Day 31: Jazz

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 

We have now started coming up with ideas for our final projects in the fibers studio. I still have no idea what I'll be doing - something based on Tyn Church, perhaps. 

What this means, though, is that the end is in sight. I'm not sure how to feel about that - I'm looking forward to going home, but I wish I could do that and stay here for another few months at the same time… 

The ATM told me last night that my account has insufficient funds, so I will be living off of my remaining traveler's cheques for a while. 

Tonight: Jazz Club! 

This was another of the musical performances included in the trip. After dark, we walked across several blocks and down a set of neon-lit stairs to a long underground room filled with chairs, tables, and portraits of famous jazz musicians. This is an entire club, apparently, devoted to jazz. Unfortunately, the lighting was far too dim for photography. 

The musicians tonight were the František Kop Quartet: piano, saxophone, drums, and electric bass. All four men were extremely talented, and large parts of the performance consisted of one of the four showing off his ability to do dizzying musical pyrotechnics with any given theme. They shared the spotlight fairly equally. They played several of their own original compositions, as well as a beautiful piece called "Sleepwalking Girl." (I went up and asked the title afterward.) It was a lovely way to spend the evening. 

There's a video of the quartet here, playing three years ago in the same place. The stage looks much the same. 

Day 24: Everywhere but Europe

Tuesday, June 5, 2012 

More museums!

First was the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African, and American Cultures. 

(My apologies for the quality of the photographs in this post. The lighting today played havoc with my camera, indoors and out.) 

The collection was apparently started by a renowned Czech traveler (for whom it's named) who liked to bring things back from non-European cultures. Like all the Prague museums so far, the Naprstek seemed taller than it was wide. It was centered around an open stairwell similar to those at the Young Art Museum. 

There were intricate mosaics in the many, many staircase landings. 

Some highlights, with photos where there was enough light: 

A map from a Pacific island area made of loose-woven reeds and shells. I assume it was somehow a map of the islands, but I couldn't tell whether the lines represented currents, winds, routes from one island to the next, or something else entirely. I wish I knew. 

A South American pitcher which, I realized, was the same basic shape as pitchers I've seen from Europe, Japan, China, North America, and practically every other part of the world that's ever invented pottery. It wasn't the generic pitcher shape either, but one of those ones with a wide bowl, narrow neck, and tall, arched handle. I thought it was interesting that so many cultures have independently arrived at the same shape. 

Some exquisite Aztec and Mayan metalwork, exhibited - to great and glittering effect - in a dark gallery with nowhere near enough light for photography. 


An actual piece of Mayan writing on a giant stone tablet. 

Some of the more interesting cultural hybrid objects from North America, such as the axe-like thing made of a European gun stock decorated with brass tacks. 

A pair of beautifully decorated human skulls from somewhere in the Pacific. 

An intricate model boat, also from the Pacific. 

The restroom signs were interesting as well. 

Many of my favorite things, as usual, were the wooden and ceramic animals from various cultures. 

After the Naprstek museum, we walked over to an architecture museum that was showing an exhibit on "Earthships" - a series of self-sufficient houses designed to be built out of trash and debris, which people have been building in areas devastated by natural disasters, such as Haiti. (There are pictures on their website.) The photographs are beautiful. Most of the houses use glass or plastic bottles, stacked and cemented together like bricks, and the sunlight shines through them like a multicolored stained glass window. 

On the way back, we passed through Betlemske Náměsti, where I stopped to get gelato at the little Vietnamese food stand again. 

There was sidewalk repair going on a little farther on. I've seen places where the cobblestones and sidewalk tiles have been ripped up, but this is the first time I've seen them being hammered back in. This explains the high-pitched tapping noises we've been hearing at dawn every day. 

Another student and I also saw some sort of long-necked animal - a weasel or one of their many relatives - peeking out from behind a drain pipe on the roof of a nearby building. It ducked into a hole beneath the eaves, flicking a long tail behind it, before we could get a picture of it. We waited for a while, but it never came out again. 

Day 10: Inside and Out

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. 

 The window of the "Cubistic house," reflecting the building across the square. 

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. 

Day 3: Orientation

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 

Orientation! 

I rode the tram to the Prague Institute this morning after a breakfast of bread, cornflakes, lemon tea, orange juice, and a Sarah Zettel novel. (Isavalta is doomed.) The Institute is a beautiful maze of a building sprawled over two and a half sides of an oddly shaped courtyard, which it shares with a tea shop, an art gallery (galerie), and the apartment of Mr. L, who has apparently been there forever. All the buildings are painted a delicious butter yellow and have balconies everywhere. 

