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Still a Longshot
Still without a government in the Czech Republic, and it seems unlikely any time soon. Trams are still running in Brno, and generally things seem to be holding together just fine. It doesn't seem that it would be much of a problem if the president and MPs just went home, but it's too bad that other people are throwing in the towel.
The oldest resident of the Czech Republic, aged 108, wondered what the holdup is. She told reporters, "I can't understand what is taking them so long."
I just say, with a bit of typical self deference, "Government? Ha, that's been a mistake like Brno since the whole thing began." (One saying, I've been told, no doubt started by jealous Praguers, is to compare anything you don't like to a "mistake like Brno," in other words implying that Brno was not worth it to begin with. Perhaps someday I'll have a better explanation for this little quip.)
**NvB Update: Anonymous commenter chimes in that the saying about Brno indicates that something is "big" rather than "bad." And I guess, relatively speaking, that Brno is pretty "big" for a "small" city.**
Tags: czech, politics, brno
The oldest resident of the Czech Republic, aged 108, wondered what the holdup is. She told reporters, "I can't understand what is taking them so long." I just say, with a bit of typical self deference, "Government? Ha, that's been a mistake like Brno since the whole thing began." (One saying, I've been told, no doubt started by jealous Praguers, is to compare anything you don't like to a "mistake like Brno," in other words implying that Brno was not worth it to begin with. Perhaps someday I'll have a better explanation for this little quip.)
**NvB Update: Anonymous commenter chimes in that the saying about Brno indicates that something is "big" rather than "bad." And I guess, relatively speaking, that Brno is pretty "big" for a "small" city.**
Tags: czech, politics, brno
Posted 11 January 2007 at 18:35.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
Wow, she's quite the sharp tack for being 108. If we could all be so lucky!
5:26 PM, January 14, 2007
Comparing sthg to Brno in czech simply means it's simply "big", not necessarily "bad".
Yes, Brno is (and always was) smaller than Prague, and even Prague is quite small to today's standards, but comparing large and important things to Brno is still very common in spoken czech.
4:51 PM, January 16, 2007
Ah ha. Now it makes a bit more sense. Thanks for the clarification. While it is kind of hard to imagine Brno as "large," it always seems to me that Brno is larger than it actually feels. I mean, while it may not be huge compared to the nearby metropolises, it has a certain feeling of being almost in the countryside; then it's surprising when you learn that Brno has almost 400,000 residents.
4:28 PM, January 17, 2007
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