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Published: December 17th 2006
Magical Morning
Looking through the Lesser Towers to St Charles BridgeUnfortunately for the last few days Lisa has been waking up at 6:30am and it is all my fault. My wristwatch alarm has been permanently locked in at 6:30, well 6:24 but let’s not split hairs. I guess I could have smothered it at the bottom of my backpack but where would the fun be in that? Today was one day I wanted to be up early, voluntarily. Prague in summer is just a step shy of an amusement park during school holidays. The beauty of Charles bridge would be lost in a sea of daypacks and scantily clad tourists drenched in a sticky aura of sweat. Collective sweat when elbow to elbow or in my case elbow to nose, can ruin the most beautiful of travel experiences. No, to be fair, it can ruin anything.
Instead Lisa and I contentedly walked along the cobblestone paths under the Lesser Town Towers to a silent Charles Bridge. I love that pleasant part of the morning where the city has yet to wake up but the sun is promising a flawless skyline without the energy-draining heat. The air is still smog-less and crisp. Lisa and I stood in front of almost every
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The old town and our quarters statue playing around with light and angles to best capture each one. The whole process was a sheer novelty in itself. Cobwebs laced almost all of the statues and while some may consider it imperfection, there was a wonderful unkempt naturalness to it. Especially for a bridge that attracts as many foreign travelers, on its own right, as the city itself.
Keith and Wendy sidled up to us, clearly falling in love with this medieval city as fast as we were.
“We were almost pick-pocketed last night,” Keith informed us.
“What? Where? How?” Lisa and I replied completely out of sync.
“When we were walking towards TESCOs. We did see some suspicious looking guys, then I felt something and I jolted,” Keith demonstrated the little jolt for maximum clarity. “I turned around and the zipper was open.”
“Did they take anything?”
“No, lucky. But you know how you feel like its just ruined your night?” Wendy interjected. Lisa and I nodded, thinking about our first trip together in Paris almost four years ago.
The Old Town Tower is less impressive than the Lesser Town Towers. If anything, the Old Town Tower is plain in comparison with its dour
St Charles Bridge
Benefits of an early night and an early rise - the bridge to us and a few others. charcoal colouring. Standing halfway across the bridge we had a 'The 360 view' which is the never ending Vlatva, the bustling side of the Old Town in comparison to the parklands of the Lesser Town and Prague Castle. Unless you are in the middle of an old town square or surrounded by concrete alley walls, Prague Castle will always be in view. I suspect it is somewhat a criteria when picking a potential location to build a castle. Not that many castles have been built in recent years. I toyed with the thought of bringing back the art of castle building till I realised that I hold no such standing to make such an outlandish (slightly eccentric) suggestion.
One of the things we do take for granted is the relative ease of doing, well, anything. Take for instance buying a ticket to a show in Prague (by no means a tourist unfriendly city)should be as simple as walking up to the box office, ask how much an adult ticket cost, work out how many we want and then exchange money for goods. What happens when there is no one at the box office and what if the box office
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Standing over beasts looks like it has never been occupied by anyone? This is made all the more confusing when the opening time for the box office is between the hours of nine in the morning till four in the afternoon. Thus picture four intelligent Australian adults standing in front of the box office reading the opening times, staring at the empty box office and wonder if we had deciphered the opening times notice incorrectly (which is English mind you) and scanning the entire area for any clues as to why the box office was closed. The fact that it was located in an obscure alleyway of a shopping complex (as is so common in Prague) did not provide much local traffic (or any human traffic) for us to flag down and ask how to solve our predicament. Then one of us noticed a bell.
“I guess we ring the bell?” I suggested. We looked at each other for a volunteer, after all it would be mighty embarrassing if someone came rushing from the basement thinking they had visitors but instead greeted by four Australians hoping to buy tickets to a show about a man who has a love affair with his television
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Up close, a little cobwebbed. told in the medium of creative dance and glow sticks.
“Keith, I think you should do it seeing as you pressed the door bell to Buckingham Palace,” Lisa suggested. Keith accepted the duty with great aplomb and pressed the bell. An uncomfortable silence floated around us and we began shuffling our feet, reading notices or just turning around nonchalantly, wondering if we had made a faux pas.
We didn’t. A lovely smiling Czech lady appears at a door which had so far gone unnoticed. She waves us in and we proceed single file down the darkish stairs to her well organized office. The actual exchange of money for tickets was in the manner that we expected and we depart with a sense of relieved triumph.
Lisa and I found ourselves outside the Communist Museum. No matter how hard we tried, neither of us were able to capture the amusing irony of the Communist Museum being sandwiched right between a McDonalds and a Casino. The Communist Museum gift shop amused me to no end with postcards ridiculing communist ideology, in particular ‘Pray we don’t catch you at another museum’. It is filled with a lot of communist iconology and
a brief spiel on the history of communism which you can read all of this under an authorative looking statue of Stalin. The theme is very much down with communism although I didn’t feel overwhelmed by it. Perhaps the only part of the exhibition that made me stop and feel anything was the story of Jan Palach, a university student who had set himself alight in 1969 in Wenceslas Square as a protest to the communist regime. His suicide note to his parents was translated and printed next to a picture of his body. In summary he apologized for the hurt that he will cause but feeling strongly as he did about the oppressive ideology of communism he needed to make a stand for his beliefs. It took a further twenty years for the Soviets to leave Czechoslovakia (as it was known then) but his impact was resounding. It left an imprint on my mind above all else.
