Day 27: Solitaire

Friday, June 8, 2012 

Weaving all day! Finished tapestry number 2 and started number 3! Stripes and gradients and an attempt at a fringe! I might be addicted to weaving! Yay! 

The soundtrack for this project turned out to be the album Right Outta Nowhere, by Christine Kane. Good music for weaving. Good music for anything, really. 

The power cord for my laptop inexplicably broke in my backpack earlier this week, so I've been using my laptop sparingly to conserve power. Today, I managed to get in touch with the Institute's IT expert, who loaned me an old spare cord he had. I can type again! 

After all the walking yesterday, I didn't really feel like going anywhere today. (Besides, I had weaving to do.) I'm not sure if I left the Institute at all before the trip back to Vinohrady in the evening. This is something that happens to me fairly often: I'll start making something, look up a little while later, and wonder when it got so dark outside... 

There are actually signs up in the Metro forbidding passengers to put stickers on the walls and doors (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what the signs say). Despite this, someone had looked at the lines and dots of the station diagrams above the doors... 

...And had added a little PacMan and ghosts. 

I had dinner at Bong Sen, the Vietnamese restaurant around the corner from the Penzion. I got a large amount of meat and vegetables for a small amount of money, with a white pillow of rice on the side. Delicious. It was nearly closing time, so the restaurant was quiet, nearly deserted except for the wait staff and a small girl (related, I think) whom they were helping to practice counting in Czech. I think she was better at it than I am yet. 

I have found myself returning to the Penzion later and later each day. (Still never after 11 pm, I think.) Partly, this is because I have a tendency to work and forget to eat dinner until after the Institute closes. Partly, though, it's because the later I get back, the fewer people will try to talk to me on the way up to the room. 

They keep inviting me to clubs and bars and restaurants. This is very nice of them, and I appreciate the thought. I've passed by the doors of the occasional bar and club, though, and they seem to contain mostly alcohol, crowds, and noise. If I wanted that kind of fun, I could just beat my head against a wall for a few hours. 

Dinner might be nice, if it was a quiet restaurant; after about 9 pm, though, I'm rarely in a mood to spend time with people, or talk to people, or remember that people exist. That's what I do in the morning and afternoon. All I want after sundown is to shut myself in a quiet room and forget that there's a world outside my head and the book or screen in front of it. 

I am a nearly complete introvert - always have been - and I'm happy that way. But I hate to disappoint the extroverts who invite me to places. I like these people, I really am grateful for the offer, and I can only hope that they aren't offended that I have to keep refusing it. 

Day 23: Further Adventures in Baking

Monday, June 4, 2012 

After planning it for weeks, today I finally got everything together that I needed to bake brownies. 

I did have to improvise some of the ingredients based on what is possible to find in Czech grocery stores. I used kakao powder instead of baker's chocolate, got butter in the single package it comes in here (fortunately, it's about the same size as two sticks in the US), and left out the vanilla extract entirely, since as far as I can tell, it does not exist in Prague. 

Fortunately, there was no one else using the Institute's Miniature Kitchen # 3 at the same time, or it might have been hard to find room for everything. 

I was trying to remember how to convert from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I'd have some idea what temperature to use in a European oven, when the IT expert at the Institute walked in and said he just bakes everything at 170. That seemed worth a try. 

It was a long and nervous half-hour wait before the brownies came out. I thought I'd burned them at first, but it turned out to just be the darker color of the chocolate. 

After another long wait for them to cool, I finally cut out a corner and tasted it... 

Perfection. 

It would have taken me weeks to eat a whole pan of brownies by myself. (Well, one week. Most of a week. Certainly a few days.) Instead, I left a note inviting other people to take one each. 

Four hours later, they were gone. I think that's a good sign. 

Day 19: The Unseen

Thursday, May 31, 2012 

We've spent the last few days carving our forms for blue printing and testing them with watercolors. We made both a pattern block and a signature block (backwards, of course).

My pattern is based on the sidewalk tiles and manhole covers in Prague.

Having finished the forms, we got sheets of cloth today and got to actually print with them.

Blue printing turns out to be a surprisingly strenuous process. All you have to do is take your form (ours are blocks carved out of foam, not the wooden ones that can last for centuries), press it into the pap, and then stamp the design onto the cloth… But when your design is a small and precise one that you want to stamp onto your cloth over 100 times, this becomes slightly more challenging. The process required me to spread more pap into the cushioned tray with a brush, press the form carefully into it, carry it across the small room to the table that held the cloth, bend over this while getting the form into precisely the right position to make a seamless pattern (or my best attempt at one, anyway), and then press it down hard enough to print the design clearly on all sides. This still might not sound like all that much, but when you consider that I had to do all these steps for each of the over 100 copies of the design… Well, I was rather sore by the end. I think I'm mostly satisfied with the result. 

I won't know for certain, though, until all the patterns get dyed. The white sections will then become blue, and the green will stay white (after being washed in acid to remove the pap).

This is one thing that printing, baking, and several of the other more patient arts have in common. No matter how much work you put into them, there's no way to be sure of your results until the very end. Whether it's a dye vat or an oven, nothing's finished until it comes out for the last time. 

We shall see. 

Several of the other students were going to an unusual tour/exhibition this afternoon, and they invited me along. It sounded interesting, so I accepted. It was called Neviditelná Výstava ("The Invisible Exhibition"). The website is here, if you want to take a look. 

The tour took place entirely inside a series of rooms in a building on a street somewhere. (We got lost several times trying to find it.) All of the rooms are completely dark - no light of any kind. Tour groups are led through them to get some idea of what it would be like to be blind. Our guide was blind himself, so he knew what he was doing and patiently led our slow, fumbling group through the tour. 

