hollywood phone number and told him to call her when he got back to the States.

After he was discharged from the Army in 1965 (when her career was already winding down) he was in California and called her. She invited him to a party she was having at her house that Friday. Vance went to the party and, according to him, he moved in with her the following Monday and he lived there for two years, until her untimely death.

Again from Wikipedia:

After a June 28, 1967 evening engagement at the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, Mansfield, Brody, and their driver, Ronnie Harrison, along with the actress's children Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska, set out in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra 225 for New Orleans, where Mansfield was to appear in an early morning television interview. On June 29 at approximately 2:25 a.m., on U.S. Highway 90, the car crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer that had slowed down because of a truck spraying mosquito fogger. The automobile struck the rear of the semi tractor and underrode it. Riding in the front seat, the adults were killed instantly; the children riding in the rear survived with minor injuries.

According to Vance, Jane called him in Hollywood from the road the night of the crash. He believes that he was the last person (other than those on those in the car) that she talked to. He said that he received a phone call from the California Highway Patrol a couple of hours later relaying the news of the accident.

Is Vance's story true? Some of it seems farfetched, especially meeting Mansfield in Iceland and having her give him her phone number and then moving in with her for two years. Wikipedia details the three marriages and several affairs that include bobby Kennedy and a Brazilian billionaire. Somehow a Czech helicopter pilot seems out of place in this group.

Mansfield was married three times, divorced twice, and had five children. The actress reportedly also had affairs and sexual encounters with numerous individuals, including Claude Terrail (the owner of the Paris restaurant La Tour d'Argent), Robert F. Kennedy and the Brazilian playboy billionaire Jorge Guinle. At the time of her death, Mansfield was accompanied by Sam Brody, her married divorce lawyer and lover at the time.

Did he at least know her and was she at least a friend? I think that's probable. He certainly knew details about her death that were true (although easily available) and he expressed what seemed to be genuine emotion when speaking of her. Also, he happened to have a page from a Czech magazine which he showed me that had a picture of Mansfield and a young guy in a military uniform that Vance said was him. I don't read Czech so I can't say what the story in the magazine actually said.

When you are in a bar having a drink it is always nice to hear an interesting story and I guess, in the end, it doesn't really make any difference to me whether the whole story, part of the story, or none of the story is true.

He had a couple of other stories that I may relay in future posts.

New building...

I made a visit to the new RFE/RL building last week. I have visited many times before, but is the first time I have been able to go inside the building. Much progress is being made and there is still cautious optimism about a completion this summer as planned.

The number of workers both inside and outside of the building is amazing. It looks like organized chaos (at least I hope it's organized).


Here is the view from just inside the gate. Windows and exterior fascade are going on.

Here is a slightly closer view. The open area on the top floor will be a terrace (it will be used for eating outside in warm weather and all year around by the smokers).

Here is the view from my future office window.

Visiting friends...

Two fo Kathy's friends, Chris and Kim, are here for a visit. Chris arrived Saturday morning and Kim arrived early this morning. Both arrived on early flights - but everything worked out OK.

We all went for coffee this morning while Noah was at Sunday school - no, not to Starbucks. Then the girls went off for siteseeing and Noah and I returned home.

Chris and Kim leave on the train tomorrow morning for Salzburg, Austria and then go to Vienna on Thursday. Kathy is taking the train from Prague to Vienna on Friday morning to spend the weekend with them. This will be Kathy's third visit to Vienna. So next weekend the guys will be alone - time for a movie and video games!

Japanese Tea Ceremony...

This week Kathy participated in a real Japanese tea ceremony that was put on by several of the Japanese moms from ISP. While normally a four hour event with a full meal, this was a scaled down version - just 45 minutes and dessert.

From Wikipedia:

The Japanese tea ceremony (茶道, chadō, or sadō, or chanoyu - "the way of tea") is a traditional ritual based on Taoism (Daoism) and influenced by Zen Buddhism in which powdered green tea, or matcha (抹茶), is ceremonially prepared by a skilled practitioner and served to a small group of guests in a tranquil setting.

Cha-no-yu (literally "hot water for tea") usually refers to either a single ceremony or ritual, while cha-ji or chakai (literally "tea meeting") refers to a full tea ceremony with kaiseki (a light meal), usucha (thin tea) and koicha (thick tea), lasting approximately four hours.