“The museum was so biased,” Lisa commented as we returned to the heat reflecting pavements of Prague Centre. I looked at her questioningly. “I mean it doesn’t look at the other side of communism like how George said at least everyone
Saints and Statues
The saint of pigeons, okay not really, just a coincidence had a job, which not everyone has now like his dad,” she explained.
Bek & Communism. Yes, everyone had a job under communism. They also had dental and medical care. Apparently a pension plan existed for the oldies who could no longer chisel large oppressive monuments of Stalin from great cement slabs. I am not surprised that George’s father thought communism was good. Forty one years of political indoctrination will likely to do that to you. Day in and day out you were told that to survive you needed to work in this particular job (in order to be a contributor to the communist society), drive this brand of car, wear this particular winter coat and orthopedic shoes ensemble. Then having done all of that without protest you were paid in a certain amount of wheat to make your own bread for your troubles. Eventually your will is broken, you become indoctrinated for many reasons (follow the regime so your children will not be punished) and when it is over you are incapable of thinking beyond the ingrained ideology. Granted my description could be a stretch on the specifics but to put it simply life under communism means not
Jesus
Removing Christ having a choice.
There are many ways in which I can argue my point but history has proven that Communism failed. The fact that Lisa and I can have a discussion (or Lisa being the unbiased Scientist that she is and me being the over-emotional idealist with a soap box coming to loggerheads) is a privilege that we neglect having never experienced a time where we could not use our own voices. In essence I have never lived under a communist regime and neither has Lisa. Yet while I can rationalise like Lisa, I am entirely partisan towards the idea of communism and yes, it is personal.
We sat in comfortable silence watching the rest of Prague walk by sweating profusely but refusing to give into dehydration by powering onto their next tourist attraction. Lisa and I newly sun-screened mustered enough energy to visit the Jewish Quarter. We became mildly lost which is entirely understandable. After all there isn’t a huge sign that blinks ‘Josfev’ (Jewish Quarter) and if there was, we missed it. Unlike the many China Towns of the world, you do not turn a corner and suddenly get a myriad of Chinese characters, herbal medicines
Saints and Statues
It could be a man and his cherub helpers... and roasted ducks hanging upside down on tenterhooks. Then again with my rather limited knowledge on the Jewish Faith I could not recognise any Jewish symbols other than the Star of David. A few wrong turns around the high end of town that is Josfev, eventually we rounded a corner and were greeted by an unmistakable crowd of tourists and hawkers lined next to the old synagogues. The Czechs know how to make money off you, remember the ticket you had to buy for your bags on the metro? Well, there is no such thing as a ticket to a single attraction in the Jewish Quarter, it is all or nothing. Thus Lisa and I headed to the Pinkas Synagogue with a ticket for all manner or synagogues and museums after negotiations with the Czech ticket vendor failed spectacularly.
The synagogue lies behind security railings and hidden behind a sandstone hedge. A simple stone building stood plainly and solemnly. A board describes how the names are arranged. Against the white walls the names of the Jew who died or never found were meticulously hand written in red with their existence in years scribed in black. Floor to ceiling in
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Saints who were drowned were given star halos... poor fella. several small rooms and archways filed with so many lost Jews. It is sorrowful to see a life condensed to a written name and frightening to see the endless repetition of the years 1944 and 1945. I can’t tell you how long I spent in those hollow rooms, but exiting to the chaos and tumble of abandoned tombstones was almost a brutal representation on what I had just experienced on the inside. Piled haphazardly and loosely in jutting angles under the protective branches of bygone trees, they were a stark contrast to the meticulous beauty of the written names sheltered solemnly. The tombstones exuded the feeling of the dead being cast aside and the extreme haste of the living for survival that there was little time to bury your loved ones with dignity.
Seeing Green. If we didn’t have to catch the Black Light Theatre’s production of Miss Sony, we would have parked ourselves all day at the Slavia and wasted the day away. If there was another beautiful day in Prague, I would be tempted to waste the day here over a shot of Becherovka lost in the oil painting of The Green Fairy. Slavia has that all
encompassing charm of being loved by the regular drunkard or the discerning food aficionado. All of the Czech Republics political history lingers in Slavia from the dissidents of communism and the Velvet Revolutionaries. The sun beam of the setting day filtered through the window walls and life’s little nuances suspended as we soaked in each other’s company.
Facing the oil painting of the translucent Green Fairy lounging seductively across the table at a lone drinker, the Absinthe latte seems like the appropriate choice to end off a great meal.
It came out looking like a lime milkshake and tasted like your regular over-frothed latte. Absinthe may have a wonderfully subtle taste about it but with the caffeine and milk, it was lost on me. Still its all about trying something new.
A svelte blonde Czech lady steps out to introduce Miss Sony in English and only in English much to a very confused Czech audience. Dressed in orange the actor walks out with the star of the show a 2-dimensial green television. For the next hour or so we were entertained by the illusion of green figures flowing out of the television screen. A love triangle story with
a difference, you can’t help but feel that it is entirely apt to today’s society. It wasn’t the absinthe talking but we were sucked into the imaginary world of green glow sticks and wishing our television was a little more exciting. Ironically though, if it was, I wouldn’t be sitting here in Prague watching two people running around the stage in orange interacting with a sultry fluorescent green foam television.
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