Prague Journal

Thursday, November 18, 2004.

Ales had invited Rick to the annual wine-tasting party by the Enological Society at one of the homes owned by the Havel family. This is a group of friends whose company Rick had been introduced to one year ago on a research trip to Prague. Each time he attends a meeting, his level of wine expertise takes a big jump, his exposure to earnest technical discussions in Czech takes a smaller jump, and his physiognomy suffers from the accumulated assaults of many small sips of wine. Rick claims it was well worth it.
Instead of going drinking with the boys, I took the opportunity to meet Eunice downtown. We had hoped to go to the National Library at the Clementinum to see an exhibit of rare Hebrew manuscripts that the Nazis stole from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Poland’s Wroclaw (1938) that were discovered in the mid-1980s. Our evening was truncated when we were told that the exhibit had left the previous day.
We opted for an early dinner at a Chinese restaurant off Narodni, and spent about three hours eating and chatting (and avoiding the nasty, rainy weather outside.) Eunice is an American, but has spent the last 25 years in Europe, mostly in Italy, but the last 7 years in Prague where she and her late husband started an audio electronics company. Rick and I will take a tour tomorrow.

posted by JWinn @ 8:46 PM