The first few rooms were set up like rooms in a house - kitchen, bathroom, living room, and so on - with furniture, appliances, and various other objects that we tried to identify. Later rooms included a cabin, a forest with a bridge over a stream, and a city street. All of these had sounds playing to make the illusion more convincing. The street was actually rather intimidating - we could hear the traffic going by, but we couldn't see it. We stayed pressed against the rough wall by the sidewalk and groped our way from windowsill to windowsill. Another room was set up as an art gallery, with sculptures that we tried to identify by feel. (One of these was Michelangelo's David, which made for a rather awkward moment about halfway down.) 

It was interesting to find how easy it was to get a picture of small objects just by feel - and how difficult it was to navigate through larger spaces. I could get a fairly good mental picture of everything within arm's reach, but beyond that, the world was a complete blank. It was a strong reminder of exactly how much I rely on my sense of sight. Without it, I could only tell what was nearby with my sense of direction (I don't have one), my sense of hearing (half the sounds around me were recordings), and my sense of touch (range: about two and a half feet). It was a surprisingly disorienting experience. 

At the end, we stopped at the "blind bar" (also pitch black) and ordered drinks. Fortunately, Czech coins are all different sizes, and half of them are thirteen-sided instead of circular, so it was possible to pay in the correct amounts. (Czech bills are different lengths, depending on denomination, and there are tools for quickly measuring them if you're blind. I'm curious now about what people do in the US, where the bills are all the same size.) 

At the bar, our guide stopped for perhaps half an hour and just let us ask him questions. We had quite a lot by then. Some of the main points he emphasized are that you should ask a blind person if they need help before trying to give it to them (many don't need or want it), that you should let them hold your arm (instead of vice versa) if they want to be led somewhere, and that only one person should provide help at a time. These all seemed fairly obvious to me, but apparently, not enough people are aware of them.

He said that he's actually trained his sense of hearing so well that he can get a feeling for the space around him - where there are buildings, where there are vehicles and how fast they're moving, where there are people, even what they're doing with their hands - just by sound. To learn the entire course of the tour he gave us today, he only had to walk through the rooms once. 

He's likely to be one of the most all-around competent people I've ever met. He speaks three languages, plays eight instruments, competes in a sport designed for blind players (it involves a ball filled with bells, caught with what sounds like a rather terrifying amount of full-body tackles), and thinks that guide dogs and assistants make things too easy. He said that there's really nothing that should be impossible for blind people - except perhaps driving. 

Day 11: The Endless Walk

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. 

Day 9: Heaven in a Pancake

Monday, May 21, 2012 

Our first night in the Penzion. There are several loud snores in the room (there are five of us, so statistically, that was almost guaranteed), so I will try to get to sleep as early as possible from now on. It shouldn't be a problem. 

We continued with lacemaking in the Fibers class; having mastered the chain stitch, we now move on to the linen stitch, which requires five hanging pairs of bobbins and one pair of "walking threads" that weave back and forth like a shuttle between them. This is even more fun than before! 

After lunch, I drew comics on my laptop for a while, then went out to take more photographs for tomorrow. We are now focusing on things that remind us of lace, presumably as a precursor to creating the patterns we will eventually be using.

I stopped behind this building, the church-with-houses-wrapped-around-it. I really should learn its name sometime.

There I found a little food stand where a woman was making crepes. They were only 55 crowns (about $3), which was about how much money I had on me at that point. I got a chocolate and butter one and ate it on the steps of the church's back door (see below) while listening to what I'm fairly sure was a choir rehearsing inside. 

Basically, a crepe is a flat pancake filled with heaven and folded into sixths.

It was gone far too soon. I will be going back to this place. 

After that, I wandered around until I got lost, then got out my small map and found that I had circled all the way around the Institute to arrive in Betlémské Náměsti (or Bethlehem Square). This is a nice place with benches, so I went to a little Vietnamese food stand nearby for dinner.

Dinner was spring rolls (they had two kinds; I got the mushroom) and gelato (the tiramisu flavor, which was quite good). Added together, these cost almost exactly as much as the crepe earlier today.

Even spring rolls here are different than they are in the US; thicker, meatier, and full of more savory crunchy bits. Perhaps this is the Czech version of Asian food, as opposed to the American version of Asian food we get in the US. 

Two of the things I've found myself missing the most here are public seating and water fountains. As far as I can tell, Prague has neither. If you want water, you get it from a tap (or, if your tastes run that way, get beer instead); if you want to sit, you go to a park, or you find a convenient ledge or stairway. It's surprising to be so surprised at this. I hadn't realized before how accustomed I am to finding benches and water fountains - free sitting and drinking - in even slightly urbanized areas at home. I've been taking them for granted without realizing. 

The public bathrooms on the sidewalks are another issue entirely. (According to other students, you have to pay to use them, and sometimes you have to pay again so that the people who make their living by occupying them will stand up and get out of your way). Between the various hotels and the Institute, I have not had to use these small and aromatic buildings yet; if possible, I think this is one aspect of Prague's culture that I will be content to miss. 

At another student's suggestion, I walked from the Penzion to the Institute and back today, instead of taking the Metro. This turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Prague is built around the river Vltava; the Old Town, where the Institute is, is right in the middle of a bend in the river. This means that the Old Town is downhill from everything else, which made the walk from the Penzion to the Institute in the morning an easy fifteen-minute stroll. It also means that everything else is uphill from the Old Town, which made the walk from the Institute to the Penzion a half-hour endurance test. It was rather pleasant, though - almost like mountain climbing with different scenery.