Since a tea practitioner must be familiar with the production and types of tea, with kimono, calligraphy, flower arranging, ceramics, incense and a wide range of other disciplines and traditional arts in addition to his or her school's tea practices, the study of the tea ceremony takes many years and often lasts a lifetime. [3] Even to participate as a guest in a formal tea ceremony requires knowledge of the prescribed gestures and phrases, the proper way to take tea and sweets, and general deportment in the tea room.


Tea equipment is called dōgu (道具, literally tools). A wide range of dōgu is necessary for even the most basic tea ceremony. A full list of all available tea implements and supplies and their various styles and variations could fill a several-hundred-page book, and thousands of such volumes exist. All the tools for tea ceremony are handled with exquisite care. They are scrupulously cleaned before and after each use and before storing. Some components are handled only with gloved hands.

"The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice . . . yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible."
— Lafcadio Hearn

The children of Terezin...

I will finish up posting on Terezin today with our visit to the Ghetto Museum.

The Ghetto Museum in Terezin is about a 1/2 mile from the Small Fortess. While nearly all of the buildings within the walls of the old town (the Large Fortess) are from the time of the Jewish Ghetto (late 1941 to May 1945) only one building serves as the museum.

There were a couple of particularly interesting items. First, there is a room with the names of the thousands who perished in the ghetto, which are listed in alphabetical order. Surprisingly, there are two Tischler - Manfred and Ernesta Tischler. I and my cousin Rick have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to follow our Tischler line back into Europe. Who knows if Manfred and Ernesta are some long lost relatives.

A stairway in the Ghetto Museum has copies of dozens of drawings from the children of Terezin.
Also, there was a room with dozens of pictures made by the children of Terezin. Thousands of drawings from the children were hidden and found after the war. They were quite moving. Each drawing had the name of the child who created it and thier fate. Most of the children ended up at Auschwitz where they died. Noah went through the drawings looking for the ones that were by children who survived the war. He would call to us when he found one and was happy. I guess it was his way of dealing with magnitude of the suffering of the kids (many his age). Yes, some did survive.

One of the drawings of life in the ghetto.

Arriving at the ghetto.



Here is a book I think I have ordered from Amazon. It's Fireflies in the dark: the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the children of Terezin by Susan Goldman Rubin.
From a review of the book: Although this book has the look of a picture book for younger children, the messages contained within are for older readers. Artist Dicker-Brandeis ran secret art classes for children at the Terezin Concentration Camp. She and nearly all of her pupils perished, but 5000 of the drawings and paintings were discovered hidden in a suitcase. Many of those works are found in this book.

More on Terezin...

From the web site Jewish Virtual Library:

Hitler, the world was to be told, had built a city for the Jews, to protect them from the vagaries and stresses of the war. A film was made to show this mythic, idyllic city to which his henchmen were taking the Jews from the Czech Lands and eight other countries. Notable musicians, writers, artists, and leaders were sent there for "safer" keeping than was to be afforded elsewhere in Hitler's quest to stave off any uprisings or objections around the so-called civilized world. This ruse worked for a very long time, to the great detriment of the nearly two hundred thousand men, women and children who passed through its gates as a way station to the East and probable death.

The Red Cross was allowed to visit Terezin once. The village of Terezin was spruced up for the occasion. Certain inmates were dressed up and told to stand at strategic places along the specially designated route through Terezin. Shop windows along that carefully guarded path were filled with goods for the day. One young mother remembers seeing the bakery window and shelves suddenly filled with baked goods the inmates had never seen during their time at Terezin. Even the candy shop window overflowed with bon bons creating a fantastic illusion she would never forget.

When the Red Cross representative appeared before this young mother, she remembers being asked how it was to live in Terezin during those days. Her reply implored the questioner to look around. Be sure and look around, as she herself rolled her own widely opened eyes around in an exaggerated manner. The Red Cross reported dryly that while war time conditions made all life difficult, life at Terezin was acceptable given all of the pressures. The Red Cross concluded that the Jews were being treated all right.

There were so many musicians in Terezin, there could have been two full symphony orchestras performing simultaneously daily. In addition, there were a number of chamber orchestras playing at various times. A number of distinguished composers created works at Terezin including Brundibar or the Bumble Bee, a children's operetta and a number of chamber compositions which only now are being resurrected and played in Europe and the United States.

This was not a death camp, by the usual definition. There is no way to compare Terezin to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka or any of the other death camps where hundreds of thousands were gassed or murdered in other ways each year. Terezin, by comparison was a place to which people would apply so as to avoid a worse fate.

