Sunday 19 May 2013

Trip to Vienna and South Moravia – the Wine Part.


It is a well-known fact that the future of mankind is almost entirely in the hands of science and that scientific progress is the basis on which the world of peace and harmony has to be built on. This progress cannot be achieved without serious and complex research. With all that in mind, a group of audacious students of Phonetics and English-American Studies under the leadership of members of the Phonetics Department set off on a journey towards better tomorrows. It is necessary to mention that each member of the leading team was volunteers and none of them was paid a single pound – they all did it in the name of progress.
 
The group met on an ordinary Saturday morning in Prague and their first direction was Haus der Musik in Wien. The students should have obtained theoretical knowledge there that was supposed to be used later on in the research.
 

Members of the Phonetics Department
Photo credit: Eliška Černá

 In the afternoon, the bold group left Austria and moved to the main destination of their journey. Until May 2013, a little Moravian village of Strachotín was an insignificant place on Earth, known only by few wine experts. But since that time, its name will be known all over the world and children will learn about it at schools because this was the place where the group should have pushed forward the limits of man’s knowledge once again. The aim of the research was to show the world the influence of dissolute drinking of wine on the articulatory abilities of the research participants. 
 
The research began soon after the group’s arrival and lasted for whole evening and till the deep and dark night. Despites the professional approach, academic supervision and enormous struggle of some members of the group to finish the research successfully even when having to stay awake until the first sunbeams showed above the lake horizon, the results were disappointing. It has shown that the failure was caused by the fact that the whole group was strongly over-motivated and wanted to contribute to its final result so much that there remained no one who would organize the process of the research and collect data. The whole effort went in vain.
However, we should learn from our own mistakes and never give up. The group has promised to improve the preparation for the research and try it again next year. Rome was not built in a day, after all. And there is enough wine left in the dark and damp cellars of Strachotín to fuel the Phoneticians for years to come.