Peeling an onion

A kid that likes to concentrate on one thing for long long time.

Love

We have been looking at a picture book with my son and at one point he always gets excited about one scene and he wants me to read and narrate it over and over and it suddenly reminds me how I used to get excited like that myself while reading a book, one scene or a picture would represent the whole world for me where I wanted to live and be and I would develop my own stories within that scene and it was always such a warming feeling. All the warmth of the love from my parents and safety of my home, all the nice things that I could remember, playing with my cousin, all suddenly condensed in one picture or a scene and the whole world was so bright! How was that happening? How did that work? I need to know that now!

P.S. Do you know that feeling?

Little creatures

My friend has this cool mirror in his house, he made it. While you get ready in the morning you can contemplate what you resemble more, the woman or the little monsters.

Click on me

Creatures in our house. The guy who sold it to us in an antique shop in Munich said it comes from Baden-Baden, turn of the century. Somehow it is hard to believe. It could be as well as it doesn't have to be, how did he come across such a provenance? Those who made it definitely hadn't seen an elephant before or at least had never drawn it. Oriental-like pieces were popular back then but would someone in Germany make it so that it looked exactly like folk piece from Orient? I doubt it. Then these were also popular during the hippie era in the 60s, but I imagine it would have had more of a funky taste if it was a hippie piece, the same situation. The border embroidery is in a kind of European folk style, could be German, but all the rest? No way, this is Orient. Still, the mystery remains unsolved. It looks nice up there on the wall, that is for sure.

Old houses

Every year or so we come across the idea of buying a house. Every year it is the same. We jump to the computer and start browsing the best looking old houses. You can already say how impractically we approach this issue. We never learn. And it becomes more apparent if you realize that I grew up in an old house (in the pictures) and thus know all the disadvantages of such a living. Yes, very old houses are usually beautiful but they are also cold, they heat up badly, they are wet on the ground floor, they are dark, falling apart all the time and last but not least they are usually haunted. But anyone who visits is amazed what a unique place you live in and that I will never get tired of.

The uniqueness starts with the fact that my parents bought this house very cheap 40 years (what? I was going to write 20) ago. Something like 1000 dollars, it was like a year salary back then, so such a purchase was pretty good. No one wanted old houses, there was this strange spirit of instant renewal and getting rid of the old orders, guess where people got it from. Luckily, my dad had an architect to help him with it, at the time these houses were rather ruined than repaired. Still, I would have some objections but lets leave it.

The pictures show the oldest parts of my parents house, the entrance hall and a kind of spare kitchen that used to be black when we moved in with an ancient stove. That is gone now, my dad made the furniture, it cost him just few crowns and I like it more than any amazing catalog kitchen that are seen everywhere. Anyway, we don't use this kitchen very much. So these two rooms are dated back to 17th century. The vaults are rather rustic looking and the entrance hall used to be higher, they built a low cellar underneath the floor sometime in the 19th century. I wish I had some old pictures of the house from before we moved in.

I could go on and on about our house. How I didn't like it at the beginning how I started liking it how we were playing in the attic with my cousin and were exploring the nearby houses through their attics. What amazing stuff there was in the attic and how all lost it. Crazy.

I still call it our house, but I actually only visit here since I have been living with my family in Prague.

Pics

The house and the door don't belong to each other, they come from my database of a disappearing town, my hometown. The gate has baroque forms but might be later as well, the forms were surviving their epoch, especially in a place like this. And the house above I like because of the garden and the way the house is grown over like the garden. It belongs to this picture, this was inside. The painting: my mum's work, it shows Český Krumlov, not my hometown. I had a picture of it somewhere here but how could I have shown it without the wallpaper!