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 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 21: Funny Animals

Saturday, June 2, 2012 

One thing I've noticed here is that the whole country seems to use a lot of silly little animals. In the toy shops, in advertising, even in bronze on the street - there are blobby little simplified creatures everywhere. 

Lamp-gargoyles on a restaurant. 

Snakes on a gate. 

Krtek, the famous Little Mole, shows up everywhere. 

These were on an ice cream poster at the restaurant near the beekeeping institute. 

This little zebra gives out safety messages on the Metro, at least on some days. I've been trying to get a picture all week. 

Many of the ads in the metro also have little animals and monsters in them. 

Even the graffiti has creatures in it, though some of them are harder to identify. 

A giraffe? 

This little chalk ghost was drawn on the front stairs of the design academy, but I've seen them in other places as well. 

The Fontana v Americka, of course, you've already seen. 

The tradition goes back to the gargoyles in the older buildings, if not further. 

Some of these creatures are weirder than the newer ones. 

You can also find various animals in museums, from the outdoor museum at Přerov Nad Labem... 

To the ceramics sections in the National Gallery...  

To the Young Art Museum... 

To the Museum of Decorative Arts, from which I have sketches instead of photographs. (More on that in a later post.) Some of my favorite ones here were the giraffe carafe, the 12th-century European interpretations of African animals, and a series of delightfully ugly glass fish. 

The whole country seems to be full of little creatures like this. 


I thoroughly approve.