Katerina Kyselica was born in Karvina in northern Moravia and grew up in the city of Havířov. Her parents, Ladislav and Marcela, now retired, worked as a technician and a nurse while Katerina and her younger brother, Robert, were growing up. Katerina began swimming at the age of six and, when she was 14, was selected to attend a sports school. She moved to Prague where she boarded with other athletes and traveled outside the country for competitions. Katerina graduated from high school and says that although she was interested in architecture, she did not have the technical skills and knowledge to study the subject at university. She instead entered law school at Charles University in Prague. Katerina learned English during her years at law school and, in order to improve her language skills, spent one summer working as a counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Kentucky – an experience which she calls ‘fantastic.’ After graduating, Katerina worked in the tax and legal department for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Prague for about five years and then decided to move to the United States to join her husband, an American whom she had met during her summer abroad. She arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on December 31, 2001.
Katerina says that the decision to abandon her law career upon her arrival in the United States was ‘an easy choice.’ She took drawing classes and, after a conversation with an art professor, decided to go back to school. She attended the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and majored in interior design. She quickly found a job at a large firm specializing in the design and architecture of airports and hospitals. Katerina then moved to the Washington, D.C. area and worked for a number of years for FOX Architects. She says that her experience in the legal profession came in handy while working there, as many of her projects involved law offices. Katerina moved to New York City in 2009, after she and her husband divorced. She now freelances as an interior designer and project manager. Katerina has also started a project called dob2010 which aims to promote Czech design and architecture in the United States and to connect people of Czech and Slovak heritage interested in these topics. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Czech Center in New York. Katerina travels back to the Czech Republic each year to visit friends and family and says that she is content with having two homes.
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Katerina Kyselica was born in Karvina in northern Moravia and grew up in the city of Havířov. Her parents, Ladislav and Marcela, now retired, worked as a technician and a nurse while Katerina and her younger brother, Robert, were growing up. Katerina began swimming at the age of six and, when she was 14, was selected to attend a sports school. She moved to Prague where she boarded with other athletes and traveled outside the country for competitions. Katerina graduated from high school and says that although she was interested in architecture, she did not have the technical skills and knowledge to study the subject at university. She instead entered law school at Charles University in Prague. Katerina learned English during her years at law school and, in order to improve her language skills, spent one summer working as a counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Kentucky – an experience which she calls ‘fantastic.’ After graduating, Katerina worked in the tax and legal department for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Prague for about five years and then decided to move to the United States to join her husband, an American whom she had met during her summer abroad. She arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on December 31, 2001.
Katerina says that the decision to abandon her law career upon her arrival in the United States was ‘an easy choice.’ She took drawing classes and, after a conversation with an art professor, decided to go back to school. She attended the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and majored in interior design. She quickly found a job at a large firm specializing in the design and architecture of airports and hospitals. Katerina then moved to the Washington, D.C. area and worked for a number of years for FOX Architects. She says that her experience in the legal profession came in handy while working there, as many of her projects involved law offices. Katerina moved to New York City in 2009, after she and her husband divorced. She now freelances as an interior designer and project manager. Katerina has also started a project called dob2010 which aims to promote Czech design and architecture in the United States and to connect people of Czech and Slovak heritage interested in these topics. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Czech Center in New York. Katerina travels back to the Czech Republic each year to visit friends and family and says that she is content with having two homes.
“Swimming was something I grew up with. I started swimming when I was six or seven years old, so by ten I started having success within the Czechoslovak Republic at the time and that’s why I was picked to be recruited for the sports school in Prague. Swimming was fun. As a child, you pursue this differently. It’s not as a drill, although when I was nine or ten years old, I started swimming in the morning before school. So you get up at 5:00 in the morning; 6:00 you are in the cold water; 8:00 you are in school; 2:00 you’re back in the pool ‘till 4:00 or 5:00; you get back home at 6:00 and do your homework and then you have to go to sleep because you will get up at 5:00. But that was life. It was fun because you swam with a group of people you grew up with. And then we traveled a lot. Every weekend for the meets, and when I moved to Prague, it became more serious in the way that we traveled also outside the country. That was during communism, which was rare for some people, but because it was part of my life, it was something natural. I didn’t realize it was rare for other people. So I had a chance to travel. I remember not everything, but we went to Moscow and Vilnius. So it was interesting. Also to Germany. There were international meets so we met people from other countries.”
