I am being punished, at this point, for not taking adequate notes over the course of the day. At the start of the trip, I would take notes assiduously, writing little reminders to myself on scraps of paper about interesting things that I saw during the day and would want to relate later on in my emails. Now, I tend to assume that I will take in all sorts of new impressions by osmosis and magically come up with something to say when it comes to write my emails; I have grown lazy. As a result, I wonder if I will end up finding anything at all to say.
I started my day by going to the hospital. I was immediately confronted with one of the problems with having hospitals, courts of law, schools, and so on in very old buildings: while they look nice from the outside, their entrances can be very hard to find. I had to walk around the block to find a back entrance to the hospital, at which point I would have been flummoxed had a security guard not happened to be standing near the entrance to the nearest hospital wing: unlike in a North American hospital, the Czech hospital had no reception area and no clear signs detailing where one should go to get treatment. The security guard directed me to walk through a door into a vestibule that could easily have belonged to a museum or theater if only it had had a ticket booth. I stood gazing all around me until another couple entered, and I followed the couple upstairs into a room smelling appropriately of damp plaster, in which a bunch of bored-looking people were sitting around on chairs. The couple that had entered just before me asked the room at large who was last in line, and a nurse who was passing by told me, when I asked the couple how to gain admission to the hospital, that Czech people had to buy some sort of entry slip downstairs, while I could get treated without doing so. I waited for about an hour-and-a-half, no longer than in a Canadian hospital (I should think), to be treated, at which point the nurse on duty, who spoke good English, grew worried that I might have an inflamed appendix and sent me to a room that had a cognate of "ambulance" in its name.
What followed was a battery of tests showing no problems whatsoever with the health of my major organs and suggesting that I had the most painful, most drawn-out, least-acute case of food poisoning of my life. I was impressed, loath as I am to admit it, with the Czech health care system overall: almost every nurse or doctor with whom I interacted spoke serviceable Russian or English, the testing done on me seemed very thorough, I was in and out of the hospital in reasonable time, and the whole affair only cost a little under 150 Euros - not bad money, all considered, and money that I can certainly refund, because of my medical insurance, when I get home (I am going to email the people tonight to tell them in advance what happened.). What seemed strange to me about the experience was that people in the waiting room said hello and goodbye to one another, chatted amongst themselves, laughed, and seemed to be having an all right time. I suppose that, since none of them appeared to be on death's doorstep, they decided to make the most of the situation.
I spent the rest of the day, from 2:30 onwards, resting. While I had planned to visit a famous castle in Lednice, I just barely missed the train there, and the lack of infrastructure in the Czech Republic is so frustrating that I decided to give up on trying to go anywhere for the day. I had filled out a prescription from the doctor whom I saw and had bought a pair of over-the-counter medicines on his recommendation, and I decided to spend the afternoon reading and watching a movie. I felt so tired that I ended up lying in bed instead, almost asleep, after which I had a very simple dinner of yogurt, a plum, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich made from the groceries that I bought on Friday. I have decided to eschew fresh fruits and sour foods for the next few days, but I figured that one plum would not hurt, as plums are not so tart and provide one with much-needed fiber.
Enough of dietary details! I may finally get over this illness over the next few days with the help of the medicine that I picked up today. It is interesting to think that the contents of my stomach will be somewhat different once I have taken a few more probiotic pills than they were a few days ago. When I was a child, I thought of the body as having two possible states, healthy and sick. When one was sick, one could only have one illness at once, as that illness filled up a slot for sickness, so to speak; when one was healthy, one's body was in its perfect, unblemished state. It turns out that the chemistry of the human body is much messier than that: the contents of one's stomach are constantly changing based on what one eats, and there is no single perfect state for them to be in. One wonders, after a week of constant illness and pain, if one will ever be healthy again, and yet it is obvious that one will be, as plenty of other people have gotten over stomach illnesses. The germane point here is that, even if one is pain-free after a week of recovery, one's stomach is not exactly the same as it was before and never can be.
