Last Kiss of Winter, First Flower of Spring

---

Wow, where did the last three months go? Oh that's right - we had a baby! Good bye normality (if that's what you could call these last 2 years since we moved to Prague). But anyway, we're thrilled to officially blog-troduce you to Dahlia May Toovey - our little spring flower. Hang on, we're getting ahead of ourselves...

Rewind to the end of winter (our coldest since being here), and Anth's 30th birthday - TRAM PARTY here we come! Ok, explanation warranted - there's this historical tram (complete with fat controller!) you can hire that drives round the city for functions. It's normally reserved for tourists, but we're kinda like long term tourists and it's actually much cooler than it sounds so far . They have it renovated, and the fat controller(!) serves drinks and snacks while you drive through all the cool spots of Prague - all with a piano accordion player in the background! And then it dropped us off at our favourite Thai restaurant for dinner. (Thanks Steph for organising, despite dozens of inane conversations in Czechlish.)

On the birthday weekend we also went to the Ski Jumping World Championships in the Northern Czech town of Liberec -an event that was organised as well as you can expect Czechs to organise something. They had a converted the main east-west highway into a car park (memo to Stadium Australia and the M4 for the next State of Origin), then had shuttle buses running from there to the hill. Once there you took a long, icy and very slippery track up the hill. Really, it was more like an event from It's a Knockout, but without the ridiculous animal suit or flippers. Probably would have enjoyed it more if one of us wasn't 8 months pregnant! We held onto each other tight, placed our feet carefully and tried to avoid every one else that was rolling down the hill...The one piece of light relief during this was passing the merchandise sellers who had the flags from all the countries competing. Germany, Poland, Finland, Japan, Norway, Australia...Hang on, Australia?! And since there were no Austrian flags available, we can only assume there was some kind of (hilarious) language mix-up when ordering the stock . Naturally we bought an Australian flag and cheered wildly for the Austrians with it!

Needless to say, seeing ski jumping live was incredible. They didn't jump as high as I imagined it, but they did fly a long, long way! It was the Teams Event and our Austria won by a massive amount, so it was the battle for the minor places that was most interesting. The biggest cheer for the day came when Germany (one of the favourites) failed to qualify for the final - no love lost between them and the Czechs.

A series of special occasions helped us pass the bleary and uncomfortable month of March - Steph's baby shower, our 4th wedding anniversary, and the 30th birthday of practically every one of our Prague friends! Still we waited out both the end of winter and Peanut's arrival impatiently, with lots of walks through Prague's hills and hot curries to try and hurry things on (the labour that is - there's no hurrying winter along!) The last kiss of winter came on the first day of spring. I was still trying to understand why the first day of spring was March 21, and not March 1 when the snow came down again. (Seasons coincide with the solstices and equinoxes in Europe - not the calendar month.) I'm all for snow - it's one of the reasons we moved here, but we were just HANGING for spring and some warmer weather. The ironic part was in the end we skipped Spring altogether. Temperatures jumped 20 degrees the following week, and there we were in summer weather!

It was the following Monday - the first day of this heat wave that Steph was induced. I have to stop here to tell you just how crazy the hospital is. Podoli Women’s Hospital looks more like a grand hotel from the 1920s. It gets more interesting on the inside - a grand foyer complete with chandelier and pond, and corridors lined with cabinets of test tubes and beakers. And despite the maze of corridors and gruff nurses, it is an excellent hospital. The next day (on probably the most beautiful day of the year to date), Dahlia was born at 3.29 in the afternoon, weighing in at 3.01kg and being 49cm tall. Such an amazing day - the next week was a blur of smiles, no sleep, and incredible joy and relief.

While we were still in Dahlia-mania, Obama-mania hit Prague. Barrack Obama was in town to address the EU (Prague being the current capital) and held a mass rally up at Prague Castle. Weeks ago we had both planned on going, although I think that was slightly ambitious. Since it was just a 10 minute walk from home I went up to check it out. The crowd was massive - allegedly 20,000+, and other than the big screens there's no real way of knowing if that was Obama way, way, way down the front or not. The crowd can be characterised in 2 parts. The first part was all the expat Americans who had VIP passes to the front, and had been really whipped up into a frenzy. The were cheering and laughing and crying (!) at everything...meanwhile the second part of the crowd (who were viewing it a bit more objectively) were mostly trying to figure out what was so funny/exciting/emotional. Obama, Obama, Obama...

So there are a handful of our recent happenings. Not as exotic as some of our blogs, but still the first entry to include historical trams, flying men, American presidents and Dahlia May Toovey!

Anth

---