PRAHA!: goin' crazy with the blues

apologies to all, for i've officially been back for two days and not written a word about my trip to prague, as promised. but yes, without further ado, here i am.
prague is a grand city, and my trip was full of surprises. tragically, my camera died (a real death, the power button has none) on the morning of our first full day there, so i have no pictures at all from the trip. i hope to steal some from my travelling companions so i have something at all, but for the moment i will try to accompany my travelogue with occasional pictures handily provided by my friend google.com - be on the lookout for links when i mention places i saw. i kept a shorthand journal for with the highlights of each day of the trip, so permit me to expand upon them here. what follows promises to be extensive, so read at will.

as a reminder, my travelling companions/initial cast of characters:

josh: gay jewish american from new york city, here for a semester, one of my close friends here, and usually up for anything
toby: jewish american from seattle, here also for a semester, someone i barely know but who shares many of my interests (english literature major, similar music tastes, etc)

day 1 - arrival: it was immediately apparent, in a sort of frightening, disorienting way, that we were in a foreign country - people said something other than "excuse me," something filled with unintelligble groupings of consonants, and the money was crowns, 25 per 1 dollar (though please let me tell you how satisfying it was to divide by 25 when thinking about money rather than multiply by 2 as i do in edinburgh with the pound). we didn't know how to use the metro system or how to navigate the maps to find our hostel, and ended up wandering around the streets of prague for a half an hour after unknowingly passing a huge sign saying "hostel vesta" immediately outside of the metro station's exit we had used. some parts of the city are a little shady, reeking of urine and infested with drug dealers - toby was offered marijuana, often in broad daylight, 12 times over the course of the trip. we found our way, and my companions wanted to pretend this whole episode of our floundering never happened, but i think it's good for us, this culture shock, for a lot of things translate pretty directly in edinburgh.

we arrived at the hostel, which was in a huge, shady-looking building on the fifth floor, and we were given keys and sheets for our room, which had 6 beds, 3 unused - what luxury. we settled in and headed back out on the town to wencaslas square, which my friend lauren krupnik who studied abroad in prague for a semester tells me is the most western part of the city, or at least prague's take on westernness. ignoring the omnipresent mcdonalds and kfc, we decided to get some real czech food and do our first night right. czech food, as lauren warned, is very bland and very heavy, and is something one quickly tires of. i got goulash and dumplings, which was tasty enough, but heavy indeed. we explored further after dinner - mostly shops and restaurants in this area - and wanted to have a low-key night so we could rest up for our big first day of exploring to follow, so we went to the cinema to see american comedy film the 40-year-old virgin, and it was certainly great for a laugh. our awareness of our foreign surroundings continued, as the ticket-taker directed us to the completely wrong theatre, one playing a czech movie. frustrating as it was, we worked it out eventually, but man was i glad for the mistake, because this theatre we went in was an amazing space. you walk in, a gigantic screen to your right, and to your left are intensely stacked seats with a blue-lit set of central stairs. this theatre didn't mess around, it was just you sitting in eerie darkness across from a huge screen and nothing else. i wish i had a picture :(
anyway then we went to bed, basically.

day 2: we slept in - something my breakfast shifts prevent me from being able to do these days. after we were all dressed and ready to go, josh said he was feeling ill and would like to find the hospital after we ate breakfast to see a doctor and get some medicine for whatever is wrong with him. i should note that josh has a typically fawning and overly-attentive jewish mother who happens to be a nurse - which means his health or lack thereof constantly centres around high-quality new york doctors and frequently-prescribed antibiotics. at this point he wasn't exhibiting any outwardly discernible signs of illness aside from general fatigue, but toby and i trusted that he wasn't enjoying his time and wanted to make it better with some medicine. the three of us ate breakfast in a lovely czech version of panera called - guess - paneria, and then parted ways, toby and i left to spend our first real time together and with the city. soon after we begin walking around, my camera died and i was really bummed out, but we pressed onward and ended up walking practically everywhere. we went to the river, all through the old town, across charles bridge - one of the most famous tourist spots - just all over the place. the weather was accomodatingly gorgeous, and i felt excited to be there - the czech people of prague were all markedly beautiful and fashionable, there was music and art and jewellry everywhere, and incidentally people and drivers especially were extremely courteous for the most part. the streets and buildings seemed out of a dream, not part of a real, functional city where people actually live and contribute to society. at times i felt miyazaki-style spirited away, with buildings such as the dancing house: this was designed as an architectural manifestation of the image of dancing pair ginger rogers and fred astaire. it was so strange, and certainly beautiful.