“For instance, in the architecture field, I was supposed to already be very good in drawing. In order to get into architecture school, I would have to be excellent in drawing to compete with hundreds of applicants at the time. In addition, very good in mathematics and things like that. So I didn’t even try that. But then I wanted to be a journalist. I did apply to go to the school of journalism, but I had no chance. At the time, I had not such a knowledge. Again, the tests were quite difficult and I didn’t have the broad knowledge to pass that. So as a result, I went to law school because I’ve always loved history. I graduated from law school; I worked in a very good firm, but there was something missing. After a few years in practice, I realized that I preferred to create something. Instead of helping someone to go over contracts and work with numbers, I preferred to create.”
“While I was in law school, where I learned English, I was looking for a chance to practice the language somewhere, and I found this agency that was looking for counselors for summer camps. I do not remember the year, but I ended up in Kentucky and I became a camp counselor in a Girl Scout camp. That was a fantastic experience because I was raising the flag. It was my first time in the U.S.”
“When I was in art school here, during art history classes, I was sad not to hear anything about Czech culture, or whatever Czech culture is – Czechoslovakian culture, Bohemian culture. The artists and architects that I knew did the movements that happened in the 1920s and 1930s that are important in the European context, and that are not known or not taught on a general level here. I graduated, life was busy, and when I moved here two years ago, to New York City, it just happened that I was so close to Bohemian National Hall. I started meeting people, Czech and Slovak immigrants, and I became more interested in knowing why what we built so far is not visible and how to make it visible by writing about it. Writing not only about past success, but also about what’s happening now. Contemporary architecture, contemporary design for instance. Very high quality things were happening one hundred years ago in that region and it’s not known really much.
“So I am on a journey, in a way, to make it visible; to promote it in the U.S. Not only as a way to promote the Czech culture, but also to connect with Czech and Slovak people, immigrants, their daughters, the first, the second, the third generation, Americans who come from that region – not only from Czech Republic, Slovakia, but Poland, and sort of connect somehow and see what we are doing here, because there are designers here; there are artists. In Canada, too. In Toronto there’s a big community. So there is technology today that can connect us and get us closer and use that network for visibility. To show to our neighbors where we are coming from.”
“Before he died, I met Jiří Kárnet, a Czechoslovak journalist and playwright who lived here in New York City, and I had this chance to meet him, visit him twice or three times before he died. In his last book he published – not that he wrote it as his last book, but he published it the same year he died. It was called Posmrtný deník – he wrote about his relationship to Czechoslovakia as his homeland and trying to justify his love for his new home. Not to justify, to explain it. He said that the way the son has a mother and he leaves his mother for his wife, the same he has two loves for his two homes, for Czechoslovakia and America, and he doesn’t have to choose. And I took it personally in a way, and I always think about that when I think about him because that helped me to resolve some of the tensions I sometimes had. You know, where is my home, where do I belong, what is my culture?”
Petra attended VŠE (the University of Economics, Prague) and studied international business. She spent one semester abroad at York University in Toronto and visited New York City while on a school break there. After receiving her master’s degree from VŠE, Petra began studying for her MBA at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. She says that the prestige of an international degree, her desire to study in the United States, and a partnership between the two schools led her to this decision. She graduated from this program in May 2012 and began working as a marketing specialist for the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation. While studying at Bradley, Petra enjoyed making Czech food and celebrating Czech holiday traditions like St. Nicholas Day. Recently, Petra returned to the Czech Republic and settled in Prague.
