exile. a while

i've had a few different nicknames in my life, but the one that has is the most used, and has the greatest history attached to it is "hen". now, at least if you live in sweden, you too can be hen! this is the proposed new gender-neutral personal pronoun, instead of "han" for he and "hon" for she. call me biased, but i think hen is much nicer than han or hon!

i am in the picturesque czech town of cezky krumlov for an easter escape; it's very cold & has been raining quite a bit, which is a bit of a shock after india, but there are plenty of museums, galleries, shops and cafes in which to lose oneself away from the weather. the vlatava river (moldau) curls around the old town which is nestled beneath an impressive middle-ages castle. the streets are narrow and cobble-stoned, there is barely a straight wall or a square angle to be found - the whole place reeks of oldness. having grown up in a country where anything more than about 50 years old is considered old, i don't think i'll ever get over my fascination with being in places where i can actually touch things created by people many hundreds of years ago. i'll also never get over the feeling of being able to jump in the car, drive for four hours, and not only be in another country but be somewhere where a different language is spoken, a different currency is exchanged, different road rules apply ... and the complex history of thousands of years of human habitation, power struggles, agriculture, developing society ...

it is quite a touristic town, and i am also here purely as a tourist. it's still very cold - remnants of the heavy snow of europe's winter were all around us from the bavarian forest into the bohemian forest - and it's been raining quite a bit; but there are still enough tourists around to cause traffic jams in the castle's tower, & for people to be turned away from the very nice vegetarian restaurant we went to last night. i'm not sure that i would want to be here in the tourist season, as the town is tiny and must just become nothing but a tourist place. however, the baroque theatre at the castle - which i'm told is a must-see - is only open for tours from may ... so we will have to return, in the high season ...

but never mind that we can't see it now; today we've been in the castle museum, up the tower, and to the egon schieler gallery; still to come is the mirror labyrinth, marionette museum and the historic fotoatelier siedel. we might go to České Budějovice tomorrow (where the main square is named after otakar II - already i am thinking of tintin and king otakar's sceptre ... ) & to the nearby "tscheschien neuschwannstein", schloss hluboká. we might, but then again - we're on holiday; we don't have to be tourists every day ...

last night andy & i watched the final episode in the new zealand tv series outrageous fortune; we've been watching the boxed dvd set over the last year and a half or so - six series, each with about 18 45-minute episodes - so it's been a big part of our lives for a while. we've followed the trials & tribulations of the west family down to every sordid detail. as someone who has never been a big tv-watcher, & even less of a regular series follower, i have to say this one had me hooked. i'd seen the occasional episode when it was originally screened on tv in new zealand, but my nomadic lifestyle meant i didn't even try to keep up with it - but i have devoured the dvds eagerly. mostly it's been a very fine series - epic and shakespearian in every respect, and andy says it's given her a special insight into the unique kiwi character (i haven't broken it to her yet that not everyone in nz is like the wests ... )

however, the ending has disappointed me - specifically the storyline of pascalle and judd; this was completely unconvincing. compare judd and cheryl's sexy flirtations, even in their final meeting, with judd's sheepish attitude around pascalle and her pathetic agonising. the director must have instructed them to express the conflict between their hearts and their minds, but this has resulted in pascalle looking like she's suffering from severe indigestion & judd looking like he wishes he was somewhere else (with cheryl, probably). remember the way that he pursued cheryl in earlier episodes, and the things he gave up (such as his job, and for a while his freedom) to be with her - a strong, beautiful mature woman whom he clearly respected, admired and desired. pascalle, on the other hand, is an airhead; sweet, but slow and naive, demonstrating none of her mother's strength of character. if anything, she's looking for a father-figure; but this means she loses all her sexiness around judd. it would have made more sense if judd had got it on with loretta.

obviously it made good drama - the scandal of the daughter running off with her mother's lover while her mother is in jail; but it didn't satisfy me at the end of what has otherwise been a fairly consistently good series. there are other things i could criticise - such as the utterly irritating character of bailey the lawyer & some of the more stupid extraneous storylines like loretta's irish dancing episode - but mostly it's a pretty damn good series from our very small television production industry. anyway, now it's over ... a few people have recommended the american tv series madmen to me, so perhaps i'll check that out ...