charles bridge, which i saw for first time on this day and many times more throughout the trip, was one of my favorite places. imagine the bridge of that picture filled with for one tourists, but also every few feet either a stand with jewellry, art, or various groups of street musicians, the last being the most charming of all. on my first time across the bridge i heard and fell in love with the original prague syncopated orchestra. i bought their cd, however overpriced, and now can delight in the memory and their music in whatever location. i talked to the clarinetist after their song ended, and he spoke better english than the rest i think; i complimented him on his solo, which he responded to with much modesty. he asked me if i played, and i said yes, flute and a small bit of saxophone - he understood, knowing them to share the same fingerings, and offered me saxophone lessons. i laughed and said it would be a bit of trek, but thanks anyway. the band plays 1920's style blues, and the subtitle of this blog entry post, goin' crazy with the blues, is the name of their cd, which puts me in the most delightful of moods.

but back to my story. toby and i returned to the hostel around dinner time to meet back up with josh, and he greeted us with the dramatic announcement of the need for his immediate return to edinburgh. of course, toby and i were a little shocked, because it was still unclear that he was actually sick in a serious way. the doctor had clearly misdiagnosed him, however, saying he had bronchitis even though he wasn't coughing or anything and prescribing him some medicine that was therefore not what he needed. he was quite feverish and experiencing waves of heat and chills, so we accepted the situation and went out meanwhile for a highly enjoyable italian dinner at a restaurant called ambiente. we then explored the old town square (at night/by day), went to a weird underground bar for a bit, then bought some playing cards and spent a pleasant hour or so back at the hostel playing silly games like egyptian ratscrew and gin rummy and bullsh*t. again, to bed.

day 3: josh's flight was not until the evening, so we decided to take a guided bus and walking tour of the city so that he could cram some of the sights in before leaving. our guide had a very dry sense of humor, and not the best english i've ever heard, which we speculated was maybe purposeful to add authenticity to the experience. i enjoyed him though, and we got to see many things, including josefov, the old jewish quarter - before the holocaust prague had 500,000 jews and now has a rarified 2,000, all of whom are orthodox and refuse to interact with tourists in any way. we also walked around prague castle (we entered here), which was pretty phenomenal. turns out it is still an operating government building for the czech republic's president, though he is mostly a figurehead, with the prime minister making most decisions. the latter operates from buildings actually called things like ministry of foreign affairs and ministry of trade; there were lots of strange residues of big-brother-like communism, like former communist meeting centres converted into hotels and a monotonous absolute-sounding loudspeaker announcing constantly at the train station - eerie, to say the least. the tour was a good decision i think, though josh's capacity for being out and about rapidly deteriorated throughout; it ended with toby and i going up in the view tower of old town square, where the panorama of the entire city could be viewed - here is one angle. josh needed to return to the hostel to take a nap, and as i had taken on the role of leader of sorts, particularly in terms of navigating the city streets, he needed us to return with him in order to find his way back. once returned, josh vomited and seemed really physically uncomfortable and not to be enjoying himself, so it was really for the best that he was leaving, because i don't think he could have had a good experience by this point. i spent a few hours (not napping like the other two) writing and reading and generally calming my self and my disappointment and coming to terms with the ways that the trip was defying my expectations. toby thus far was not proving to be too adventurous or fervent about being in prague, but was just sort of pleasantly going along with things, so i realized that i was going to have to do most of the work from then on - which indeed turned out to be a correct assessment.

after the nap, toby and i wanted josh to see charles bridge and some of the old town by foot, so we headed over to charles bridge - only in time for the only rain of the entire trip. poor josh's luck. but he took some pictures, bought a few souvenirs and went off to catch his flight. there was some relief in the parting, in that now toby and i could tackle the city without the awareness that a member of our party was really not enjoying himself. we sought refuge from the rain with some pizza dinner, and spontaneously decided to see a chamber orchestra's concert in the chapel of mirrors. they played mozart, vivaldi, dvorak, all the common songs of theirs, but it was very pleasant and fun for me to watch as a musician, for the one female violinist kept making eyes at and smiling with the other male violinist, rather unprofessionally, as if there wasn't a light shining directly on her face. it was pretty amusing, and the music was flawlessly executed nonetheless. then toby and i checked out a bar called chateau that lauren recommended, and moved on to another called lucerna, where i had my first real fun of the trip. i firstly tried the native prague beer kozel cherny - i don't even really like beer, i should say - but this stuff was really quite good, lauren was right to say so. and it is so cheap there! about a dollar for a pint. but the real fun was in the dancing. a dj was playing some disco-type music, which was a little cheesy, but this was like the best possible disco you could find, and i think toby and i were the only tourists in the bar. toby was not a big dancer, but i had so much fun dancing with these locals and fell in love all over again with the institution of dancing, as it permitted universal good times and laughter, where language and culture didn't even enter into it, just the groove and how you could move. it was lovely.

