Jabloneč

Something I have just written in my notebook amongst half-finished 100 words.

My life is amazing. These Czech men and women are like kinsmen my heart has dreamed of. They love to use their bodies at every possible moment. After returning from dinner at a pub and a walk through an incredible forest park with trails and fields interspersed, many of the people were already getting ready to "go swimming". Naturally - though it was nearing sunset and cool outside - I agreed. What going swimming meant was running on sidewalks and between concrete buildings until we ended up at a lake, stripping down, and swimming half the width of the lake to a plastic blue island. The water was cold but not frigid, brownish-tinged, and somehow comforting to my skin and muscles. On the way out I could flip over onto my back and look at the sun setting the waz I had come. Around the lake were a skinny dam, ducks, and the land covered with fir trees and great square apartment buildings. The Czechs were just dutifully loving being in the water and the motion of their bodies. By the time I got out, pink clouds on a navy blue sky above, I had this deep, irrepressible feeling that my life was complete. Not that I was done living, but that every facet of myself and the world had fit together perfectly. Now I have taken a shower in this gaping primarz school where we stay - I was naked in a rustz room tiled with orange and blue, unused showerheads all around while the basement air filled with steam - and I feel like my mind and body are used and content. I have written this in a dark locker room on a bench looking out of a bank of dark windows to a night so untouched by the streetlights that I can barely see the difference between hills and sky, I can hear the footsteps and phrases of the others in the halls in echoes that travel mysteriously far. I do not know what unfathomable convolutions of history have made these moments, but somehow they have created the perfect chord that is left resounding in my body.


Other comments/observations.

The keyboard is difficult here, it is easz to confuse y and z and impossible to find an apostrophe. So I do not use contractions.

We had a seven and a half hour layover in Rome airport which was trying on our patience but ultimately worked out all right. At one point we found a luggage cart abandoned on the back roads and it turned out to be one of the most energetic characters we have met yet. We named him Leonardo the Matador. It was great watching people get angry when they changed the gate at the last moment and yell in Italian at the ticket scanner ladies. But we got there, after an hour and a half drive to the camp from Prague to Jabloneč.

Like I said already, the people are great here, many have taken English in school so communication is not too much of a problem.

Now I am tired and I am heading the way of the buffalope, to sleep!