Lost in transit

Last Easter, I gave you my...egg

It's Easter this weekend. Yay, for chocolate and eggs!

This is a story about what we did last Easter. Well we were proper Czechs, is what we were, even though we mostly spoke English and hold the wrong passports. My parents came to visit and the weather did what it never does when we have visitors, which was SPARKLE: gorgeous, sunny, but not too hot, perfect weather. We went to Rousinov, where my former boss and current friend lives on weekends (with her husband, son, daughter, and dog. Plus the daughter’s boyfriend and many other neighborhood youth popping in and out… what a cast!) Rousinov is a small town, a village really, and the house where they live is the one where my friend’s grandmother lived, and it is a crumbling beauty of a place. One visitor said it was painful because it was so beautiful and so crumbly. And it is exactly that. It is like a museum, a wonderful abandoned museum. Full of creaky wooden wagons, festively painted kitchen furniture, piles of dusty, crumbling books from the early 1800s, bell-jarred Catholic icons, some great-grandmother’s childhood dolls forgotten in the dust on the floor. Lovely and painful. It reminds me of a “before” picture, you just want to get in there with a comb and some tea tree oil and get it all sorted out. But of course half of the magic of the place is its very crumble.
So we went. It’s a 30 minute bus ride, and we got there around noon, my mother hauling many chocolate and other sweet goodies from the states (they DO have sweets here, but sometimes she forgets), me holding a jar of pickled beet eggs (it’s my mother’s favorite Easter thing, and I have until this year considered it pretty but vile, but in trying to perfect the recipe I got a bit of a taste for them, so I guess I’m over calling them “Mom’s nasty egg things”), and the men/boys holding switches. Cause that’s Easter here—the boys use sticks made from willow branches and whack at the girls, and the girls hand them eggs. I’ve been here for 10 years, but I still cannot get over this one, this “Yes, come at me with that rapidly undulating/wagging thing and I will hand you my ov—I mean, an egg!” but then sometimes you like the holidays served primitive. And the guys at Rousinov weren’t really hitting all that hard. Slovaks dump water on you, so we got some of that, too. And also I really liked making them eat the freakish purple pickled things right after. A girl’s gotta have her weapons at hand, and there’s nothing like a strangely colored egg being popped in your mouth to make a person keep his distance.
So. We did the stick and egg thing. We did the disgusting amounts of eating (always in Czech houses, always in Rousinov, always on holidays, so it was a triple whammy of gorge and fun, cheese spreads and chicken and potatoes (for those of us who eat of the chicken) and hot peppers (Tonja, being Macedonian, understands the love of spicy, yay) and lots of buns and cakes and nummy nummies. And brownies. And eggs.
And slivovice (Czech moonshine), which wasn’t really slivovice because it wasn’t made from plums, but from 1. apples and then later 2. pears. Na zdravi, na zdravi, na zdravi, na zzzdravi, naaaa zzzzdravvvvvii.
And then we were well fed and talked out and sleepy and happy and all of that end-of-the-holiday bash stuff, so we went home (some of us handled the standing-room only bus better than others, let’s say).
And that was Easter last year. Surprisingly, my parents remember having had so much fun that they’re coming again this year. Go figure.