You can"t always get what you want...

I know this trip is supposed to teach us about reporting, minority issues, cultural differences, etc. But a lot of it--for me, anyway--has been a lesson in patience and acceptance, especially in the little things throughout the day.

Like this morning: I wanted to get a pack of gum, which back home may be the most simple purchase a person can make. Go into a store, grab the kind you want, pay, leave. But here the shops keep the gum behind the counter, so the process here involves pointing at the rack, a series of pleading expressions and saying 'toto, prosim' (that, please), waving my hand left or right to guide the clerk, who was clearly getting sick of my antics. She finally picked up some weird orange-flavored gum and handed it to me. I paid, thanked her, and left.

I don't know if you know this, but I'm a little sick of companies feeling the need to mess with things that have seemed to work well for years. Coke went ahead and made that 'Black Cherry Vannila' crap, and now you can buy chewing gum that tastes like anything from oranges to strawberries and cream to pina colada, even. What was wrong with mint?

Anyway, that's the deal with being in another country and not knowing the language. Things don't always go exactly how you planned, and it doesn't do any good to get upset. Of course, this was just a pack of gum, and I doubt I'd make a big deal about it even if the woman behind the counter could have understood me. But there are other instances, though none of them are terribly life-altering situations. Still, we've (I've) gotten so accustomed to being able to get exactly what we want exactly when we want it, and not being able to throws you off a bit.

And again, it's the little things that by themselves wouldn't be a big deal, but going through day after day of not being able to communicate even the simplest things is just weird.

But I've been doing stuff other than just looking like an ass and getting bothered by a pack of gum...

Saturday I went to the Národní (National) Museum, which is a lot like the Natural History Museum in NYC. Unfortunately, all the signs were in Czech, so all the stuff that I normally would have found fascinating was kind of lost. They offer those little audio tours in English, but getting the little headset costs more than the entrance fee, and I had a problem with that. Luckily, I'm a huge nerd, so not being able to understand Czech wasn't a problem when I got to the animal exhibits because I recognized a lot of the Latin names for animals, and the spellings for a lot of different minerals and precious stones isn't all that different in Czech, so I managed to at least know what I was looking at a lot of the time, even if I couldn't put it in any context. Among the highlights:

They had an uncut, unpolished diamond. 3,000-some-odd karats. Seriously, this thing was the size of a grapefruit.

Butterflies and moths: First-off, I had no idea there were so many, or how colorful they could be. Some of the butterflies were this deep shade of royal blue surrounded by black lining, which gave the wings the appearance that they were a set of enormous eyes, the kind you'd see in an anime cartoon. And some of the moths were as big as my face, which was...disconcerting.

From what I could gather, one exhibit consisted only of artifacts found at the Prague Castle, from early stone and metal tools to ornate swords and battle axes to even the skeletons some people and horses buried on the castle grounds. Again, I had no way to put any of this into context, but as I moved through the exhibit I saw the map of the excavation area look more and more like Prague Castle, so I used my substantial powers of deductive reasoning to come to that (probably wrong) conclusion.

I took a bunch of pictures of the building itself, a neo-classical structure that dominates Wenceslas Square. The inside was even more incredible than the outside. I swear that when I return, I'll upload all these pictures and you can see all this stuff I've been talking about.

Yesterday, we visited the newsroom of the Prague Post, Prague's English language newspaper. The editor-in-chief (Frank) met with us for about half an hour and discussed some of the challenges he's had over the past few years working as a journalist in the Czech Republic. As I've said in an earlier posting, it's common practice here to let sources read stories before they go to print, which isn't at all how things are done back home. He also said a lot of government organizations and departments aren't really accustomed to dealing with the press, and don't see talking to the press as an important part of a democracy. Rather, they view the media ask kind of a pest, something that if they ignore will just go away. Not that some in our government don't see the press in the same way...

Frank said that he tells anyone who applies to work at the Post to forget everything they know about journalism, and I think with good reason. In the States, we've had 218 years of evolution with the media's role in society, and we're still not sure exactly what we (the media) should be doing or can be doing. And early in our democracy, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which by today's First Amendment standards are absolutely abhorrant. Here, there's no tradition of the press "keeping them honest," as Anderson Cooper says. And it's not just on the media's part and the government's: Frank said a lot of people don't expect the press to hound the government, make them explain how and why they're doing this or that. It's a different world, to be sure. I'd really like to come back to the Czech Republic in 20 years, or 50 years, or even 100 years, and see how things have changed over time in regards to the media.

As far as my story is coming, Martin and I have been e-mailing drafts back and forth, and tomorrow we're going to meet up so we can do some editing and finalizing of the majority of it, though I want to do at least one more interview before we go. But I swear I'm getting work done. Really.

Take care, thanks for all the comments.
S