PragueBuzz!

Let say you have a monthly salary of 30,000KC.

Health Insurance: 1350
Social Insurance: 2400
Governement tax: 4176
Lunch coupon: 803 (You and your company split the cost for lunch coupons)

Final income: 21271

Czech Crown is gaining against the euro and dollar. Bad news for me. When the dollar held against these two currencies, I traveled no where to my sofa, becoming a potato couch, holding on to my precious dollars. Now that I’m ready to depart from it, it loses values in a matter of months. Four months ago while I was still in Czech, a dollar was worth a little more than 22 crowns. Now it’s 21 crowns and expected to decreases over the next few years.

I just hope that Czech doesn’t adopt the euro just yet, at least while I’m here as Czech residents might lose the buying power.

[Read the article]

Oh, for a moment, I thought I witnessed Taiwan’s politics.

Czech’s Health Minister is whacked from behind on the head in a room full of people. It’s said that the minister claimed the head buster, vice-president of a dentist association, married his wife for money. Wow! This is a really bold allegation.

And it got even better, this young minister walked up to the microphone on the stage saying “coward” to his beater. This relentless head buster raised his hand to get ready for another head smack only this time, the prepared Health Minister blocked the hand of his opponent and proceeded to smack this guy on the head. Chop! Chop!

Just a thought though. If you ask me, given his defensiveness, I’ll say this macho head buster probably marries his wife for the money. Innocent people would simply ignore, laugh it off, or at least resolve in a civil discussion.

Any thought?

I watched this movie on Vietnamese channels as a little kid and liked it a lot and so did many other kids, even adults. Soon I’d completely forgotten about the movie until I talked to J. one day as we were walking the around a small coastal city in Oregon. We sat on a bench in front of a supermarket when I asked him if he knew anything about Arabela. He couldn’t fathom how on earth us Vietnamese knew about a fairy Czech movie.

True. At the first glance, Czech and Vietnam seems so far away, so unrelated. But if you think a little longer, you’ll remember that both Czech and Vietnam were under Communism for many years. I don’t know anything before the 80s, but during the 80s and 90s, we watched many Russian movies and once in a while Czech’s.