My main observations for the day are that the Czech Republic sucks and that Gustave Flaubert does not. The Czech Republic's inadequacies, from the traveler's point of view, include its not having useful information points, its having infrequent trains and unreliable buses, and the fact that its personnel in the transport business rarely speak any language besides Czech. My advice, I repeat, is that one not bother visiting this country, as there are far superior places (Holland, France, Germany, Austria - and that is only counting places that I have personally visited) with the exact same highlights as the Czech Republic (castles, churches, medieval cities, delicious food) and none of its downsides (widespread poverty and an exceptionally-bad infrastructure). Seeing Prague might change my opinion about the Czech Republic, but I hope that it does not, as I hate changing my opinions, plus the southern part of this country is so abysmal that one nice city in its center could not sway me. I hope to continue disliking the Czech Republic until I leave it.
My mentioning Gustave Flaubert is a result of my having finished the book that I had been reading before - Moscow and Musovites, by so-and-so Gilyarovsky (I cannot be bothered to look up his initials.). I brought along a Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, most of which I read on the way here, and the Bacchae, by Euripides, but have nothing else with me, reflecting some interesting choices. In effect, I assumed that I would spend less time reading than I have ended up doing and brought along books that I figured that I ought to read - books that I might never have read if I had left them at home. I am not much into classical literature and so assumed that I would never get around to Euripides (but I assume that he is important); I disliked Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Three Tales, as I found them belletristic; I was wary of Graham Greene, as many of his films had been turned into movies, which suggested to me that they were not serious literature; and I did not know if Moscow and Muscovites would be an interesting enough read to justify my wrestling with its sometimes difficult language, so I might never have taken the plunge and started reading it if I had not brought it with me.
Moscow and Muscovites turned out to give a fascinating account of Russia's 19th-century history through the lens of Moscow, and my suspicions about Graham Greene were confirmed: he is a second-rate writer. While I have not yet started reading the Baccae, I have so far enjoyed Bouvard and Pecuchet. I never realized that Flaubert was such a skillful satirist or that his powers of observation were so great: he never misses a single detail, placing readers very firmly in the settings of his book (or, at least, of this book). It strikes me that writers can be divided into two or so types: those who generally like telling stories, an those who tell stories for a reason. By "writing stories for a reason" I mean having an overarching goal in one's writing, that of communicating a worldview or essential set of ideas or describing some vital human experience in one's work. There are advantages to being either type of write: writers who take joy simply in telling stories are more likely to be imaginative, to just make stuff up, than writers who write for a reason, who are more likely to draw from personal experience and may have difficulty fabricating. It is my theory, however, that writers who write for a reason are far more interesting than those who write strictly for the sake of narrative. I hope to convince you of this in a brief didactic proof before going to bed.
Since I am hungry and should have started writing this email earlier - it is already 11:30 PM - I will cut straight to the point. Consider the case of Primo Levi, the 20th-century Italian writer. He had trained to be a chemist and worked as one for several years before he started writing. The only reason for his having started to write was to make sense of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp - he had no other way to possibly understand them. As a result, he wrote some of the best works of 20th-century literature (that I know of). Dostoyevsky wrote with clearly-didactic aims; Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Aitmatov, and Pasternak wrote both from personal experience and to document an epoch; Tolstoy, whom I dislike, worked from personal experience; Camus wrote fiction that personified his life philosophy; Boleslaw Prus wrote to document the lives of his people; Aldous Huxley wrote largely from personal experience; George Orwell had didactic aims; and so on. While I am sure that there are plenty of more imaginative writers who have managed to say things of philosophical importance, I consider it much easier for such writers to fall into the trap of telling stories but having nothing, at root, to say. Those stories are like cotton candy to the meatier, more motivated works of writers who do not tell stories strictly for their own sake. The example of such a writer that most readily jumps to mind is that of Evelyn Waugh, whose entire life philosophy, based on the work of his that I have read, appears to have been, "I am a jackass." I leave you with that thought, as I have to get to bed and should have tried to do so early, for once, but I could not quite manage it despite not having done much of anything today. Tomorrow I am off to see some famous caves near Blansko, and the day after tomorrow I will depart for Prague, the capital of this miserable country. Goodbye.
