Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Back again for another crepe today. They are the best thing I've eaten here. I actually led a whole group of fibers students (and the teacher) to the stand I found behind the church, but it turns out that it doesn't open until 1 pm. I shall continue to recommend the place to anyone who shows the slightest sign of being interested in local desserts. It deserves all the business it can get.
Before that, I had a klobasa (sausage) at a stand by the Old Town Square, where they were roasting entire hams on spits off to the side. They would just cut a corner off one of them whenever someone ordered ham. You could smell them halfway across the square. The sausage was delicious - it was served with bread, which helped to hold the enormous red-brown thing, and a plate to catch the hot meat juice that dripped out of it when I bit into it. It was glorious.
According to a woman in the park near the sausage stand, it's actually illegal to feed pigeons here; you will be fined. Perhaps the city doesn't want to encourage them to live here. (I think it's too late). Perhaps they've had pigeon attacks in the past, with pink-toed birds swarming innocent pedestrians and ripping cars open in search of bread crumbs.
No, wait, that's bears.
Anyway, near the sausage stand was another crepe stand (more fruit flavors; also more expensive) and a stand with bins of brightly colored candy - fruit slices and long sugar-coated ropes and one bin full of what looked like millefiori in sugar. They charge by the gram. I'm not sure how much that is in candy. I shall have to go back there when I actually remember to get some more money.
Of all the things there are to buy here, the hardest to resist are the desserts.
I have yet to eat at an actual restaurant in Prague. Partly, this is due for my fondness for street vendor food - instead of the polished version of the national cuisine found in restaurants, this is perhaps the professional equivalent of someone grilling in their backyard. The other reason is the prices. You can get a sandwich here for 25 crowns, a sausage from a street vendor for 50; it's hard to find a restaurant that serves anything but appetizers for less than 100. I'll certainly try a few restaurants while I'm here, but only a few. I'll have to choose carefully.
The restaurants here often have someone stand on the sidewalk outside, holding up a menu or - in some cases - actively trying to recruit passersby to eat there. Most people ignore them. It looks like rather a thankless job.
I took more photographs for the fibers class this afternoon. The focus this time was inside/outside, so I got a lot of interestingly layered shots of doors and windows and reflections, as well as some shots of buildings and streets under construction.
Stickers inside a street sign. Stickers in cities have always interested me - they seem to occupy a spot somewhere between advertising and ready-made graffiti.
Tennis courts surrounded by multiple walls of netting.
The weird clock shop.
One of many Art Glass shops.
It's odd to think of streets as having an inside, but they do. A few of the plank-walled construction pits even have the shapes of old brick archways visible beneath the cobblestones, filled in by dirt and gravel who knows how long ago.
There was a group of musicians in (debatably) Renaissance-era costumes in the Old Town Square today as well; two drums, bass and tenor, and a set of bagpipes. They played various tunes - Scottish or not, I have no idea - at racetrack speed for several hours. I found myself tapping my fingers to the complex rhythms.
Tomorrow, it will be time for errands again; I am nearly out of money, food, and clean clothes (considerate of them to all run out at the same time), so I will be visiting the local bankomat (ATM), attempting to find the laundromat that's reputed to be nearby, and comparing prices at the street market and the two grocery stores I've been shown so far. That should be interesting.
I've noticed that my horizons are expanding. In the first few days, anything a block or more away from the Institute or the hotel felt like a strange and alien labyrinth where one could be lost forever in delicious architecture; now, the Old Town Square - a good four or five blocks away - is starting to feel like familiar territory, and I can find my way by dead reckoning and various large landmarks (the clock tower, the Old Town gate, the TV tower, assorted streets, the river) to many parts of the Old Town without needing to use a map. I could probably even find my own way from the Penzion to the Institute on foot if I had to. Who knows - maybe if I stay here long enough, I'll even develop a sense of direction.
Like hotel number one, the Penzion has only one key per room. If none of the five of us are in the room, the last to leave leaves the key at the front desk; if any of us are in, we leave the door open a crack so that the others can get in when they arrive. This leads occasionally to some interesting situations. This evening, around 11 pm, we had a surprise visit from a group of teenagers from the Netherlands. They were slightly drunk and very happy, and they came in to introduce themselves and shake hands with everyone in the room.
"Hey, you're from North Carolina, right? Over here studying?" asked one of them. "You listen to classical music?"
"Actually, I usually listen to some death metal," said one of my roommates.
"Oh, like D-D-D-D-DAH, D-D-D-D-DAH?" One of the other visitors made the appropriate spastic guitar motions.
"Yeah, like that."
"Awesome!" they said, and ducked back out the door.
I made a second Skype call to my family earlier today, now that they're back from their own (much shorter) trip. There was far too much to tell in a single call, on both sides, but that's what I'm keeping these notes for. I'd never remember all of this on my own.
I'm still surprised to hear other students complaining about things - the food, the unfamiliar smells, the public transit, the lack of cars and universally available wi-fi, the shower facilities… It simply doesn't occur to me to complain about any of these things. It's just the way they are. They're different, certainly; inconvenient, maybe, in some cases. But that's to be expected in a different country. Finding all the ways that the Czech Republic is different from the United States (and we'll never find all the ways they're different) is part of the adventure. Perhaps all of the adventure. The idea of complaining about that hasn't even entered my mind.
Well… The shower facilities I can understand. They're a challenge sometimes. Still, it's not any worse than camping. Think of it that way, and it's almost fun.
I don't know. Maybe this is just another way I'm weird.
If so, thank goodness.
I've found people from the Netherlands speak English best and most confidently of all Europeans. It may be because even before satellite they could get English television stations. Or because Dutch, of all European languages, sounds most like English when you speak it, so it's familiar to them. Or just because they have good schools.
ReplyDelete