]]>Petra Bolfikova was born in Havířov in eastern Moravia in 1985 and moved to Děčín in northern Bohemia with her parents when she was three years old. Petra’s mother Renata is a dentist and her father Michal teaches computer science classes at a university. Petra says that shortly after the Velvet Revolution, her father (who at that time was a high school teacher) took advantage of private enterprise and joined a partnership that provided social service programs. Before returning to teaching, he was the head of social services in Děčín. Petra began learning English before she started school, as her parents put her into private lessons. After fifth grade, she attended gymnázium, where she continued learning English and also studied German.
Petra attended VŠE (the University of Economics, Prague) and studied international business. She spent one semester abroad at York University in Toronto and visited New York City while on a school break there. After receiving her master’s degree from VŠE, Petra began studying for her MBA at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. She says that the prestige of an international degree, her desire to study in the United States, and a partnership between the two schools led her to this decision. She graduated from this program in May 2012 and began working as a marketing specialist for the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation. While studying at Bradley, Petra enjoyed making Czech food and celebrating Czech holiday traditions like St. Nicholas Day. Recently, Petra returned to the Czech Republic and settled in Prague.
“Right after the Revolution, we used to go shopping in Germany, because some stuff like pudding or peanuts, some articles were really cheap, compared to the Czech Republic, in Germany. So we went shopping there for specific things, but nowadays, it’s not worth it. After [the Revolution] we also went to Dresden because there were shops that we didn’t have in the Czech Republic, but now it’s more to see the Christmas markets and it’s closer than Prague, actually. Still, a lot of Germans come to the Czech Republic now to shop. They come, they fill up their cars, they go to the hairdressers, eat at the restaurants, shop a little at Tesco, and then they go home.”
“I was an international business major, so I had English and German as the two main languages, but no one really taught you how to speak. You were supposed to speak; that was the entry exams to the university, and we were taught three semesters of business English, so basically micro/macro terms and the business phrases, and then the other three semesters of the undergrad was business English too, but we call it in Czech obchodní korespondence. So more formal, like how to write a claim, how to write a resume, how to write stuff related to business, and then also more specific terms. For example, in the international business with international logistics, different types of boxes and cases and the paperwork you need for that. I even got to [learn] the captain of the boat. I don’t even remember any of those words because you don’t get to use them, but we had to know them.”
“My dad was a teacher, so the school had a partner cabin in the mountains where they used to go for ski trips with the students, so most of the faculty went there over Christmas, over winter with their families, so that’s kind of unique for me, I think. I used to have two Christmases when I was growing up because we would celebrate on the 19th or 20th, kind of like a premature Christmas Eve, because we didn’t want to take all the Christmas presents with us there, and then the next day we would go early so we could ski before all the people came to the mountains, and then we would have a second Christmas Day on the 24th with all the teachers and their kids. So most of my friends from childhood were teachers’ kids, basically. And it was the same school that I went to afterwards – it was the gymnázium. So when I went there, some of the teachers – we have this habit of calling friends of my parents ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’ – so they were there, walking around and teaching me, and I had to call them ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Mr.’ That was kind of weird.”
“One thing that is kind of typical for me is that I travel a lot, and I think everybody should do it eventually, because that really makes you think about what other people…There is so much hatred towards Americans in Europe, but being here I get to see their [the Americans’] point. I don’t necessarily agree with what they’re doing or saying, but I now know why they’re doing it or why they’re saying it, because they have this cultural and historical background because of this and this. And sometimes it’s just this one public figure and no one in the country actually agrees with the public figure, but the public figure represents the country for the foreigners. And it’s all over – like I said, I’ve been to Mexico, Australia, Canada, so getting to know more cultures broadens your horizons and makes you more tolerant and receptive to other cultures and opinions and stuff like that. So I think that everybody should do that. Maybe we’d have more peace in the world.”