Helloooo 2009!

New Year's eve was fun - as I mentioned in my last post, we were with Andy's brothers, David and Lukáš, and their women, Hanka and Katka.

The ladies made yummy food - chlebíčka (little breads with spread and pieces of meat like ham or salami, with bits of pickles, eggs, veggies... whatever's around... taken from "chleb" which means bread, it's a cutesy way of saying little breads - "chlebíčka" - cute, right?), salted almonds, and pork with a horseradish/apple/pork fat mixture that was awesome.
We listened to music and played poker and drank wine.

As it neared midnight I insisted we find a radio station that would have a proper countdown - I need a proper countdown on New Year's. We figured the station we were listening to would have one - shouldn't all stations? We got our champagne (Bohemia Sekt, actually) ready, and when David's clock read 11:58pm, fireworks started going off in the town. Confusion. A minute later the song on the radio ended and the DJ said that midnight had just happened. No countdown! Sad. And David's clock was wrong.

Oh well, we drank our sekt and celebrated. We watched fireworks from the window. Because anyone can buy fireworks it was quite a scene - there were fireworks shooting up in at least eight different places we could see. We could even see them through the bare trees of a nearby woods, going off in the next town over. It was pretty cool.