Compact archive July 20, 2006

Czech legendary top rank skier and Olympic winner said at yesterday’s press conference that this year is the last one in her professional career. Her trainer for the skiing season will be Stanislav Frühauf.

Frühauf was her trainer for 15 years. Their ways parted this spring and Katerina’s training was in her own hands. She wants her closing season to be perfect and must thus to be superbly prepared. Frühauf will ensure it happens and that is the reason for their re-newed cooperation.

Neumannova is aware that having or not having the trainer she has full confidence in can result in her final times differing even by seconds. For the highest level she competes at, a couple of seconds can be the difference between the first and the last position.

Katerina will not train alone but sometimes with junior skiers. It should be beneficial both for the champion as well as for the younger skiers.

Prague public transport is often target for critique. People frequently complain it is not on time, too crowded or hot and with unbreathable air. European survey of quality of public transport services showed recently that there is actually nothing to complain about.

Survey was done with the cooperation of many people and its results are thus representative. The participants were the town dwellers from Copenhagen, Berlin, Barcelona and the Scandinavian Oslo, Helsinki and Stockholm as well as Vienna and Geneva.

Travellers in Prague praised the service as worth the money and they also liked the quality of provided information. The location of the stations nearby one’s home was also complimented. Overall, Prague with Swiss Geneva were the only towns to win all of the categories.

This may be the reason why inhabitants of Prague also use the public transport services among the above-listed towns most frequently. Therefore, Prague has the advantage of having wide range of services which are well integrated and (as was now proved) also of very high quality.

This evening at the State Opera will be devoted to educational project Hear Our Voices. Art and in this case mainly music will be the main medium drawing attention to dangers of prejudice and racial intolerance which may lead to persecution.

The performance will include reciting of poems, reading of diaries as well as letter passages – all of which were created by children during the time of the Holocaust. The background forms music by famous composers. Prague performance tonight closes the trio after London and Nuremberg.

The whole evening programme was based on workshops with young people. The aim was to help them to express their own feelings about these problems. You can read more about the project here.

From yesterday till the end of September Wenceslas Square and Na Prikopech street nearby will be the location of the fourth international festival of large scale sculptures. The exhibition seems to be in spirit of “the bigger, the better” – there may even be possibly a sculpture measuring incredible 240 metres.

More than 40 artists created 19 sculptures that in the eyes of some beautify and in the view of others scar the city.

The star of this year will be worldwide famous Dennis Oppenheim. One of his artworks is called “Air Closets” – a kind of a tree with branches ended in a set of sinks and toilets. This description suggests the displayed objects should entertain but they should also lead to contemplation.

Czech artists will be represented by Darina Alsterova who will be trapped for a few hours in a displayed cube. Milan Knizak with colleagues created 12 huge concrete letters saying “art is for nothing”. You can take a seat on one of them (they can serve as benches) and think about this kind of art. Art is namely subjective and this applies even more so for the modern art.

Prague Klementinum serves as the place where temperature has been measured since 1775. Yesterday’s look at the thermometer showed a number higher than 34 degrees centigrade. This is a new record for 19 July which substitutes its predecessor from 141 years ago when the temperature was about half a degree less.

On the other hand, the last quarter of the 19th century experienced the lowest recorded temperature – less than ten degrees may seem rather unbelievable these days. According to today’s weather forecast we can “look forward” to temperature almost four times as high. If mercury climbs to 38 degrees, Prague could have a new record for the entire month July instead of the current one form the 1980s.

The tropical weather is here to stay until the weekend when an arrival of the cold front is expected. The ideal refreshment and the way to cool down in the meantime is intake of lots of mineral water and non-alcoholic drinks without caffeine and sugar.

A Grammy award winning English guitarist as well as a composer and singer performs in Prague tonight. The lucky owners of the tickets can look forward to hearing songs from Eric’s new album Back Home as well as to enjoying the most famous hits. His friend’s Robert Cray Band will perform before Clapton comes onto the stage and will also be accompanying the main star at some points throughout the evening.

The fame of Eric Clapton hardly has to be described. As a not even twenty-year old musician, Clapton was known as a guitar magician in metropolises such as London or New York. His career started in well-known bands such as the Yardbirds of Cream in the sixties. Shortly afterwards Clapton became a solo-star and managed to produce around thirty valuable albums.

The artist was nicknamed Slowhand due to the drawn tones of his solos. According to another version the nickname has its origin in the slow clapping of the audience while the star had to change the burst strings.

The fans of Clapton’s style rooted in blues and rock ballads will be enjoying his music all over the world during his 2006-2007 European-American tour.