"Seratonin" Means "I Forgive You" in Czech

Just isolated thoughts today.

Food-Service Language Issues

First, while I'm glad to hear that a Chinese restaurant will be opening soon right down the street from me, I'm not sure they're getting the most bang for their marketing buck. Seems like, here in the Czech Republic, if you're going to advertise in English, you should make sure ...

Also ... "Black Royal?" Asian food?

On a related note, I'm writing this in the Cafe Żivé Kytky that I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Downstairs is a vegan burger place that, when I first lived in Prague, I assumed was a goth club of some kind. In the abstract, or in the context of a goth/hardcore club, it's a great name — probably my favorite name of any restaurant or bar in the world. But it's a terrible name (and logo) for a vegan hamburger restaurant. All I can assume is that the person who thought of the name was so (justifiably) proud of it that he insisted on using it regardless of the actual kind of restaurant they were opening

BelzePub — that's genius!

Cafe Żivé Kytky was crowded when I got here this afternoon, and the only open spot was at one of two small square tables that had been pushed together, with a young couple sitting (and maybe breaking up?) at the other end. I asked them if I could sit at that open spot, and they said "sure,"  so I sat down and stared at my cappuccino for a bit, trying not to disturb them.

They were both Czech, and eventually, when they got past whatever drama had been happening when I first arrived (she with tears in her eyes, neither of them really looking at each other, neither of them really talking beyond short sentences followed by long silences), things got a bit lighter. At which point, though I couldn't understand what they were saying, I did discover that Czech is, these days, peppered with a lot of familiar-to-my-ear phrases and words. That is, unless "Great British Bake-Off" and "Twin Peaks" and "Reality Shows" and "seratonin," sprinkled as they were in otherwise purely Czech conversation, are actually just normal Czech words that happen to sound familiar to me. 

It's possible, I guess. Maybe "seratonin" means "I forgive you" in Czech. Who knows?

David's Adventures Abroad

I played tennis with Ales at the Hamr-Zabehlice club this afternoon — the same club I went to with Rick and Nick a few years ago, where Nick and I played in a drizzle for several hours, and then the three of us got some good food. It's a beautiful club, with a little wooden bridge over a good-sized burbling brook. 

Hamr Záběhlice

Nothing remarkable about the day, really, but I did experience the kind of thing that I feel only happens to me en route to the club. I had happily discovered that a bus that stops directly outside my building goes directly to the club, so the trip that in previous years required transferring and 45 minutes is now a no-brainer. So I got on the mass-transit app and bought myself a ticket and walked out to the bus stop two minutes before it arrived. While I waited I tried to connect my headphones to the phone, but for some reason they weren't connected. I've discovered, over the past year or two, that when this kind of thing happens, I need to restart the phone, so no problem. Once restarted, the phone asked for the PIN code. And wasn't satisfied on either of my first two attempts with the one I've been using FOR YEARS.

Only then did it say I needed to enter my "O2" pin-code — that is, the one connected to the SIM card I just bought a couple weeks ago, with my Czech phone number. Which meant that I couldn't restart the phone without it ... which meant that the bus ticket I had just bought was inaccessible, so that, were I to be stopped by a bus-police guy, I wouldn't be able to demonstrate that I had purchased it.

Sighing, I walked back to my apartment, trying to ignore the bus that came, right on time, behind me as I crossed the street, went upstairs got the PIN code (which still didn't work, so I had to use the PUK code I got as well), and then changed the PIN code back to the one I'm familiar with, and ... ordered an Uber to get me to the club on time.

If I hadn't bought the ticket BEFORE connecting the headphones, or if I hadn't needed to connect the headphones, none of this would have happened. But I did, and therefore paid for the bus ticket in vain, and needed to pay for an Uber. Another seven dollars, down the drain.

All this, to listen to a Crystal Palace podcast

No Guts No Glory

One thing I didn't mention in my tennis summary yesterday was my pride in three specific shots in the finals: 1) Serving at 2-4, with that hole about to become to big to recover from, I tossed the ball up on a serve and saw, out of the corner of my eye, him creeping in — and made a last second adjustment to hit the ball much harder than I had on any serve before then, which he was unprepared for and unable to return; 2) at 5-5, 30-40, with him serving, he hit a weaker cross-court shot to my backhand than usual, and I ran around it, screwed my courage to the sticking point, and ripped a down-the-line winner to win that game; and 3) serving at 6-5, 30-40, I saw him taking up a position ever-so-slightly wider than usual (which made sense, because that's where every serve had been going, and fairly weakly), so summoned up the energy and went for it down the t, and got an ace to bring it to deuce.

These shots are unusual for me, both because, in tournaments (or, in the US, in league matches), my overriding instinct, which I've discovered I can't turn off, is not to make mistakes — not to give away free points — and trust my legs and defense to keep me in points until I finally get to the net or until they make mistakes. This is good against weaker players — consistency, in tennis at this level, is itself an under-rated weapon. But against better players it can get me in trouble, because my relative inability to push them back (because hitting deep, after all, increases the chance that I'll hit it long, giving them a free point) allows them to step up into the court and hit winners past me.

And that happens a lot in these tournaments against good players. Indeed, after I won the finals, my opponent, Filip, said, with some frustration, that he prefers — and is better at — games with people exchanging rockets from the baseline, whereas my softer shots kept dragging him in to unfamiliar and uncomfortable positions. I could see it happening. I actually apologized to him after the match, because that makes it sound like it was a strategic move on my part, and instead it comes from tightness, and an inability to let 'er rip.

Anyway, the point is, with all of those three shots I described up above, I did let 'er rip, in stressful points of the finals. It shows, I think, that I have the skill to match up with a lot of these players even with the kinds of tennis they prefer, and that, when forced to, I can ramp it up a bit. It also shows that I'm thinking, during matches, and when I become aware that they're recognizing my tendencies and trying to take advantage, I can switch things up.

What I assume my forehand looked like.

Don't get me wrong. I still lose often, and even yesterday I needed tie-breakers in two matches to win. I'm hardly over-confident. But I was proud of myself for taking the risk inherent in those three shots, which is not usually how I play.