How does one enter a hospital that has no entrance?
I started my day by going to the hospital. I was immediately confronted with one of the problems with having hospitals, courts of law, schools, and so on in very old buildings: while they look nice from the outside, their entrances can be very hard to find. I had to walk around the block to find a back entrance to the hospital, at which point I would have been flummoxed had a security guard not happened to be standing near the entrance to the nearest hospital wing: unlike in a North American hospital, the Czech hospital had no reception area and no clear signs detailing where one should go to get treatment. The security guard directed me to walk through a door into a vestibule that could easily have belonged to a museum or theater if only it had had a ticket booth. I stood gazing all around me until another couple entered, and I followed the couple upstairs into a room smelling appropriately of damp plaster, in which a bunch of bored-looking people were sitting around on chairs. The couple that had entered just before me asked the room at large who was last in line, and a nurse who was passing by told me, when I asked the couple how to gain admission to the hospital, that Czech people had to buy some sort of entry slip downstairs, while I could get treated without doing so. I waited for about an hour-and-a-half, no longer than in a Canadian hospital (I should think), to be treated, at which point the nurse on duty, who spoke good English, grew worried that I might have an inflamed appendix and sent me to a room that had a cognate of "ambulance" in its name.
What followed was a battery of tests showing no problems whatsoever with the health of my major organs and suggesting that I had the most painful, most drawn-out, least-acute case of food poisoning of my life. I was impressed, loath as I am to admit it, with the Czech health care system overall: almost every nurse or doctor with whom I interacted spoke serviceable Russian or English, the testing done on me seemed very thorough, I was in and out of the hospital in reasonable time, and the whole affair only cost a little under 150 Euros - not bad money, all considered, and money that I can certainly refund, because of my medical insurance, when I get home (I am going to email the people tonight to tell them in advance what happened.). What seemed strange to me about the experience was that people in the waiting room said hello and goodbye to one another, chatted amongst themselves, laughed, and seemed to be having an all right time. I suppose that, since none of them appeared to be on death's doorstep, they decided to make the most of the situation.
I spent the rest of the day, from 2:30 onwards, resting. While I had planned to visit a famous castle in Lednice, I just barely missed the train there, and the lack of infrastructure in the Czech Republic is so frustrating that I decided to give up on trying to go anywhere for the day. I had filled out a prescription from the doctor whom I saw and had bought a pair of over-the-counter medicines on his recommendation, and I decided to spend the afternoon reading and watching a movie. I felt so tired that I ended up lying in bed instead, almost asleep, after which I had a very simple dinner of yogurt, a plum, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich made from the groceries that I bought on Friday. I have decided to eschew fresh fruits and sour foods for the next few days, but I figured that one plum would not hurt, as plums are not so tart and provide one with much-needed fiber.
Enough of dietary details! I may finally get over this illness over the next few days with the help of the medicine that I picked up today. It is interesting to think that the contents of my stomach will be somewhat different once I have taken a few more probiotic pills than they were a few days ago. When I was a child, I thought of the body as having two possible states, healthy and sick. When one was sick, one could only have one illness at once, as that illness filled up a slot for sickness, so to speak; when one was healthy, one's body was in its perfect, unblemished state. It turns out that the chemistry of the human body is much messier than that: the contents of one's stomach are constantly changing based on what one eats, and there is no single perfect state for them to be in. One wonders, after a week of constant illness and pain, if one will ever be healthy again, and yet it is obvious that one will be, as plenty of other people have gotten over stomach illnesses. The germane point here is that, even if one is pain-free after a week of recovery, one's stomach is not exactly the same as it was before and never can be.
