Easter abroad

The Ester commenced in a nice and calm way. Since egg dyeing is one of those rare traditions shared by many countries across the world, me and my friends did not hesitate and dived into it as soon as the Saturday. I have to admit that I was more supervising than dyeing, because as a child I was not allowed to even see the eggs and it is not an easy thing to break a habit. Guys from other countries, however, do not seem to have this problem. We were using artificial dyes, acrylics and markers; but the nicest eggs were certainly the ones dyed in onion peels. Most of my Eastern European friends have no clue what koledování is, so we all ate the eggs for breakfast already on the Sunday. On the other hand, they accompany the eating with a number of rituals which I have never encountered in my country. They smash their eggs against each other and whichever egg cracks first has to be eaten. In Romania, they even have to say the words “Christ was resurrected!”, which I thought was a rather nice illustration of how the Easter spirit integrates Christian and Pagan symbols. Clearly, the main outcome of this is that one eats a lot of eggs without even noticing it properly.

When I first mentioned to my friends that in my country we beat up girls with pomlázkas on Easter, they showed signs of surprise. I learned from them that Czech people are sexist, misogynist and sadist. The girls started being distrustful. Some of them rolled their eyes at experiencing Czech traditions. However, some got really enthusiastic about it, and when I explained them how it is supposed to bring them fertility and health, they became grateful. All of them wanted me to translate the words of the Czech poem “hody hody doprovody”, which made me realise how uninteresting the content of this poem is. There is really not very much to translate. I did not forget to visit a few of my Czech girl friends from other colleges, who appreciated the koledování in the right way and endowed me with a few eggs and sweets. The greatest disappointment of the day was the fact that British people do not really care about Easter at all and do not have any interesting traditions to share with us. The only two clear signs of Easter which I noticed in Cambridge were the morning service on the Sunday and a considerable expansion of the chocolate section in Tesco.

Fortunately, not long after Easter I got the chance to learn about a rather different type of British tradition, the game of rounders. It is curious that I had never known about it before because, as I found out, this ancient game with roots in the eighteenth century is still very popular in the UK. It is pretty similar to baseball: you have a bat and bases, although the bat is a bit short and you are supposed to hit the ball in a funny way. After hitting the ball, you need to run around the playing field and the members of the other team are trying to put you out, which is not easy given that the ball is really light and sometimes flies far away. I have to say that after a few experiences with this game I found a liking for it and take it to be a fun summer alternative to tennis.

One of the most interesting events I attended this term was a ceremony in London during which the Czech priest Tomáš Halík was awarded the Templeton prize. We set off for London with a group of Czech and Slovak friends who all consider themselves Halíkians. The ceremony took place in the church of St. Martin in the Fields on the Trafalgar Square, which is rather cosy in its all protestant decorative modesty. A lot of people turned up, starting with the Czech cardinal and minister of culture, and ending with Czech émigrés who live in London (I was introduced to Zdena Tominová, who is a former Czech dissident and speaker of the Charter 77). We also met a handful of other Czech students, mainly from London and Oxford. The event was very nice and we all appreciated a brief break from the work-intensive Cambridge term.