Leskley painting "Beautified and Phony - Red Cross Inspection"
Eli Leskley's Ghetto Diary (from the University of Minnesota Holocaust and Genocide Studies web site)

Born in 1911, Leskley painted 70 satiric watercolors while he was interned in Terezin, the show camp and ghetto established by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. He hid them, retrieved them after the war and recreated each one. The paintings are available in sets of 15 or the complete collection of 40. Many of the originals were damaged. Part of those paintings were saved and mounted. Immediately after the war, Leskley repainted all the images to provide a satiric and poignant view of the camp at Theresienstadt.

Terezin

On Saturday we made the 45 minute drive north of Prague to Terezin. Terezin is most notable for its role in World War II, as the location of a primary Jewish ghetto and for the political prison also there.

The Jewish cemetary just outside the small fortress.

A fort named Terezin, or Theresienstadt in German, was built by the Hapsburgs in the 1780s to protect against the Prussians to the north. During WWI it was used to house prisoners of war.

From Wikipedia:
The Small Fortress was part of the fortification on left side of river Ohře. Since 1940, the Gestapo used it as a prison (the largest one in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). It was separate and unrelated to the Jewish ghetto in the main fortress on the river's right side. Around 90,000 people arrived there and were usually sent to a concentration camp later. 2,600 people were executed, starved, or succumbed to disease there. A possible 1,100 children survived of the 15,000 sent there.

The 1st gate of the small fortress with the slogan "Work will set you free". Most of those who died here were worked to death as slave laborers.

Noah stands in the hallway of the building that housed the more than 20 cells for solitary confinement. Conditions here were horrendously bad. Only one of these cells was not used by the Nazis during WWII - Cell #1 had housed Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife, starting the First World War, and he died here of tuberculosis in 1918. I was able to enter the cell - it was an interesting feeling.

The shower room of the Small Fortress. Noah asked if this is where the Jews "got acid" meaning the poison gas. But Terezin was not an extermination camp. The Terezin ghetto, like all of the Jewish ghettos, was a place to accumulate Jews before deportation to the East for extermination in places like Auschwitz. Terezin was the western most of the Jewish ghettos.

During WWII, the Gestapo used Terezín, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, as a ghetto, concentrating Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as many from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark. Though it was not an extermination camp, of the over 150,000 Jews who arrived there, about 33,000 died in the ghetto itself, mostly because of the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density. About 88,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. At the end of the war there were 17,247 survivors.

Part of the fortification (Small Fortress) served as the largest Gestapo prison in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, separated from the ghetto. Around 90,000 people went through it, and 2,600 of those died there.

It was liberated on May 9th, 1945 by the Soviet Army.

Visit to the Prague Starbucks...

This morning Kathy and I dropped Noah off at Sunday school at 9:45 and then headed over to the first Starbucks in Prague just across the way which opened on Tuesday. We usually either go for a walk or stop somewhere for coffee so today we thought we would have our coffee at the new Starbucks.

Lots of other Sunday school parents had the same idea and there ended up being about 10 of us there.

The experience was OK, but then I don't really understand all the fuss over Starbucks. There were only a couple of people ahead of us in line and within a minute or two we were able to place our order - a tall (i.e. small) caramel machiatto for Kathy and a grande (i.e. medium) white mocha cafe for me. The total was 200 Crowns, or about $12. That seems a bit pricey, but before the recent fall of the dollar that same 200 Crowns would only have been about $9 (better, but still pricey).

The service at the counter was good and the coffee was prepared quickly. We retired to the main room, which was appointed similar to all the others. Soft jazz was playing on the sound system. The wall color was a warm peachy-yellow-orange.

As for the coffee itself, I thought it was just OK. It didn't seem noticeably different from what we get at Coffee Heaven, a local high end coffee chain in Prague (where the two coffees we ordered would probably cost 20% less).

The view is probably better than most Starbucks. The location is in a corner of the building, so there are windows on two sides.

The clientele seemed to be mostly tourists and expats with a few local Czechs thrown in. I expect that is what they are shooting for, but of course the more Czechs the better.

All in all I was underwhelmed, but on the other hand it is nice to have a place better than McDonalds to get a taste of home.

My 2007 taxes are done!...

I got my W-2 delivered on Thursday and it only took about an hour using the on-line version of TurboTax. I have filed on-line this way for about seven years, but this year was particularly easy for a variety of reasons.

First, 2007 was the first year that we were in Prague for the entire calendar year - we moved here in August of 2006. The 2006 taxes were more complicated because of the time split between Minnesota and Prague. But 2007 was easy.

Because we were overseas for all of 2007 there was no state tax to file - we are not residents of any state. That cut the paperwork by almost half (although state taxes are generally less involved than federal).