My main observations for the day are that the Czech Republic sucks and that Gustave Flaubert does not. The Czech Republic's inadequacies, from the traveler's point of view, include its not having useful information points, its having infrequent trains and unreliable buses, and the fact that its personnel in the transport business rarely speak any language besides Czech. My advice, I repeat, is that one not bother visiting this country, as there are far superior places (Holland, France, Germany, Austria - and that is only counting places that I have personally visited) with the exact same highlights as the Czech Republic (castles, churches, medieval cities, delicious food) and none of its downsides (widespread poverty and an exceptionally-bad infrastructure). Seeing Prague might change my opinion about the Czech Republic, but I hope that it does not, as I hate changing my opinions, plus the southern part of this country is so abysmal that one nice city in its center could not sway me. I hope to continue disliking the Czech Republic until I leave it.
My mentioning Gustave Flaubert is a result of my having finished the book that I had been reading before - Moscow and Musovites, by so-and-so Gilyarovsky (I cannot be bothered to look up his initials.). I brought along a Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, most of which I read on the way here, and the Bacchae, by Euripides, but have nothing else with me, reflecting some interesting choices. In effect, I assumed that I would spend less time reading than I have ended up doing and brought along books that I figured that I ought to read - books that I might never have read if I had left them at home. I am not much into classical literature and so assumed that I would never get around to Euripides (but I assume that he is important); I disliked Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Three Tales, as I found them belletristic; I was wary of Graham Greene, as many of his films had been turned into movies, which suggested to me that they were not serious literature; and I did not know if Moscow and Muscovites would be an interesting enough read to justify my wrestling with its sometimes difficult language, so I might never have taken the plunge and started reading it if I had not brought it with me.
Moscow and Muscovites turned out to give a fascinating account of Russia's 19th-century history through the lens of Moscow, and my suspicions about Graham Greene were confirmed: he is a second-rate writer. While I have not yet started reading the Baccae, I have so far enjoyed Bouvard and Pecuchet. I never realized that Flaubert was such a skillful satirist or that his powers of observation were so great: he never misses a single detail, placing readers very firmly in the settings of his book (or, at least, of this book). It strikes me that writers can be divided into two or so types: those who generally like telling stories, an those who tell stories for a reason. By "writing stories for a reason" I mean having an overarching goal in one's writing, that of communicating a worldview or essential set of ideas or describing some vital human experience in one's work. There are advantages to being either type of write: writers who take joy simply in telling stories are more likely to be imaginative, to just make stuff up, than writers who write for a reason, who are more likely to draw from personal experience and may have difficulty fabricating. It is my theory, however, that writers who write for a reason are far more interesting than those who write strictly for the sake of narrative. I hope to convince you of this in a brief didactic proof before going to bed.
Since I am hungry and should have started writing this email earlier - it is already 11:30 PM - I will cut straight to the point. Consider the case of Primo Levi, the 20th-century Italian writer. He had trained to be a chemist and worked as one for several years before he started writing. The only reason for his having started to write was to make sense of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp - he had no other way to possibly understand them. As a result, he wrote some of the best works of 20th-century literature (that I know of). Dostoyevsky wrote with clearly-didactic aims; Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Aitmatov, and Pasternak wrote both from personal experience and to document an epoch; Tolstoy, whom I dislike, worked from personal experience; Camus wrote fiction that personified his life philosophy; Boleslaw Prus wrote to document the lives of his people; Aldous Huxley wrote largely from personal experience; George Orwell had didactic aims; and so on. While I am sure that there are plenty of more imaginative writers who have managed to say things of philosophical importance, I consider it much easier for such writers to fall into the trap of telling stories but having nothing, at root, to say. Those stories are like cotton candy to the meatier, more motivated works of writers who do not tell stories strictly for their own sake. The example of such a writer that most readily jumps to mind is that of Evelyn Waugh, whose entire life philosophy, based on the work of his that I have read, appears to have been, "I am a jackass." I leave you with that thought, as I have to get to bed and should have tried to do so early, for once, but I could not quite manage it despite not having done much of anything today. Tomorrow I am off to see some famous caves near Blansko, and the day after tomorrow I will depart for Prague, the capital of this miserable country. Goodbye.
How does one enter a hospital that has no entrance?
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