Summertime approaches “the land that vegetables forgot”

Spring has come to “the land that vegetables forgot” as Anthony Bourdain recently dubbed the Czech Republic in a Prague episode of “No Reservations.” Trust me, my best friend Claire and I are aware of the approaching bikini season, doubly so because we spent the majority of winter exploring the Czech cuisine and forgetting the existence of vegetables ourselves.

Now that last year’s spring wardrobe is fitting more snuggly, Claire has become my exercise buddy and we are committed to trying all of Prague’s sports options, well, most of them.

Even though a recent gift of a box of Oreo cookies has thrown my friend’s diet off track temporarily, she’s now more serious than ever about kicking those few extra pounds. We’ve committed to go to a session of Bikram Yoga together once a week. For those of you not in the know, Bikram Yoga is similar to power yoga, only it’s performed in a room that’s heated to 40 degrees. And each session is 90 minutes long. Did I mention we’re really serious about our spring diet?

Svíčková

We also tried a few other yoga courses. Vinyasa flow yoga turned out to be rather discouraging, because who would trust a teacher than can basically bend her body to resemble the shape of a wheel and still speak to the class? Our inability to do most of the poses amounted to little to no exercise value.

Then our quest lead us to a session of power yoga. See, these classes are in Czech, so Claire is a real soldier for attending. She’s American and can speak a little Czech, but she can’t really follow the yoga teacher’s instructions full of anatomical terms and odd verbs. But once any instructor realizes that Claire’s not a Czech speaker, they usually feel the need to overcompensate and pay special attention to her, which in yoga sometimes isn’t a good thing.

Me, for my part, I try to be noticed as little as possible, but seem to draw attention to myself in involuntary ways, be it by falling over in poses that require more balance than I can muster or by my exclamations of “Ježiši” or Jesus in English, which isn’t really the yogi way. It seems that Claire and I are the special needs children of any yoga class.

And beyond the yoga mat? I ask Claire what else she’s been doing to lose weight. She says she finds it helpful to eat “a really, really big breakfast, at least 500 calories” and her eyes bulge a little as to illustrate the size of her morning meals that help her eat less later on in the day. However, her diet is complicated by the fact that she’s a food critic, so eating in Prague’s many restaurants is her daily bread and butter.

As for me, I don’t really have an excuse, other than the fact that Anthony Bourdain called Prague a “porkopolis,” and which porkopolis resident wouldn’t, well, eat pork?