A Typical Lunch

Lunch is the biggest meal in the Czech Republic. We have 2 hours off from school to go eat, but most people working get an hour to go to a local restaurant. We have sampled a lot of Czech food over the past week and have found that a very typical lunch consists of some very hearty soup, beer, bread, and a main dish (maybe even a dessert after that). The soup is a daily special, so today we had a goulash-type soup with sausage in it. It is even more delicious and salty when you dip the big piece of bread in it.
Many of us have found the pork pieces to be our favorite main dish. But a warning- never order a full portion for yourself. I can't even finish a half portion! As you can see in the picture below, the pork comes with sauerkraut and potato dumplings. Dumplings are a specialty here in Prague. You might be thinking dumplings- Chinese? But they are nothing like them. These dumplings are either bread or potato and are boiled in water (we can't really figure out if they use ovens here because we don't have ovens in our apartment kitchen, which are supposed to be "full kitchens"). The dumplings are a great compliment to the hearty meat.

Some other Czech cultural facts we have learned:
1. Robot, pistol, pilsner, and polka are words that the English language has adopted from Czech. Pilsner is the beer that was invented in a major town in the Czech Republic- Pilzen.
2. Czechs do not like to receive compliments, so when they do they brush them off and play them down.
3. In addition to putting your name on the number sign in front of your house, Czech people add the title of their profession- like "engineer", "doctor", "professor", etc. They are really proud to display their success and receive a lot more respect for doing so.
4. When you ride any public transportation, any young people should be ready to get up and give their seat to any elder or disabled person.
5. If you show your knowledge of Czech sports players, famous scientists, well known musicians, etc, you get major points. Good thing I have my tennis knowledge of Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl. And we learned today- Wichterle was a famous Czech scientist that invented contact lenses.

We are off to Budapest and Vienna for Easter weekend. Hope everyone has a good holiday!