BASIN PARTY

My colleague from school Terka arrives with little Marie in a baby carriage, determined to hold a boycott against UNES-CO. A gang of mothers wearing painted t-shirts shows up in front of the UNES-CO houses to hold their uprising. In the end, the Čarkovices convince Terka otherwise, and the boycott is cancelled. Nevertheless, Terka and her child quietly hold out on Široká Street past noon, and she promises to come tomorrow to bathe her little one in a basin. She does, however, offer some of her views of the project. “All in all, I like UNES-CO. But it’s us people from Špičák who live here and come downtown every day with our baby carriages. We don’t want any money for that. We just want the right conditions for LIVING. Also, for instance, that there won’t be any cars in the center so we don’t have to run a slalom with the carriages and with little kids just learning to walk. And for the Chinese to be given a manual on proper behavior in Europe. In overcrowded China, they might be used to bumping into people to get them to move. But here in town it’s shocking when you get shoved aside by a Chinese person while holding a child in your arms. (Yes, I distinguish among Asians, and this is something I see mostly among the Chinese; other Asians are more polite.) I’d also like for the downtown to be more than just shops with jewelry, baseball caps with a hammer and sickle, amber, and wannabe designer clothing; I want shopkeepers not to destroy the interiors and exteriors of buildings; I don’t want so many of them to speak Balkan or Russian; I don’t want the Vienna Hotel, after something like a hundred years, to be ridiculously renamed the Bellevue, or for the owner to destroy its original beautiful appearance; I don’t want to see these crazy products like Mozart Collection, Prague Collection, Natally Boutique, and so on. We are passing on all this ‘beauty’ to our children…”