National Public Kissing Day!!! - YouTube »
Posted By gamahuche 7 months ago in Arts & EntertainmentMay 1st is a day of LOVE in the Czech Republic. Kiss your lover under a cherry tree on May 1st to strengthen your love for the year. It is a celebration of Spring, and a tribute to the 19th Century Czech poet Karel Hynek Macha and his long poem Maj.
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gamahuche
"I would rather be a square peg than fit in a pigeon hole" -
an essay which won me the "Lamb Essay Prize" at the Religious ...
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gamahuche7 months ago
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Love, kissing, poetry - it was a perfect foil for the dreaded May Day parades, especially with a little paganism thrown in for good measure fromthe Beltane energies from the preceding night . Above all, neither the Communists, nor the Nazis before them were nether able to control what went on in between the sheeets nor many forms of artistic expression.
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gamahuche7 months ago
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I did post a story on this same theme a year ago - probably I'll post one every year until I kiss my last kiss!
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BUT there IS a significant difference this year - one which may not phase those who solely head to the hill of Petrin - a VERY potent and magical hill in Prague - to KH Macha's statue to do their kissing..
But for those of us who are REALLY determined to kiss under a flowering cherry tree the ravages of global warming are becoming all too evident - and when global warming interferes with the expression of LOVE it starts ti hit home in all the wrong places.. Two years ago we could kiss under our nearest tree to home. Last year we headed towards some higher ground in a southerly direction. This year I was obliged to call a ski resort in the Giant Mountains, right on the Polish border in the North to guarantee a kissing spot. Funny phone calls those were! "Do you have any cherry trees there? Are they flowering?" "Ah - for kissing! Well we don't but the Hotel Ducha [means rainbow] does.."-
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Shixa_Reborn7 months ago
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That's too bad about GW and the interference with May Day. Is the problem so bad that you have to make Reservations for a tree?
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I enjoy bird watching, not so much as a hobby, just listening to their songs in the spring and summer. The observation of Nature, if you will.
The past 2 years, I've noticed Hawks and Sand Cranes appearing 4 to 6 weeks earlier than usual. I believe the warmer climes south of me have altered their migration patterns.
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gamahuche7 months ago
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"(Did you upgrade your computer to enjoy this video?)"
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No - i was able to watch it - just without sound! :(
The main problem with youtube for us here is that they just won't let us watch much of what's on there. I've no idea what that's about.
My current computer is an original mac clamshell though, so that doesn't help much either..
By the end of the year I should be in the 21stC - as long as some of our clients start updating their debt-payment systems..
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gamahuche7 months ago
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This page probably gives the best options for accessing the poem, along with a succinct brief history of it. The Edith Pargeter translation is the "Classic one"; James Naughton is one of the best modern translators of Czech to English - and was my daughter's tutor at Oxford for a while till she got bored with Czech literature and switched to Spanish :( - the fact is that the Czech language was largely suppressed for hundreds of years as a language of diplomacy or literature :
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http://bohemica.com/czechupdate/2006/jan/92
Twisted Spoon is a GREAT English language publisher of Czech books, mainly more modern ones, based in Prague.
"Severin's Journey into Darkness" is one of their finest - and slimmest - volumes, authored originally in German by Paul Leppin it stars Gustav Meyrink as one of the main characters and starts dark and gets darker and darker and darker.. -
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Poulenc7 months ago
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It's interesting that one is always given license to kiss under something vegetable. I'm thinking of mistletoe as well as cherry trees.
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How about a holiday on which one can kiss while over something non-vegetable. Like the state of Montana. -
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gamahuche7 months ago
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There are lots of good reasons to go to the CR - and an event like this are definitely one of them.. There are a LOT of days and events that have celebrations attached to them - perhaps not as many as there are fiesta days in Mexico, or used to be when I lived there.
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I can offer a kiss - but it definitely it couldn't be on THIS day.. That could provoke the 3rdWW in the gama household. Probably my daughter would be excused but even that's not certain..
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aceofspades17 months ago
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gamahuche7 months ago
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On the contrary, Wolfie!
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Those who are blossoming in their hearts are 100% protected from such unpleasantness.
But I guess you weren't Florence Nightingale in a previous lifetime any more than you're a knight-in-shining-armour in this one.
So keep your mask on, by all means and perhaps you can snog through that - with a Japanese tourist perhaps IF anyone tours your neck of the boonies. -
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gamahuche7 months ago
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I published that last year - its one of the Easter traditions:
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http://www.propeller.com/story/2008/03/24/czech-ea...
I'm not sure if I want to publish that one every year - I'd rather be known as a kisser than a spanker! [That of course is without the full explanation of the context of both! This, at Easter, time we hurried back from another trip to get home in time to the waiting implement..]
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