Day 22: Týnská Ulička

Sunday, June 3, 2012 

For the fibers class, our next assignment was to choose a single place in our area and spend at least 45 minutes observing it (using photographs, sketches, and so on). I spent the afternoon photographing and sketching the little square behind the magnificent Church of Our Lady before Tyn.

Judging by the street sign, the square might be called Týnská Ulička; I'm not sure. Perhaps that's just a street name. Týnská is one of the streets that leads into it.

The fact that this square is where the crepe stand sets up every day had absolutely nothing to do with my decision.

Well, it wasn't the only reason, anyway. 

After lunch (a ham-and-cheese crepe, since they were so conveniently nearby), I took a few dozen photographs of the square. 

This is one of the things I love about Prague. It's easy to find gorgeous, elaborate buildings wedged into tiny little squares and back alleys, where you can barely even get across the street to look at them. I don't know if the city has grown up around buildings like this, or if there's just such an abundance of decoration in the city that they don't have to constrain it to the highly visible areas. Either way, I love being able to walk down the narrow streets and see lovely architecture like this stretching up four times as high as the street is wide.

It was hard to get even a single building into a photograph, though, so I eventually turned to sketching in an attempt to get a feel for the entire square. I still had most of my 45 minutes left, so I found a good vantage point - up on one of the ledges between the buttresses of the church - and took my time. People stopped occasionally to watch me. One even asked to take a picture of the half-finished sketch.

A little while later, I finished the sketch, checked my watch, and found that I had been drawing nonstop for three hours. Part of that was under an umbrella, because I wasn't going to stop for a silly thing like rain. I'd been back and forth across the square more times than I could count, trying to get a good view of every part of every building.

I'm fairly satisfied with the result.

Having become familiar with practically every meter of the square by then (there's no better way to observe something than to sketch it), I packed up my sketchbook and got another crepe for dessert. (They were nearby, after all.)

When I ordered the second crepe, in Czech again, the woman at the stand asked where I was from. She seemed surprised that I was from America, saying that my accent sounded Polish. I think that's a good sign.

On the way back, I stopped to watch the man blowing giant bubbles in the Old Town Square. I'd seen this type of performance once before - at night, in the square in front of the Museum, where the bubbles reflected the myriad lights of the city around them - but this time, it was light enough to get photographs.

Day 1-2: by Bus and Airplane

May 13-14, 2012

Arrival in Prague. Two days on airplanes.

British Airways was the fanciest and had the most cheerful service. American Airlines was the one that served dinner and breakfast, though, and it was delicious - lasagna and rolls and croissants with jam. Unless this was unusual, I don't know why people complain about airplane food.

Then again, I do tend to like nearly everything.

I was unable to sleep during the night, on the long AA flight over the ocean; instead, I kept falling asleep over Europe, when I actually wanted to be awake. The result was that I got very little sleep at any time. That's all right; I've done it before.

I have never been outside the United States before, and it shows. All the way into London-Heathrow Airport, I kept looking out the window and thinking, those are English people! Doing English things in England! The land of Shakespeare, of Gaiman and Pratchett and Miéville and Monty Python and Diana Wynne Jones! I am actually setting foot on this incredible island!

Granted, I was in an airport the whole time and never actually touched the ground except through layers of concrete and asphalt, but still. It was so exciting it was silly.

I ended up going through security three times today. Once at the beginning of the trip; once at Dallas, because I didn't realize that the baggage claim area was outside security or that I would pick my one suitcase up later, in Prague; and once in London, because everyone apparently has to go through security in London no matter what. Fortunately, it's much less draconian than US security. Customs in Prague was completely uneventful.

It's a little disturbing how many airports are basically shopping malls with gates around the outside. Sketching people in them is still fun, though, as long as I avoid people who look my way often. A lot of people get stiff and unnatural if they know they're being watched.

I realized in the London-Heathrow airport that I was largely choosing people to sketch based on the number of wrinkles they had. I tried to include some younger faces too, but they never turned out as well. Older faces are just more interesting.

On the way into London, we were treated to beautiful views of the English countryside's cloud formations. They were thick and white and completely opaque. Anything could have been underneath them. On the way out of London, though, the clouds cleared halfway to France, and I got to enjoy tea and biscuits 30,000 feet over the English Channel.

My favorite part of the flights was going over the mountains of Germany, with little white-cottage villages sprinkled like sugar into every valley - until we got to Prague, which was like flying over the most beautiful parts of the 16th century. All these gorgeous little towns, whitewash and red roof tiles over twisting little hillside streets…

The Czech Republic has beautiful coins. Much heavier than American. Bicolored metal and ornate heraldic lions. (I'll try to post photos later.) I got about 1080 koruna (crowns) for 60 dollars, so the exchange rate seems to be about 18/1.

Everything looks different in Prague. Everything. The signs and caution fences are different; the street signs are attached to buildings rather than poles; half the streets are cobblestone; there are what I assume are magpies instead of crows, as well as rosy gray doves with white rings around their necks; the buildings in the area around the airport are mostly a sort of eclectic, slightly shabby Bauhaus style, lots of rectangles and bright colors and cement, a look I don't always care for but which looks beautiful when a whole part of a city is done that way; the buses seem to use the streets and the tram tracks interchangeably; even the plants are all unfamiliar - some just have textures that are subtly different from anything in America, while others are quite alien, like the ones with black bark that flakes off sycamore-style halfway up their white trunks.

Not to mention the language. I don't understand a single word anyone is saying, with the exception of other students from the US. I have no reason to believe that anyone would understand anything I said. It's a rather humbling experience. I'd started studying my Czech phrasebook on the plane, but I'd had time to look over the pronunciation guide, nothing more. All I could do was watch the signs go by outside the bus from the airport, able to pronounce but not understand them, and hope that the name of my destination would show up somewhere prominent when I reached it.

I must learn the language as soon as possible. I can already pronounce the letters (fortunately, they are phonetic and logical, however unfamiliar some of the sounds are); next, I move on to words. That will take somewhat longer.

My two roommates were already at the hotel, so we got to introduce ourselves before collapsing from exhaustion. We all wear retainers, sleep heavily, and are fans of Pokemon.

The hotel apparently has wi-fi ("vee-fee," as it's pronounced here), but it only actually works in certain parts of the building. With at least five stories, I'm not surprised. The rooms are tall and full of pleasantly mismatched fabrics, with bathrooms a little larger than my closet at home. Taking a shower is a bit like one of those puzzle games where you must move things around using only a limited number of places to stack them. We shall see if this remains fun or becomes annoying with repetition. We'll be in a different hotel next week (this one is a last-minute one-week emergency relocation for about half the students), at which point everything is likely to change anyway. No way to tell yet.