To get into the Institute, you walk up some stairs to a metal gate that opens with a key (from the inside, you hold down a button with one hand and kick the gate open with your foot). The rest of the doors inside the Institute open with a chip we were given, which releases the 450-pound electromagnetic door locks when you wave it in front of a little gray sensor. It's rather like waving smelling salts under someone's nose to wake them up. The chip unlocks all of the doors except the ones it doesn't; one of the teachers showed us a keyring with a diverse menagerie of keys, most of them for various Institute doors. From there, we walked through the studios. They are long, narrow, crooked rooms with a pathway down the middle; to reach one studio, you walk through the two or three before it, as they are all laid out in a line. There are offices and balcony doors wedged in little sunlit corners between them. At the other end of the line is a wide, open spiral staircase with cacti and a glass ceiling at the top. You go down this, past little side doors and wall niches and the bicycle standing at the bottom, to go out another door that requires a completely different key to open the enormous wrought iron handle. 

The floors inside the Institute are linoleum, or carpet, or wood, or tile; the walls are linoleum, or carpet, or wood, or the lovely 800-year-old white plaster that we were instructed in the care of this morning. Apparently, the walls (circa 1250) were built with horsehair, straw, and various other materials. If the walls cannot breathe, these materials will get moldy, rot, and make the building collapse; which means that they can't be painted with non-porous paint; which means the paint is not waterproof; which means it can't be washed, so stains have to be painted over or stay forever; and it can't have tape put on it, or three centuries of paint will come off in chunks when the tape is removed. Needless to say, we were told several times not to do this. 

During the lunch break, after a quick Skype call to let my family know I survived two days of airplane travel and made it to Europe, I wandered around the nearby streets - never more than a street or two away, for now, or I never would have found my way back. There is an elegant little square (triangle, really) nearby, with a fountain and benches in the middle. This turns out to be an excellent landmark when navigating in the area; the Institute is in a crooked, overhung little side passage (large enough for a single car to drive down if the pedestrians on the sidewalk turn sideways), but the square (triangle) is visible from many of the nearby streets. I wish I'd found it sooner; I would have gone there to eat my lunch. 

Lunch was a knotted poppyseed sweetbread thing, a bit like dwarf challah and just as delicious, and a slice of some sort of enormous sheet pastry with apple inside and powdered sugar on top. I got them at a shop with "Potraviny" on the sign; I thought it was the shop's name at first, but having seen the same word on other shops, I'm pretty sure it translates as "minimarket." Fortunately, the prices inside were all clearly labeled, and I (with my limited vocabulary) could just point to what I wanted. The woman at the counter probably thought I was mute. 

The open-air market outside sells mostly fruit and knick-knacks, so I haven't bought anything there yet. Maybe later, when I've got my lunch schedule better figured out. Someone had stuck a 20-crown piece to the curb, and a passerby and I shared a laugh when I tried to pick it up. 

One of the first sessions after lunch, thankfully, was an introduction to the Czech language. After reading the pronunciation section of my phrasebook on the plane from London, and muttering every shop and street name I passed under my breath for the following evening and morning, I was fairly confident in my ability to say Czech words. Unfortunately, I still don't know what the vast majority of them mean. (I'm trying to avoid reading any graffiti out loud for now.) 

The teacher managed to make the language introduction clear, entertaining, and memorable. She's a Czech teacher here, so presumably she's had some experience with this. I couldn't imagine a better introduction. 

I already knew "please" (prosím), "thank you" (děkuji), and "I'm sorry / excuse me" (promiňte), of course. Those I memorized on the plane. 

After the language was a brief presentation on Czech history and culture. I fear I will not be able to appreciate two of the major parts, which are hockey and beer. The rest was fascinating, though. Apparently, the Czech republic has one of the highest (possibly the very highest; I forget) concentrations of castles in all of Europe, possibly because every war in Europe comes through here at some point. There are castles just sitting in ruins out in the countryside, free for anyone to wander in and take pieces off of them for souvenirs, because there are simply too many for the country to have any hope of preserving. 

The history teacher then took us on a whirlwind tour of the area within easy walking distance. He seemed disappointed to find, at the end, that he'd only lost two students on the way. 

