Wednesday, May 23, 2012
According to my watch, I spent at least five hours walking today.
In the morning, I forgot to put any of the usual things in my pockets, which meant that I found myself at the Institute in the afternoon with no keys, no money, and no transit pass for the Metro. Fortunately, the Metro police didn't stop me on the way in this morning.
In the US, the method is usually to have some sort of restricted access to subways, so that it's only possible to get in if the user has paid for some variety of access card. The Czech method is different. Here, anyone can just walk into the Metro freely - but teams of Metro police wander seemingly at random through the system, stopping random passengers and asking to see their transit passes, permanent or temporary. If the user has no pass, or if a temporary one is expired or lacking a date stamp, the fine is 700 crowns. If you don't have the money on you, the Metro police - being helpful individuals - will walk with you to the nearest ATM so you can retrieve it.
This is what I've heard from other students, at least. I've actually never been stopped myself. Maybe I walk too fast.
Anyway. I was fairly sure that if I went on the Metro just one time without my pass, that would be the one time I got stopped - it was only luck that I wasn't stopped this morning - so I walked back to the Penzion to get my things. I'd done it in the evening before, after all, and it wasn't that long a walk.
Walking uphill to the Penzion at cool, breezy dusk, as it turns out, is a very different experience from walking uphill to the Penzion at a cloudless one in the afternoon.
After stopping at least four times to rest and emptying my entire water bottle, I finally staggered back into the Penzion and just sat indoors for a while before getting everything together and heading back to the Institute. I have never been so grateful for the cool, dark tunnels of the Metro, which require a bare minimum of walking to cross half the city.
I returned just in time to leave, with the rest of the fibers class, for a trip to the other side of Prague. We started by visiting the Young Art Museum, a collection of bizarre and fascinating modern art in an equally bizarre and fascinating building.
Originally a palace, the building was later broken up into tenements, whose residents made their own improvised alterations for years before it became a museum. Many of these alterations are still preserved there. In some cases, the rooms of the museum were more interesting than the art in them.
In others, it was difficult to tell where the rooms ended and the exhibits began.
We then crossed the Vltava over the Charles bridge, passing artists and jewelry stands and a musician or six, and spent another few hours wandering through the sunlit streets of Malá Strana, the district across the river. There's another modern art museum over there, which we will be visiting later.
The John Lennon wall is just inside the border of some foreign embassy - I forget which - so the wall, and the few feet in front of it, are officially on foreign soil. As a result, during the Communist era, this was the only place in Prague where people could not be arrested for what they said or wrote. It's still a major canvas for graffiti.
According to a tour guide who stopped near our group for a while, the wall changes constantly; come back a day or two later, and it will look completely different.
We also stopped in a tiny shop that sells antique textiles - huge amounts of them, hats and scarves and tablecloths and folk costumes, draped and stacked and neatly folded in the deep drawers of old dressers. The store is laid out to resemble a home. With only two rooms, it's a rather cluttered one, but everything is neatly folded and arranged; there's an amazing amount of beautiful work in the store, but it still manages to seem comfortable, even with a dozen fibers students packed in to exclaim over the particularly lovely pieces of lace or embroidery.
It was a wonderful afternoon. Unfortunately, it left me with little time to prepare for the fibers excursion, which leaves at 8 am tomorrow and lasts for three days. This will require money and clean clothes, neither of which I had in great amounts at that point, so I went out to get them.
This was when I found out that I had forgotten the PIN for my credit card and could not use ATMs. Fortunately, I still had a lot of traveler's cheques. Unfortunately, each change booth will only take one of these per customer per day, so I had to wander for another half-hour to visit several of them and get enough money (I hope) for the excursion.
With that finished, I walked down to the laundromat closest to the Penzion, only to find it closed for the evening. I shall have to make the clean clothes I have last throughout the excursion. Having run out of time and money to buy dinner, I finished off the remains of my lunch supplies instead, rather than have them sit in the refrigerator and go bad for the next three days.
I then ran out of errands to run and promptly collapsed.
It was a good day. There was somewhat more walking than should have been necessary, to accomplish somewhat less than I would have liked, but it was enough. And it was a good day overall.
I'll just need to sleep a lot on the bus.
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