Checklisting Europe | A Master Plan for Adventure – The Germanized Slavs

Checklisting Europe | A Master Plan for Adventure – The Germanized Slavs

Wait! What about surprises? What about just let things happen? (Read “How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza“)

You can forget that dealing with Czechs.

The Czechs are strange kinds of Slavs. They don’t resemble other Slavs I have encountered, who are more slovenly in their habits and actions. In contrast, the Czechs are fastidious in nature, possessing a weird sense of orderliness, not only uncharacteristic for Slavic people, but also for people from post-communist countries.

They are obsessed with planning like it was wired in their DNAs. They plan their evenings, weekends, vacations and whatever required their actions.

I had a really hard time in the beginning and some time even now to plan lunch with people. I need to resist the urge to holler at people 15 minutes before my stomach strike and say “Lunch?” I understand we have to plan our life, but lunch? If you can’t then you can’t. Why make the fuss over planning a casual lunch days even weeks in advance? What if when the time comes, I feel like being on diet and don’t like eating. What if at that fateful planned lunch date I feel like withdrawing into my shell and stay away from people. Do I still need to put on a happy face to eat?

But I made peace with that and diligently click and send Outlook invite to schedule lunch with my colleagues. The Romans taught us that “When in Czech, live like the Czech.”

My ex Honza often greeted me with “What’s your plan for this evening?” or “What do you plan to do this weekend?” or “We have nice weather this weekend. What’s your plan?” or “What’s the plan?” instead of a simple “What’s up?”

We used to travel a lot together on well thought-out, planned-out and organized by who-else except Honza. He organized weekend trips and took me all over the Czech Republic and often had to put up a lot with my typical moody weekend reaction: “Hey Honza, I don’t feel like staying home today. Can we go somewhere?” “Going where?” he would shout and showed me an utterly, grudgingly outrageous face: “Why didn’t you tell me before? We need to plan! Why are you keeping doing this?” And this fiasco kept repeating for over a year. When it was my turn to “organize” our travel, I would leave bits out of the plan like accommodation booking, and dear Honziku would be all over me: “Where am I going to sleep? I’m not going to sleep on the street” and silly stuff like that. Somehow he equated not knowing where to sleep to being homeless. (Perhaps that was why we became the exes.)

Seeing how distressed Honza was with my “flexible” nature, I tried to plan. I had no other choice; he would smack planning onto me anyway.

By then I was already living among many Czechs and Germans, and I started pickig up on their habits and behaviors.

And slowly, step by step, to my dismay, I became Czech. They might not agree, but I swear I did.

Read part two “Loving Spreadsheet and Becoming Czech”

Photo Credit: szeke via Compfight cc