The biggest reason for the time saving, though, was that I used the standard deduction. Without a house (which we sold last February) there is not much to itemize, so it was cost effective - and much quicker - to use the standard deduction of $10,700. A lot of time is saved when you don't have to pull together donation receipts and look up how much you spent on your car tabs.

Because we are expats working overseas there is a foreign income exclusion. That means that when I calculate my gross income I then get to subtract the amount of the foreign income exclusion. For 2007 that exclusion is $85,700. That doesn't leave a lot left - and then you take away the standard deduction.

Anyway, I don't think I have been done this quickly with taxes since, well, when I was still in school. This will, of course, all change whenever we move back but for now I'm lovin' it.

First Starbucks in Prague opens...

I know that I have been spending a lot of time on the first Starbucks to open in Prague, and I'm not really sure why. I have been to Starbucks, but prefer Caribou, and in any event don't spend a lot of time in coffee shops. I usually have a single cup of coffee at home each day and that is pretty much it. The arrival of Starbucks in Prague - the first store opened yesterday - is more of a cultural than culinary event. It reflects the complete dominance of American popular culture through the world. (Now if we could only get Taco Bell to open in Prague I would be the first in line on opening day).

Czechs by nature do not consume mass quantities of coffee from half-litre sized cups. To the typical Czech, coffee is something that is served after a meal and comes in a very small cup (think espresso) with perhaps a little cookie. That's it. For Starbucks to be successful beyond the tourists and foreign workers the culture of why and when Czechs drink coffee will have to change.

Obviously, Starbucks has moved into other countries with the same local perception of coffee, and has succeeded. So I have little doubt that 5 years from now Czechs will view coffee as Americans do.

Starbucks was quite clever, in my opinion, to take a location that long ago served as a cafe/coffeehouse for young writers and wresting it from a popular restaurant (Square, on Malostranka namesti as I have previously posted). I am sure it was expensive to do, but it is a way to get Czechs to mentally associate Starbucks with their own heritage

Here is a report from yesterday's Financial News:

“Starbucks takes great pride in announcing it has carefully and thoughtfully rehabilitated the Palác Grömlingovský retail location and returned it to its historic use as a coffeehouse and gathering place for the local community,” said Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks Europe, Middle East, and Africa. “We are thrilled to welcome the people of Prague back to the Palác Grömlingovský to enjoy Starbucks finest coffees in the location they have known and loved for years.”

“Many steps have been taken to ensure that the physical space was restored respecting its original architectural features,” said Jakub Strestik, operations director for Starbucks Czech Republic. The 270 square meter location was originally established as a coffeehouse in 1874 and it remained a destination for local literati, scholars and neighbors for decades. The renovation includes restoration of the original flooring, use of recommended paint color palettes, maintenance of all existing windows, and design and installation of subdued exterior signage in keeping with the ambience of the town square. Starbucks will also introduce programming at this store that will allow customers to enjoy include book readings, book releases, and other arts and literature related events.

A bet that the dollar will go up...

This morning I made a bet with a guy here at work that the US dollar would go up - reaching 19.00 crowns to the dollar by 01 March and 20.00 crwons to the dollar by 01 June. Of course, then the Fed went and cut the key rate that banks charge each other overnight by 75 points, from 4.25% to 3.5%. This has weakened the dollar even more and it currently sits at about 18.00, down from about 18.25 before the announcement. However, I stand by my analysis from yesterday and believe that the dollar will be "saved" by a worldwide (and possibly deep) recession.

Yesterday I mentioned the difference between the "old conventioanl wisdom" - that the rest of the world is tied at the hip to the US economy - and the "new conventional wisdom" that others, like the EU, had disengaged themselves from the US sufficiently that a recession in the US would not doom them.

Here is the EU in all of its "new conventional wisdom" glory. I call this an example of whistling past the graveyard. From the Associated Press:

The EU's economy chief on Tuesday blamed the United States' huge trade deficit for plunging shares on world stock exchanges, saying Europe was in a very different state and could weather the storm despite slowing growth.

"It's obvious that we are living in an uncertain period," he told reporters after EU finance ministers met in Brussels. Fears of a U.S. recession -- not a larger global slowdown -- were behind falling equity markets, he said, stressing that Europe was not facing similar problems.

I hope I don't lose this bet - it's for a beer!

I forgot...

Since it's Martin Luther King day in the States there will be no markets open today. That makes it even more interesting since we will have another session in Europe tomorrow before the US markets finally open. I predict a second day of European gloom and doom.