Day 28: Quiet

Saturday, June 9, 2012 

I brought my loom back to the Penzion with me last night. After I woke up this afternoon, I finished tapestry number 3, then spent the rest of the day (what little there was) drawing comics on my laptop. Another lazy Saturday. 

Prague - or the district we're in, at least - seems to shut down almost completely on Saturdays. Most of the stores are closed, and traffic is nearly nonexistent except on the main streets. 

When I got hungry, I walked a few blocks - the weather was gorgeous, the streets practically deserted - to get a few slices of pizza for lunch. (Giallo Rosso, the tiny hole-in-the-wall pizzeria near the Metro stop, lets you get pizza by the slice. The ham and spinach variety is my current favorite.) I ate them in the park while watching pigeons - it's amazing how different they all are if you look closely - and listening to children playing in the fountain on the other end. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, it's a pleasant sound when you can't hear what they're actually saying. 

After pizza, I walked back across the street to the bakery next door to the pizza place and got a slice of chocolate cake, which I ate while looking out the front door at much the same view. Delicious. On the way back to the Penzion, I checked the hours of the Vietnamese place - it's one of the restaurants that's open on Saturdays - and stopped at the corner potraviny to get some shampoo to refill my nearly empty bottle. 

This is what I love about living in a city. Anything you need is within walking distance - usually several of what you need, and even more if you count places you can get to by the Metro. Lunch, dinner, a visit to the park, and a brief shopping trip today made for a total of maybe twenty minutes of walking, and I could have done it in less if I'd done less wandering around. 

Of course, the downside of living in a city is that everything is also within walking distance of several thousand other people, so it's hard to get any privacy. 

That's why I had dinner at Bong Sen again. It's one of the friendliest - and even more so, the quietest - restaurants I've ever visited. In a city full of noisy bars, crowded restaurants, and hotels full of college students (which can get noisy sometimes), it is an oasis of peace and good food. 

Of course, I've only been there after 9:30 pm, which might have something to do with it. For the sake of their business, I hope it's busier during the day. 

Tonight, I was one of only three customers in the restaurant; after I'd finished my rice and vegetables (69 crowns, or about $4 - it's also one of the only restaurants in the entire city where you can get dinner for less than 100), they let me stay and write until closing time (10:30). This one hour might end up being the source of five or six future Hamjamser posts. 

I might have found a place to go regularly. It's a shame I won't be able to do so after I return home. In the meantime, if you're ever in Prague, the address is Řipska 19, Vinohrady. Stop here for dinner at least once. 

Day 15/16/17: His Only Desire

Monday, May 28, 2012 

Today, I ate breakfast before going to the studio to start work on my lace project. I'd finished the sketch yesterday but hadn't had time to start weaving. The project was due Tuesday morning. 

I took a half-hour break to use the restroom and get a sandwich for dinner at the closest affordable place I could find. 

I skipped lunch. 

I had to stop for perhaps another half-hour to ride the Metro back to the Penzion. 

That was all. Other than that, I worked on my lace project all day and all night. I worked in the studio until the Institute closed. I worked in the hotel room until my roommates came back and needed to sleep. I worked on a chair in the hallway outside, clicking away as the late-night wanderers among the students gradually trickled back into their own rooms, expressing surprise and occasionally concern to find me still working at such a late hour. 

I like to listen to music while I work, to occupy the part of my (left) brain that's in charge of distractions. I've found that, after a certain point, it becomes easier to keep focused on a project if I simply listen to the same song over and over again. The song for this project was one by the incomparable Kirsty MacColl (repeated 61 times, according to my laptop). It worked quite well. 

I finished just before dawn (not as late as you might think, since we're quite far north here and the days are a few hours longer than they are back home) and climbed quietly into bed for several hours of deep sleep. I felt like I'd earned it at that point. 

There is a certain fierce joy that comes only from this kind of stubborn, sustained effort. If I tried to do it routinely - or even twice in the same week - I suspect it would kill me; but every once in a while, it becomes necessary to throw all the time and energy I have into a project, casting everything else aside for one unceasing burst of creative work. I love it when it happens. There is nothing quite like it. 

And the result was this: 

So I'm satisfied. 

Day 15: Rest

Sunday, May 27, 2012 

Everyone is exhausted from the excursion. I went to the Institute, looked through my hundreds of photographs, and finished a sketch for my upcoming lace project - but even that small amount of work was exhausting. 

Another one of my roommates returned from the glass studio's excursion with what turned out to be a sprained knee. 

More than perhaps any other day on this trip, I think this is a day to rest. 

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.