Why Europe Rocks: Reason #17

*Dada decked out as an Irish fairy*

Fairy Tales

Fairy tails are a huge part of Czech culture. Every holiday, instead of football games and parades, Czech TV stations show fairy tales. Many of these seem to have been made in the 50s-70s, so it's kind of like for young Czechs what The Sound of Music is for us...er, us who are around 30 (gosh, that sounds nice, huh? "Around thirty", like, as if I'm walking "around" it to get someplace else). When Breanne and I were at Letovice's big outreach fairy tale character party, they played this game where they divided everyone into groups and played a few seconds of the theme song for one of these TV fairy tales. The kids were going wild, screaming stuff like, "Ahhhh! 'The Proud Princess'!" (Pysna Princezna) and "Frozen Man! Frozen Man!" (Mrazik) and of course "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella!" (Tri...you know). It was so cool to watch them bond over these fairy tales, even though for me I felt a pang of, oh yeah, I'm still a foreigner and nothing can change the fact that I grew up with Julie Andrews. But I've seen "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella," and I liked it a lot, even though I'd never be able to recognize the theme song. And, as someone (I think Dada) said, "Now you know how we feel when we play Encore at camp training!"

For an interesting article about this in English,go to: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/74043