day 4: with continued meteorological luck, toby and i spent from 10:30 am until 8:30 pm out walking the city of prague, seeing all that was left to see, whatever wants of ours had accumulated. unfortunately, it turns out monday is their sunday and most things, especially museums, are closed, so our attempts to see the czech museum of cubism and museums of fine arts, etc. were a bust. we did experience bohemian bagel, which is a very popular bagel shop of the city and which made me nostalgic for bodo's bagels back in charlottesville which i can't wait to include as a regular part of my life when i get back in the states. we also went to an english-language bookstore called big ben, where i picked up quite cheaply haruki murakami's latest book, kafka on the shore. we went back to charles bridge and i bought some earrings to replace the 4 pairs i had lost earlier in the hostel - it amazes me how i always lose things when i go on trips. of course we also heard some more old timey music that i couldn't get enough of. then toby and i went to the castle's cathedral, st. vitus, properly - it is a fully functional catholic church, so had been conducting mass the day before when we did our tour through the castle and was unopen to the public. man, this structure was impressive. prague is also quite famous for its glass, and i've never seen such intricately colored and designed stained class windows, in all of the churches i've seen. had i had a camera, this would've been the subject of many pictures, so let me point to some here: the great hall, exterior front with authentic scaffolding in place & rear, exterior of tower, stained glass example. we also spent a lot of time in the labyrinthine gardens surrounding the castle - built after it was no longer used for defense purposes. lastly in our series of touristy visits we went to the wallenstein garden, which contained the strangest stalagmite wall randomly in the middle of it, as well as an aviary with the most humungous owls i've ever seen - i think they were great africans, or something. we then grabbed some milkshakes in a tearoom that supposedly part of the film amadeus took place in - prague is very mozart-obsessed, as he apparently loved the city, and also franz kafka-obsessed, for he was born and lived there. i bought a silk pashmina - prague is also famous for those - and we headed to this cheap authentic asian food place called maly buddha that lauren told me about. it was at the very top of the city's most massive hill atop which the castle is perched, and upon arrival our trek was rewarded by another closed-on-mondays-establishment. we got indonesian/malaysian food close by, and then headed home to sit for awhile after our extremely long day of walking - i actually pulled a muscle or ligament in my foot from walking 5-10 miles every day on the hills and cobblestone.

off in the evening to a club! we teamed up with some other americans staying in our hostel who from a study abroad program in athens, greece and were friendly enough, though very drunk and, it turns out, very american and not all that cool or kind. we ended up a touristy club that played really cheesy american music, but it was still pretty fun. at one point i danced classily with a random fellow to the famous uma thurman and john travolta twist song from pulp fiction, and we really pulled the dance off, it was a great success. i ended up talking to this young man for like an hour and a half - he was a parisian named jerome who complimented me on my dancing - so i really felt like i was in the cool club after all - and told me how he is studying engineering but really just wants to play upright bass with his jazz band all the time. we talked about france and nationalism and the feelings between our countries, and he was a perfect gentleman and got very frustrated with me when i occasionally in the loud environment only pretended to understand his broken english instead of telling him to try again and better. another connection formed in paris, then - i really must get out there at some point. toby and i were ditched by the other americans even though we were leaving at the same time and going to the same place and he had spent all evening hanging out with them. he seemed pretty upset about this, but it was i'm sure for the best, and we finally made it home and to bed at around 4:30 am.

day 5 - departure day: i woke up at 9 with a swollen foot that i couldn't walk on, and thought, man what a trip this has been. the problem ended up going away by the time we were to leave, but toby and i laid low in paneria for a few hours, reading and doing our own thing, before heading to the airport and back to edinburgh. i at least had gotten a little tired of him by the trip's end, as people in constant company for several days are likely to do, so was happy to just sort of sit and read and be in my own head. toby was pleasant company throughout the trip, but the situation did devolve into single girl travelling with a single guy who she didn't have an established relationship with, which is a good bit of pressure in and of itself, and i still had to do all of the work to keep the conversation going and the dynamic interesting. i don't think he made one joke the whole time, which is a heavy thing when you are around someone all the time for a few days. and for me to be the funny one...well, i'm not especially funny, as girls often aren't, so it was a little stressful for me. the situation with my travelling companions did not detract at all from my enjoying the city, but it could have been a lot better in a more perfect situation. the trip was of course very much worth it in the end and i loved being there, but i was happy to return to scotland and edinburgh. i feel a great love for scotland by this point, and also just felt drained in many ways. even though i was woken up at 4:45 am last night by a fire alarm in my silly first-year-filled flat- some drunk person, no doubt - i am still very glad to be back and in the swing of things, resting up and taking care of business and just living here, in the city.

congrats to those of you who have made it through all of this. it took me forever to write and i'm sure forever to read. i should get off to the library to prepare for my second essay of the semester, so adieu until soon, but not too soon, because goodness was this a lot of writing.