15 Aug

Hi Camilla,

Glad to hear it, that's great :)

I'm up and down: lots of good experiences, lots of bad experiences, I feel a bit like a sock in the tumble dryer sometimes.

Which is why I am planning to head to Slovakia - there's an IH there and if I can just wrangle my way out of my contract here, then I'll be starting in early September. Maybe I'll get the regular classes that Mark always denied me in the belief that it would make me 'grow' (his words). Danube, close to Vienna, blah blah blah blah

Winter arrives in my dreams representing Carrie and Chicago and family cooking and a brief glimpse of English streets. I am very homesick at this stage. Carrie came to visit last month and it coincided with a heatwave. I took her up Petrin Hill to overlook the whole of Prague. We were delirious and had to decend to find water when we stumbled on a zoo I never knew existed. We stroked the ponies (a pony is a small horse) and looked at the turtles in the turtle pond. We couldn't see the lizards. It was built around a school - classrooms and drawing activities for all the local kids. Then we heard a scraping from one of the greenhouses. We went to investigate as we weren't sure if we were trespassing. A woman was watering all the plants. Did she work there we asked? Does she feed the animals herself? Are the schoolkids on holiday? We should see the croc, she said. It's back there but far too hot for viewing the animals now really. As she talked she kept casting an eye down at the box in my hands (my new trainers). I couldn't understand until she finally asked 'Do you have something for me?' She was used to people bringing her unwanted pets, injured bats and so on.

I didn't give her my rabbit or turtle or anything, but we headed back down. I thought it was magical that fate should come up with that misunderstanding.

I've been really into Germany since my visit to Berlin - I want to hear Zoo Station by U2 and Lou Reed's drama about an addicted mother who kills herself - 'Berlin' ('And this ... the most vile album of all' - The New York Times :) ) I've been reading Christopher Isherwood's "Return to Berlin', which Cabaret was based on, and Stephen Spender's autobiography in which he visits Hamburg and Berlin pre-WW2. Fantastic. I've just begun The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.
I went on a tour of the Jewish synagogues and cemetary last week which was really harrowing. The Pinkas synagogue is the biggest epitaph in the world - the white walls are covered with the names - in simple calligraphy - of each of the 77,477 Jews from the Czech Republic who never returned from the concentration camps or ghettoes in Poland and Germany. It is done chromatically - the town in orange, surname in red, first names in black (often there were many members of a family who were killed) and then the dates in red too. All of them, regardless of whether they were born in 1898 or 1940 ended in the date 42 or 43. there was a section on 'Mlada Boleslav' the town where I am living.

And still people had to be asked not to take photos.

I'm not teaching till 5, so I'm off to get a potato cake.

Hope you're doing well Camilla,

Hi to everyone,

Take care,

Matt x