Prague

I first came to Europe in 1978. I was traveling with a pair of college chums, Dan McCormick and Bruce Greene and no finer traveling partners can be imagined. A couple of Cleveland boys, Danny was in possession of a remarkably consistent temperament and an unerring ability to blindly point to any entrée on any menu in any language and come up with a pork chop. Bruce’s urban perspective kept us from getting carried away with how friggin’ continental the whole adventure was. His rudimentary knowledge of the romance languages got us understood in places we didn’t ourselves understand, although it didn’t keep us from asking a trio of Bordeaux gendarmes where the war (guerre) was. (We were looking for the train station (gare). I suspect it’s a common mistake.) He also came close to sparking an international incident in the same town when he suggested to the proprietor of a cafeteria that the rabbit in the warming tray was actually cat. We were armed with backpacks, Eurail passes, and what was, at that point, the cheap travel bible, Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 15 dollars a day. (That may seem like an impossibly low budget but I kept track of every peseta and centime on that trip and averaged out at $12.50 a day, remarkable when you consider that we rarely went to bed sober, but wine was cheap and sleeping, whenever possible, on overnight trains knocked a good bit off the expense column.) My recollection is that the book focused on about 15 key cities on the continent. While it was a valuable book in terms of finding cheap sleep and eats, its real kick was in its ability to describe every city with such hyperbole that we would stumble off those overnight trains, bleary-eyed and funky, but energized with the knowledge of the marvel that awaited us. (For the record, it was usually right.)

Anyway, there were a few of cities described in that book that weren’t accessible by way of the Eurail network and therefore not in our budget. The ones I remember were Berlin, Budapest, and Prague. They’ve been on my bucket list since and I’d hoped to visit a few while living on this side of the Atlantic. Though the quiet months of winter and early spring offer time to travel, the lack of income makes the thought of such seem a little frivolous and my tendency now id to avoid avoidable expenses. Still, with the expectation that the double whammy of Easter and Beatification would bring tourist business to the end of the month, I boarded a plane for Prague a couple weeks ago. (and the crowds did arrive, which is why I’m so behind on the blog… that and my dog ate my laptop.)

It’s a short flight from Rome to Prague but it seems to be a world away. I left to bright blue skies and temperatures brushing up against the 80s and landed amidst a rapidly approaching line of grey and leaky clouds with winds in the 40s. Coming in from the airport, Prague looks like any other place but gets more distinctive as you enter the city. My driver informed me that I had just missed a blast of spring, which accounted for the fact that the trees were blooming against the grey backdrop. Actually, grey seemed to suit the city. Part of that’s a carryover from my early conception of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe being a drab place but the old cathedrals with their acute steeples and sooty looking statues seem to call for a muted backdrop.
I was dropped off at my hotel near the old part of town. My room was tiny, but tiny in a good way-cozy, bare beams and a gabled window, a small bed pushed up against the wall. The bed had a nice brocade coverlet and an old mattress (uh, that was old in a bad way). I decided to walk around a bit.

Like most great cities, Prague has a river running through it and I headed in that direction. Prague architecture falls into three categories. First there are the medieval cathedrals and towers.  Then there are long wide, streets, particularly those along the river, which are lined with tall colorful buildings, covered with decorative sculpting. Finally, there is the occasional Art deco or modern building of eye-catching and improbable design.
Sculptures are everywhere. Some are recent and whimsical, a man hanging with one hand from a wire across the road was one of the more striking ones, while others are obviously a part of the city’s history. Where most of the pieces in Italy are white stone, the Czech pieces are black and grimy, although the occasional patch of shiny bronze or brass emerges. Fountains and bridges are covered with tableaus of folk in peasant dress. They look like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales but more often are scenes from the lives of saints, although not saints I’d ever heard of. They are Saints like Ivo and Vitus, and Saint Hubert, who converted to Christianity after he encountered a stag with a crucifix nestled between his antlers.

The Charles Bridge, which connects both sides of the river, holds an amazing collection of these pieces on the span between its two towers. Odd scenes with curious groupings and imploring poses. One particularly striking group featured the saint, a dog, a Turk and a couple more guys chained up within a rock. I have no idea what any of them are up to.
One of the most distinctive things about the city is how quiet it is, at least during the two days that I was there. It’s not a ghost town by any means, Wenceslaus Square was bustling and the Old Town Square was full of food stalls and entertainment in preparation for Easter (You got to love a town that sets up candy and pastry stalls for Lent). It also has a thriving cultural scene with numerous chamber performances nightly and a healthy appreciation for jazz. Still, I walked around for two hours my first night there and had the sense that something was amiss until I realized that what was so unnerving was the fact that I hadn’t heard a horn honk or a siren wail and that no one had tried to sell me anything. Apparently I have become too accustomed to the clamor of Italy.

The people also appeared to be much quieter, particularly the adults. While Italians never seem to have any unexpressed thoughts, the Czechs seem to travel the streets in solitude, brooding over some internal monologue. By evening, they meet in twos and threes in restaurants or little shops devoted to coffee and cake, but even in those places, which tend to be small and cramped, and are invariably a half flight of stairs below street level, the conversations tend to be hushed and earnest.
It’s an interesting vibe and one that felt appropriately Eastern European. I don’t know that I’ve ever visited a city before that made me want to sit at a table with a cup of coffee and read a book before (my Kindle just didn’t feel right) but Prague did. It doesn’t hurt that whenever you ask for coffee, they ask if you would like some cake (That, by the way, may be my favorite question of all time.), but cake aside, it carries itself like, well, like an adult city. Italy, by contrast, can at times feel like a nation of children so the change of pace was nice, at least for a few days.