Poo Detective...

I admit: I have one of the best jobs in the world. What other job allows you to spend the majority of your time colouring, dancing, laughing and playing?

When I arrive to my classes in the morning there is a small stampede of 2-4 year olds yelling my name and throwing themselves at my legs. Crouching down to greet them is a health hazard and not recommended for those who would like to escape unscathed.

I am pretty sure no one else gets a greeting that epic when they arrive at their workplace. Unless of course they work with dogs or monkeys, which I assume would be comparable.

If I am away for a few days, they miss me, well, sometimes I think the younger ones actually forget who I am, but the older ones, they miss me.

Working with children makes you realize how guileless we started out. They don't pretend to like you if they don't, they don't pretend to listen if they're not, if you suggest something that they don't want to do they'll just say 'no'. They are also completely unashamed, they'll pick their nose in front of you, tell you exactly what they are going to do in the bathroom and break wind during a conversation without so much as a blink. Somewhere along the line as we grow up these things become (thankfully) inappropriate.

But, they are not all sunshine and lollipops.

Enter, the poo detective.

What is a poo detective one may ask. Well, let me clarify. Sometimes when you are doing said colouring, you catch a whiff of something, it's faint and unpleasant, but unmistakable. Realization dawns on you and now you must identify the perpetrator. But which child is it? And how do you figure it out?

Well, you have to smell it out. This consists of feigning interest in a child's artwork as you casually smell them for clues. Once you discover the culprit, you have to wait a moment and then smell again, because at this point you may just be a flatulence detective. And if there is one thing that is worse than being a poo detective it's realizing that you are intentionally inhaling someone else's fart.

Children are usually pretty good at potty training after 2 1/2 years, which is around when they start at preschool, but every now and again if they are stressed out or overly excited - say when it snows - there are calamities.

The worse case yet ended up with some in his hair.

How?!?

So when people tell me they are so jealous of my job and wish they could be a kindergarten teacher, I just smile, because they clearly don't know the half of it.

Smoking, Beer and Dogs

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship going on with Czech pubs.

Love, because first and for most beers generally cost between $1.30 to $1.80 - and good beer at that. This is a country known for their beer, and with good reason, their first brewery opened in 1118, so they have had time to perfect the art.

There's even a microbrewery in Prague that doubles as a monastery. Documentation of the monks of Strahovský Klášter brewing their own beer have cropped up since as early as the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries when there were actually two breweries in the monastery. Although the tradition stopped in 1907, it was restored and reopened in 2000. As far as I understand it is no longer the monks doing the brewing, none the less it's still pretty uniquely European to enjoy a pint at a Monastic Brewery.

So you can understand why the Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita in the world. The annual average per person is 158.6 liters, to put that in to perspective that's 27.5 liters higher than Ireland. Who knew that ANYONE could drink more than the Irish?

The next best thing about Czech pubs? Fried Cheese.

Fried Cheese can be purchased and eaten as a meal without facing judgement from calorie counting waitresses. Wer'e not even talking mozza sticks, but more along the lines of an entire block of cheese, breaded and fried and then served with some variation of potatoes. Which I am not gonna lie is pretty magnificent.

Czech food isn't exactly unrivaled, with not a lot of variation from meat (most often pork) and dumplings with a pile of cabbage forever looming on the side of each plate. Traditional Czech food is centered around meat and starch, with vegetables being a very secondary concern. In fact, I think Fried Cheese may be the only vegetarian option on most Czech menus. I once ordered a tomato salad and literally received a bowl full of tomatoes, nothing else, just tomatoes. A well balanced meal is of little concern over here. But they do have a few scrumptious meals, which I may even miss once I leave including Bramborák (potato pancakes) and Svíčková (marinated beef sirloin served with a vegetable sauce, dumplings, cream and a small dollop of cranberry sauce).

To top it all off, most pubs and restaurants are dog friendly. How great is that? And there doesn't even appear to be a size restriction. My friend's Weimaraner, a dog that rivals me in size, has tagged along with us to various posh establishments.

