So I moved back to Prague for the third time in early December, 2024. Signed the lease on my new apartment (with some hesitation, but more on that later) on December 8, and though I've borrowed a few cooking utensils and bed linen and towels, and bought a few glasses and plated, I'm still living a pretty spartan life until my things arrive from the US in early February.
That's ok though. My building is, by happenstance, essentially next door to the building where my good friend Filip lives, and in the neighborhood I wanted to be in (Vinohrady/Zizkov) which is full of cafes, parks, restaurants, and even a super-close supermarket, as well as lots of mass transit options and easy walking distance to the main train station.
I sort of didn't have the bandwidth to get this blog going earlier, but I do now, so I'll try to fill in the details about the past month as we go, while working hard to stay up to date.
The big news this past weekend is that I won my first Sport-level ATTour tennis tournament in a year or two, on my fourth try since getting back to Europe. Previous attempts this time around had faltered in the quarterfinals at the Cibulka tennis club (6-1!), the quarterfinals at Modrany (6-1!), and the semi-finals at Hajnovka (6-4, so at least that one was respectable). This time around, in an eight-person tournament at SK Aritma, I needed to win my last group match to even qualify for the semi-finals ... and did so in the closest possible fashion, 7-6(8), including having a terrible net-cord winner fall over the net in my favor on my opponent's match point at 7-8.
With that reprieve I played an older Ukrainian man, Sergei, in the semis, and although he hit approximately 4228 forehand winners to go up 5-2 — I could not keep the ball away from his killer forehand — something happened when I clawed one game back, and you could see him start getting a little nervous with his shots, second-guessing himself and trying to hit them perfectly instead of well. I came back and won 7-5, taking extra satisfaction in the fact that he threw his racket four different times in frustration.
Finally, I played a guy, Milan, who had rolled over me 6-1 earlier in the day, but by this point I was looser and more comfortable, and to his shock I beat him 6-4. Despite the age difference — I may be a good 15-20 years older than him — he was the one bending over gasping for air and taking a sitting break even though it wasn't a change-over. Nice guy (and he gave me ride home in his Mercedes afterwards), but I'm still in the glow of it all.
Don't worry, I won't often go on at such length about something so arcane/uninteresting, but the win was pretty exciting for me. When I first started playing in these tournaments in 2015 I was 47 — not the youngest, but not near the oldest in the league. Now, ten years later, I'm much closer to the latter than the former, and although I'm playing well, I'm also starting to feel some concerning tweaks and twinges, lingering aches, and so on. It was ... well, dammit, it was very satisfying to prove, to myself if to nobody else, that I'm still fit, competitive, and youthful. The tournaments are, of course, very amateur — nobody's suggesting we're ready for prime time. But even for good players, winning them requires some real fitness — in this tournament, I needed to win five sets, involving over 5.5 hours of court time, without a break for food — sort of above and beyond the specific tennis skills involved. As a result, I wrote to some friends afterwards that winning the tournament meant, to me, NDY — "Not Dead Yet."
Age and infirmity will come to me (if I'm lucky). But NDY. Coming home with my trophy to watch Crystal Palace obtain a satisfying draw with Chelsea over a freshly ordered and really good pizza before sitting in a hot bath ... you could do a lot worse, seems to me.
Anyway, yesterday — Sunday — I ran some errands (bought a new pair of shoes, returned a radiator-attached cat-seat, and got a wonderful pedicure from Tina at the Pankrac shopping mall), and made a delicious stir-fry for dinner.
Today I woke up at 3 am to watch the end of the Detroit Lions game on TV, then after a nap walked to the Flora shopping mall to pick up my dry cleaning (had lost the ticket, of course, but the woman was pleasant enough about it) and get a new simcard for my phone. So I'll have a Czech phone number. Slowly but surely I'm getting my feet under me! Apartment. Address. Internet. Phone Number. Before long I'll be driving a Skoda.
Oh, favorite source of confusion of the day. The Czech word for car, Skoda, in translation, means "pity," as in "that's a pity." (Hmm. I wonder if could then translate, in English, to sucks, or lame, as in "that sucks," or "that's lame"). Anyway, the Czech word for "deuce" in tennis is pronounced "sxoda," and I always confuse the two. I wonder how many times I've prepared to serve by yelling out "it's a pity!"? Which, now that I think about it, kinda works as trash-talking anyway. Maybe it's ok. 😄
Now that I've started writing, I've got a lot to fill in, from my thoughts about the Czech Republic and Czech culture, to grocery shopping here, to my Czech New Year's up in the mountains, and much more. Today, though, I'll simply note that, while I've been struck by a real obliviousness here to other people when grocery shopping, or walking in the mall, or anything like that — a surprising failure of basic etiquette in that one way, reflected in people standing in your way absolutely unaware that you're trapped and unable to get past them, until they finally move on on their own or are asked to move (a request which is usually effective, but rarely welcomed) — it's also true that the etiquette of drivers is amazing. They stop at every crosswalk when a pedestrian is anywhere near it, even if in fact both the pedestrian and the car could continue at normal speed without ever coming close to each other. I've never seen anything like it. Sometimes I'm not even planning on crossing yet — maybe I'm writing a message on my phone, or pausing to look at something — but that car will stop anyway, effectively guilting me into scrambling across the street.
My Czech friends dismiss this, insisting that Czech drivers are rude and no different than anywhere else. And that may be true in Europe, for all I know. But compared to American drivers they're incredibly respectful of the pedestrian right-of-way, and it's striking.
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