Solo Prague

Okay, you’ve had a lot of photo-heavy posts of late.  Now it’s time for a wordy one.  I have to admit that I don’t love Prague.  I never expected to, given my background.  As most of you know, a careless driver killed my bonus-father Hank here nine years ago while he was visiting.  It has certainly made me a twitchy pedestrian.  But everyone kept telling me how charming the place is, cheap, great architecture, etc.  So I’ll go along with that.  It is cheap – or at least cheaper than other European cities with castles.  But only by a bit.  And there is a trade off to that.  While this place is teeming with tourists like other cities, it does a poor job of corralling them.  The ticket offices are always jammed with only one or two clerks selling.  I suppose that keeps things cheaper by under-employing, but it’s a bad bargain.  Great architecture – check.  Czech!  But I’m not sure I find it more charming than Salzburg, or Heidelberg.  Maybe it is just part of the “we weren’t badly bombed” rah-rah?

Today is my last day here in the city, and I am once again solo.  There are plusses and minuses to this.  One plus: amid all the hordes you are able to move faster without having to check-six to see if your companions are still with you.  A minus: no pics.  I figure I have enough thanks to downloading Lindsey and Kate’s cameras, and it’s raining today anyway.  Lindsey took off before dawn and Kate headed out before noon.  Since I am alone in the city I did the obvious: my laundry.  Another thing I really dislike about Prague is the cigarette smoking.  As I have moved further and further east I have been encountering more smoking.  It’s been causing me headaches and Lindsey’s been sneezing up a storm.  So I took the opportunity to hit a Laundromat – looking quite fetching in my yoga togs, as they are my only clean clothes left.  Then I checked into a hostel for my last night.  This is my first experiment with hostels.  They are much more economical than hotels, especially if I am not sharing, but there are usually downsides.  I am very pleasantly surprised by this one.  No smoking anywhere in the place – unlike our hotel!!  Furnishings are obviously a bit spare, but it’s quiet and seems very nice.  The front desk clerk is much nicer than those at the hotel we just checked out of.  She was quite impressed that I am reading the history of Prague, and commented that I now know more about the country than most Czechs.  The book: Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz is dense, long, and has bad font.  Thanks so much for the gift, Andrew!  But one of the consequences of reading it is that I have a more layered view of the history of the place, as opposed to the sanitized for tourists and neo-nationalist pap we’re getting from the Castle guides, etc.

So my afternoon was spent trying to subvert some of that simplicity.  First I hit the Mucha Museum.  Somewhere buried in my disposition I have a huge fondness for the Art Deco romanticism of Mucha.  But while the museum celebrates this national artist, they do have to admit he did his most recognizable work while living in Paris.  Then I toddled off to the Lobkowicz Palace.  Unlike the unheated and generally empty Castle museums, this place is a fascinating story that you are invited to walk through.  The Lobkowicz family feature in my Demetz book as major power players in the history of the city.  They eventually become Princes, then Dukes, then lose their titles (with their support) when the Czechoslovakian nation is created and hereditary titles are abolished.  Unfortunately, the family art, palaces, and other goods were first looted by the Nazis, returned, then taken three years later by the Communists.  After 1990 the family returned to Prague from the US and fought to get it all back.  Through laws, lobbying, and a good lawyer, they got most of it.  And they have worked to curate, repair, and showcase what they have.  But it is very clear that without the money from the US that they have been able to raise, much of this would have just rotted away.   Both Mucha and the Lobkowicz stories remind you that globalism is a reality, not an abstraction.

Mucha