So how can one hate these pubs? They offer great beer for a ridiculously cheap fare, while your dog lounges at your feet and you munch away on an entire block of cheese. Well the answer lies in the cigarettes.

Now I suppose if you are a smoker this may seem great, as the world quickly decreases the amount of countries which allow smoking in public places. But for non smokers, the dark murkiness dominating Czech bars is offensive at best.

Without fail I leave smelling like a chain smoker and wake up with a sore throat to match. And in a country that seems to have politely ignored the invention of the dryer, the only option is to either hang your clothes somewhere where fresh air will pass through them for at least a day or to spray them with artificial chemical scents.

The only regulation on smoking in restaurants, pubs and bars is a sticker on the front door, indicating that they are one of three options: A non smoking bar (about as rare as a sensible Herman Cain quote). A smoking bar (read smoking den where identifying people at other tables is an issue because of the haze) or they have separate areas for smoking or non smoking, which is rather pointless without physical barriers so it's more of an imaginary separation.

The Czech Republic is a far way off from having a proper smoking ban. In fact as far as I can tell though many European countries claim publicly to have smoking bans it's about as ridiculous as the countries that claim to be democratic by adding the word Democratic to their name...(Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo...the list goes on.)

So to get that delicious beer at a Czech pub you've just got to suck it up, quite literally. Because the prospect of change is a gloomy one when it comes to smoking laws.

Saint Mikuláš (like Santa if he went to jail first)

First, imagine Santa if he stopped eating all those cookies and chose skim over whole milk, wore a red bishop hat and robes, walked with a staff and hung out with an angel and the devil.

Now imagine, his job instead of flying around in a magical little sleigh judging children was to instead rock up in person at said children's houses and schools, with much graver consequences to a not so good year than a couple lumps of coal, like say, being put in a bag and taken to Hell with the devil. Wait. What?

I present to you, Saint Mikuláš (pronounced Mikulaash), the beloved saint celebrated on December 5th.

Now, according to a few of my Czech friends, in their parent's era Mikuláš did in fact pass off the bad kids to his buddy the devil who promptly put them in a bag and pretended he was going to take them to hell or mildly beat them.

Well, I don't know about you but I know that would have been a way more efficient bedtime story for me as a child than the whole Santa Claus bit. 'Be good or some old man will leave you coal in the living room' versus 'Be good or we'll let the devil take you without ransom'. Ours is clearly lacking the fear element.

But alas things have progressed, and with the prospect of putting children in bags to be carted off to Hell being looked down on as a somewhat cruel practice, the devil now only gives you a stern talking to and shakes his chains. Slightly anti-climactic if you ask me, though still more fear inducing than Santa.

The Czechs aren't the only ones who let people cart off their children, apparently the Dutch Sinterklaas had a somewhat similar gig although your final destination was Spain as a slave as opposed to Hell. And Sinterklaas comes with reinforcement, Zwarte Pieten, a group of black men, now called 'helpers' but formerly referred to as 'slaves', a tradition that is only now starting to be questioned with concerns about the racist content.

So if this all happens at the beginning of December, then who brings the gifts on Christmas? Surely not your parents. I found the answer to this question last year from a conversation with one of the 5 year olds at the kindergarten, Tomáš, he was playing with a new toy and I had asked him passingly who had given it to him, mum? Dad? Grandparents, maybe?

None of the above.

'Ježíšek.' Translate: Baby Jesus.

Come again?

The absurdity of this is not even that a baby somehow navigates his way around the world dropping off gifts (which clearly an old man in a flying sled led by migratory mammals could reasonably achieve), but that the good people of the Czech Republic are getting gifts from a religious icon that they don't believe in. They proudly boast to anyone who will listen that they are the least religious country in Europe.

So are they duplicitous or are they simply being advantageous?

The picture above was taken at the kindergarten during last year's Mikuláš celebration (2010).