According to legend, the astronomical clock was created by a renowned clockmaker in Prague. After it was complete, the king didn't want the clockmaker to make another clock this amazing for anyone else, so he had him blinded. Once he was well enough to walk, the clockmaker had someone lead him to the clock; he reached in, knowing every detail of the mechanism even without the use of his eyes, and moved just one piece out of place. It took a hundred years for someone to figure out how to make the clock move again. 

That's the legend, anyway. No one really knows if it's true. It's a beautiful clock, with an elaborate face that shows the time, the hours until sunset, the position and phase of the moon and sun, the signs of the zodiac, the date, and the positions of several stars. Around it are carved figures representing (according to my guide book) Vanity, Greed, Death, and Lust; Death is a skeleton that rings a bell in time to the bell in the tower. More clockwork people (the apostles, I think) walk by and look out of the windows above the clock while the bell rings. After the ringing of the hour, a trumpeter (living, not clockwork) comes out on top and plays a short melody. A group of musicians in the square below harmonized with the trumpeter for a while. 

I continue to be amazed at how beautiful the city is. Every building is gorgeous. There are ancient stone buildings, blackened by age in all the whorls and crevices of their ornate Gothic architecture. There are open markets and little hole-in-the-wall shops. There are restaurants spilling tables out onto the sidewalks. There are buildings in every possible shade of bright, shining, elegantly cracked plaster. There are buildings with whole paintings done on their façades. 

I will have to go back to the library at some point. I think checking out a few picture books could be a good way to learn more Czech. Of course, that would require the often quite complex process of getting a library card, so maybe I would just read them there instead.  

In the process of obtaining dinner, I had my first whole conversation in Czech! 

Granted, it consisted of "Sandwich and chocolate croissant, please." "Here you are." "Thank you." 

(Or in Czech: "Panini Brusel a zenitka čokoladny, prosím." "Prosím." "Děkuji.") 

But still! I communicated! 

I'm not actually sure if "zenitka" means "croissant" or if it's something that just looks kind of like one. 

This was at the Paneria on I forget the street name, where I got the above food for 44 koruna. I think this is about $2.50, but I'm not sure. That seems low. I'm still uncertain about the exchange rate. Something to look up when I get the chance. 

I think I know how the man in that story felt now. 

(Once, there was a Norwegian man living in New York City. He went to the same restaurant every day and ordered "apple-pie-and-coffee," because that was all the English he knew: "apple-pie-and-coffee." Finally, one of his friends taught him to say, "cheese-sandwich," so that he could order something else. Full of pride at this new phrase, he walked into the restaurant the next day and said, "cheese-sandwich!" 

The waitress asked, "white bread or wheat?" 

The man frowned and said, "apple-pie-and-coffee.") 

This is exactly where I am now. I had a whole (brief) conversation today, and I said (I hope) all the right things; but it used a significant fraction of my entire Czech vocabulary, and if the lady at the counter had asked me a question, I would have been completely lost. This language is still a vast and unknown wilderness, and the slightest deviation from the few paths I know could easily leave me as lost as the Norwegian man in the story. (I don't actually remember if he was Norwegian or not. He might have been Swedish.) There are still many places I want to go to which I have yet to find any paths at all. 

Still. This is progress! And the food was delicious. I plan to start actually cooking food soon, but I'll probably wait until I've got other things figured out first. 

I then took the subway to the wrong hotel (which will be the right hotel after we move next week) and had to walk back to the one where we're staying. Fortunately, it's not a long walk - fifteen to twenty minutes, perhaps. I could probably just walk over there for the move this weekend if I didn't have to carry my suitcase. With a suitcase, the walk would be more like forty minutes, and I'd collapse after about ten. 

The subway has what seems like the longest escalator in the world. It's like looking down an aluminum-plated shaft to the core of the Earth. 

Tomorrow, I will have things to buy. Food, for one thing, and possibly a larger sketchbook if the one I brought isn't big enough. Fortunately, there are several grocery stores, an art supply store, and a paper store only a few minutes' walk from the Institute. I suspect I'll be visiting them a lot. 

The weather today was just about perfect, which means that I was in a t-shirt and 75% of everyone else were in sweaters and complaining about the cold. I don't know what the actual temperature was, but I hope it stays like this for a while. 

Also tomorrow: the Opera! We will be going to "Rusalka," by Dvořak, with tickets already paid for as part of the semester. I can't wait!