Prague World

In late November 1989, a last-minute switch in travel plans as I was going from Frankfurt to Athens put me on a "Czech OK Airlines" flight transiting Prague. We flew into the city on an old Soviet aircraft, a Tupelov, I think, about the size of a Boeing 737, but without that plane's appointments. Instead of overhead storage bins, there was only rope mesh, stuffed with shopping bags, battered cloth suitcases, and even the occasional huge sausage poking through the webbing. The only drink the steward offered was beer--excellent beer--decanted into drinking glasses from a 2-liter bottle; the food offered was slices of sausage. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia was coming down that night, and I wondered whether I'd see any evidence of disorder from aloft or during my short layover. From the air, the whole city was brightly studded with orange from sodium vapor street lights. The small airport transit lounge, I recall, had uncomfortable wooden seats and a ceiling oddly studded with light bulbs of different sizes, plus one plump, gray, and grumpy guard making sure no one exited the lounge. And that was all I saw of Prague. Simplicity, bareness, and signs of an economy just above the poverty line. But well lit.

Early last Saturday morning we boarded the train at Vienna's Meidling Station for the 5-hour, nonstop ride to Prague. Soon after we crossed the border from Austria into the Czech Republic, the change in the economic level became apparent. From the train window we could sometimes see local highways, shoulderless, narrow, and heavily patched. The villages and cities along the way looked more prosperous than the rural areas, which at times reminded me of Appalachia--tiny wooden and tar-paper shacks with small, fenced vegetable gardens along the lowlands of adjacent streams. Besides the stretches of farmland, small, rundown enterprises--brickyards, lumberyards, chemical plants, agricultural machinery repair services and outlets--often bordered the tracks. In the towns, the tracts of houses were a dull array of earth tones, many with carrot-colored roof tiles, the houses painted sauerkraut beige, potato tan, onionskin yellow, cabbage green, the occasional pumpkin, and various shades of sausage. Now and again we'd see a neon-green building, or sometimes a bright yellow one, or sometimes one of both bright green and yellow. It was as if someone, sensing dullness, tried to overcome it by serving popsicles with a plate of fried cabbage. Along the way we also saw what must have been abandoned sentry stands on stilts, prolific in fields close to the border; bunkers; and a junkyard of old tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other military vehicles, including an old jet fighter. I wondered whether any or all of these had been deployed when I passed through in 1989.

When we reached the train station in Prague, we were in a bustling, brightly and colorfully lit modern building lined with newsstands, shops, and fast food outlets. We finally located the driver our hotel had sent for us. A tall young man with a Beatles-style haircut and a shiny black suit, he soon had us at our hotel--its original structure dated from the time that Chaucer was a boy--on the Old Town Square. With just two days to tour, we contented ourselves with a visit to the castle and its church, and with wandering the old city, just taking in the street views and occasionally browsing in the shops. One of our walks took us to the hundred-year-old train station, a portion of which is preserved atop the new station; its huge old clock is stopped at 12. And sometimes it did seem as if the city, never having been bombed or destroyed by the many wars that ravaged Europe, enjoyed a timelessness.

The shops are filled with crystal, with pottery, with Russian dolls, with refrigerator magnets, with t-shirts that "I Heart Prague" and "Prague Drinking Team"; there are black light shows, abundant bars, tiny restaurants, "medieval torture museums," ghost tour sites, and even an "Erotic Grocery," its windows covered by a massive plain brown wrapper, which my curious traveling companion could not resist peering under.

At times the language barrier reminded me of being penned in the transit lounge more than 20 years ago. Although most of the shops and restaurants provide signs and menus in English and Czech, the churches and historic sites, for the most part, are labeled only in Czech. That made it frustrating, requiring the continual consultation of a guide book to determine what we were looking at, and it was not too often that one of us was sufficiently patient to shed gloves, dig out the book, and find the right page. Even Latin signs and tablets would have helped me, but there was only Czech. Thus, we were inclined to stroll a great deal on this visit, and to spend less time lingering at exhibitions and buildings than we otherwise might have. The television in our hotel room brought little relief from the language prison; it offered only Czech programming and one channel in German. Although we have both much improved our German since we arrived--we know an amazing amount now, and we don't know an amazing amount now--we are nowhere near being fluent. Tuning in to the German channel at night nevertheless gave us a feeling of comfort, almost like listening to English. German felt secure and familiar. The room was blessed with but one English sign--in our bathroom: "Please economize water consumption according to your feasibility."

I doubt that the menus in the city have changed much since I flew through in 1989. The Czech selections consistently looked like what we find in Austria: the omnipresent goulash and an infinite variety of pork products, though servings were smaller and with more fat; cabbage--white sour and red sweet; potatoes, mostly fried. A basket of rye bread accompanied each selection. Fortunately, some restaurants offered faux Italian, just like in Austria. The pizza was great. The beer was excellent.

It was a different world--a charm much like Venice, and one of the loveliest cities I have seen: cobblestones, arches, twisting narrow streets, pastel buildings, arcades, stone towers and church spires decorated in Gothic generosity, a wide river, wind, snow flurries, masses of tourists, a wide gray river, the Karls Bridge lined with saints' statues, the architecture a harmony of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern. And the buildings are all from their own time, unlike the "historism" of Vienna with its self-conscious architectural anachronisms (though I love them, too). At night there is another kind of visual grace from spotlights aimed up at the structures and illuminating upper stories and church spires, giving them shadows that deepened their appeal. Across the Moldau from the old city, rising like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, sit the castle structures and St Vitus Cathedral, its spires seeming to reach all the way to heaven, joining Prague to another dimension. At night, the Moldau became the Jordan, with the Promised Land just on the other side of the Karls Bridge. Prague is still well lit.

Monday morning we stuffed ourselves at the hotel's copious breakfast buffet and got a car to the train station. We rolled back to prosperity, where the beer is also good, where the city is also well lit, and where the airplanes have always had plastic overhead bins. We were home by mid-afternoon, both of us thinking the Czech Republic is OK, and Old Prague is a fairyland.

Filler

Back to Austria.......

-- The Saturday evening before Valentine's Linda treated me to the lovely gift of a candle-light dinner cruise on the Danube. The Embassy office that plans social events in the city had arranged to have 10 seats reserved for the cruise; these, we were told, sold out quickly. How pleased we were to see that the seats, all around a single table, were on the glass-enclosed upper deck of the ship and right at the front. It was like being on the flight deck, with a 180-degree view. What a lovely evening it was, gliding along the river, a path of darkness lined with lights from roads, businesses, churches, and homes along the shores, good food, and a beautiful, loving companion.

-- for Earl...7 May 04 - 16 Feb 11...a few lines from Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"

"His dinner is ready. Won't he dine today, either? Or, does he live without dining?"
"Lives without dining," said I, and closed his eyes.
"Eh, he's asleep, ain't he?"
"With kings and counselors," murmured I.