October 14: The Conquests of the Jelly Explorers

This story is impossible without Jiři, so I think as a prologue I should introduce him. Jiři, my first Czech friend here, was a fellow TEFL student. I first met him when we decided to meet, sight unseen, our classmates at a statue in Old Town. He was able to guide us to a few smaller, but interesting pubs, although he has given up alcohol and cigarettes, totally obliterating the base of the Czech food pyramid. On one hand, Jiři is a 35 year-old former software and systems analyst and carries himself with the pragmatism and maturity you’d expect from anyone who has ever had the title “analyst”. On the other hand, Jiři is a FORMER analyst, and thus has an imaginative sense of humor. That is how we got our name, The Jelly Explorers. But we’ll get to that in a second.

With Lindsey and I fighting both a virus and the indignation at having to spend our week off in bed, we agreed to go on a day trip to the Czech town, Kutna Hora. We met, after some minor miscommunications, our fellow explorers at Masarykovo Nadraži. In all, it was Lindsey, myself, Alex (the roommate), our friend Liz from CA, and Jiři. With a Czech-speaking guide, buying tickets was pretty easy, since we didn’t have to do it, however he assured us that simply stating your destination is often enough (maybe stating your destination coupled with a “please”).

Our train was brand new, brightly-lit, and since we had coach-class tickets, we had to walk through four empty cars, through these Star Trek-style airlocks between each, and into another empty one identical to the first four, which Jiři assured us was coach-class. Upon sitting down, Jiři informed us that he brought some recording equipment so that he could create English podcasts for some of his future classes. Now, when I say recording equipment, there was of course a small mp3 recorder (two actually), a large microphone, and an apparatus that Jiři called his ambient mic system. The AMS was actually two small clip-on mics fastened to a pair of sunglasses behind the ears, which Jiři wore for a little while during our conversations. People walked by, and eager for more people to record, Jiři would start a conversation. While most of them stayed to chat for a bit, they seemed a little uneasy speaking to this cyborg of a man with microphones coming out of his ears and wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day.

Not long into the trip, Jiři decided that we needed a team name for the podcast, something, he thought, to do with explorers. Having made a joke a few days before about how drinking beer from big mugs seems more “jolly”, someone suggested “The Jolly Expolorers”. This was misheard by our friend to be “The Jelly Explorers” to which he gave some serious thought. “We travel the world,” he said, “tasting all of the various jellies, and making sure they are safe for human consumption.” Thus, The Jelly Explorers were born. We were each designated positions, The Butter, The Toast, The Head Jelly, etc. and took turns addressing the podcast. At one point, when Jiři removed his sandwich from his bag for a snack only to find that it had fallen apart, we created a module to teach the words death (of my sandwich), tragedy, sandwich down, and cremation in my stomach acids.

Our path from the train station in Kutna Hora took us past rows of communist blocks, painted in bright colors that have corroded so that the buildings are a sickly combination of pastel and bone. We stopped at a café to reload on caffeine and Tylenol before striking out to the Kostnice Ossuary in Sedlec. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, and I’m guessing that’s most of you, the Ossuary goes by the name of The Bone Church in most tourist pamphlets. It is dubbed thusly as it is a medieval chapel that was built on a cemetery. Over the years, as real estate became a bit more restrictive, many of the dead, nearly all peasant plague victims (the wealthy could afford to keep their plots) were dug up and their bones were moved into the crypt. The Czechs, sitting with all these bones, decided (why not?) to decorate the church with them. The result is this tiny chapel dressed in the bones of nearly 40,000 plague victims. In four chambers are pyramids of femurs and humeruses (sp.?) about the size of small busses. Each pyramid has a small tunnel filled with skulls. Along the walls are arrangements of ribs and carpals, and even a coat of arms constructed completely of bones. The centerpiece, however, was four six-foot tall candelabras made of skulls surrounding a giant chandelier made from every bone of the human body.

Now, having been to Terezin, and going to the holocaust museum there, which featured photographs, crayon drawings, clothing, glasses, and various relics of Czech Jews that died in the holocaust, I was bracing from something hauntingly emotional. And yet, these bones were long dead, shuffled, arranged, rearranged, so that any remnant of humanity was something only distantly recognized. For the most part, it was difficult, at times, to even see them as bones as they seemed more like crude stones. It was almost comical, between the misspellings in the visitors guide, the violent symbolism in the coat of arms (which featured a raven pecking a man to death), the way that that the pyramids looked as if they were stolen from the set of the new Indiana Jones movie. However, after a little while, things started to set in. I think it was the chandelier, held to the ceiling by four taut chains of jawbones pulled wide open like screams. It all sort of hit at the same time for us, staring up at the chandelier, and all of a sudden what was funny was not anymore. And the bones, to me, started to take on more meaning. They were vindication of what Milan Kundera would call “fear of becoming a corpse”. They were symbols of the one-sided history of conquest in middle ages of the rich over the poor. We all agreed to leave pretty quickly.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the medieval cobblestones of Kutna Hora’s city center. Alleyways funneled into bright squares circled by ancient mini-palaces and giant cathedrals. Thanks to Jiři, we made our way to some of the better local restaurants, and a park lined by quaint houses that I are a few steps above living in a shack. And climbing the steep ridge up to the Cathedral of St. Barbara, we could peek down into the back gardens of these houses, where grapevines, apple trees, and rows of tilled garden basked in the glow of the trees that line the valley of Kutna Hora changing at the height of autumn.

After our climb to St. Barb’s, we took a few panoramic pictures and peeked inside. That was when Lindsey and I ran out of steam, or perhaps in light of our fevers it’s appropriate to say we became full of steam. Either way, after a day of bones, walking, and eating at strange Czech pubs, we were ready to head home. Fittingly, the bus dropped us at the train station just in time for a mad dash to the platform. We were on the train for literally seconds before it started moving. Our trip home featured a few more podcasts by The Jelly Explorers, however, we mostly stared out of the window at the Czech countryside marked by rolling hills, bright trees, and decayed train stations that predate even the occupation by Austria-Hungary. And so we parted ways with our fellow explorers (except Alex) and returned home.