I have, to my misfortune, a gigantic number of notes to cover for yesterday's walk through Prague. The first of them is that Prague's existence is a testament to man's greatness. I will not be able to cover the notes detailing my impressions in a very systematic fashion, but I hope that their scattered presentation will give you a sense of the city's grandeur and almost-thaumaturgical atmosphere.
I started my day out by walking through the Jewish section of the city and discovering that the people in Prague who think about these sorts of things pride themselves on the city's historical amenability to Jews. Perhaps living here was easier for Jews than living in Germany, Russia, Spain, and the various other nations that persecuted them. The city has plaques about historically-important citizen on practically every street block in the city center, which, to my mind, are the height of reverence for a city's history, as statues can be purely ornamental. When I got the city center, I both discovered that there was almost nowhere to sit (surprisingly, as the designers of the city's - Eastern Europe's - central plaza, the very seat of its culture, should have figured out that people like to sit down) and found a free bench, after some searching. I was interested to see a fellow tourist sink onto the bench next to mine and remain sitting there, like me, for some fifteen minutes - sedulous sightseeing can be a very tiring activity!
I started my day out by walking through the Jewish section of the city and discovering that the people in Prague who think about these sorts of things pride themselves on the city's historical amenability to Jews. Perhaps living here was easier for Jews than living in Germany, Russia, Spain, and the various other nations that persecuted them. The city has plaques about historically-important citizen on practically every street block in the city center, which, to my mind, are the height of reverence for a city's history, as statues can be purely ornamental. When I got the city center, I both discovered that there was almost nowhere to sit (surprisingly, as the designers of the city's - Eastern Europe's - central plaza, the very seat of its culture, should have figured out that people like to sit down) and found a free bench, after some searching. I was interested to see a fellow tourist sink onto the bench next to mine and remain sitting there, like me, for some fifteen minutes - sedulous sightseeing can be a very tiring activity!
After grabbing a quick and slightly-overpriced lunch at a restaurant with Russian-speaking waiters located just outside of the city center, I went to a free concert in the cathedral put on by an award-winning youth choir from South Africa. I wondered, before it started, who first thought of using cylindrical columns (typically, with widened rings of stone at their tops and bottoms) that gradually tapered from top to bottom in churches, and I noted that, like the cathedral that I saw in Brno, this one had an open nave - it had no thick supporting columns separating the nave into different sections. The message of the choir performance appeared to be that God is great, and the songs performed failed to represent the whole gamut of human experience, as they were all predicated on blithe optimism about the future. I am opposed to the denial, in art, of pain and misfortune, as acknowledgement of them can make them easier to cope with, and I am virulently opposed to Jesus' apotheosis. While I am sure that he was a wonderful person, and his dying for man's sins, if that whole story is true, was very altruistic, it is ridiculous to treat him as though he was the only great person to have ever lived. We should not celebrate his birth and death, but those of Copernicus, Guttenberg, and the person (or people) who invented penicillin. I have tried my hardest to give Christianity a chance over the course of this trip, but the youth choir broke me. The whole system needs to be thrown out. There are some good sides to Christianity, such as its insistence on our not killing each other, stealing from each other, and so on, and its intimations that life is sacred strike me as sensible and life-affirming, but on the whole Christianity is a screen that blinds us from the realities of the world around us. Endlessly chanting to one another that God is great and everything is great despite our (if we take the average Christian) living in abject poverty, suffering from preventable disease, and having no hope of ever living comfortably is not only an unproductive, but a pernicious activity. Prayers will not help us; antimalarial medicines and clean drinking water will help us. The belief that we will be rewarded for our terrible lives by bliss in Heaven discourages positive efforts to improve life in the present; people who derive a meaning to life through their belief in God should consider that the meaning of life is to improve it for ourselves and for other people, not begging a man in the sky who has so far shown no interest in our lot to suddenly take pity on us. I am, like a great many other people, sick of Christianity at this point, and I cannot see any reasonable defense for belief in it. (Aside: consider replacing God with the living world's sacredness and replacing Jesus with anyone who has made life better for other people (e.g., Nelson Mandela), and you immediately have a more reasonable and positive religion. Replace the idea that one is lower than God and lesser than anyone in the clergy with the idea that each of us can positively impact the world, and you suddenly have a somewhat-attractive religion!)
I left the cathedral fuming about religion and its deleteriousness. As I crossed Charles' Bridge onto the side of Prague that contains its castle, I could not smiling to myself and thinking, "I'm in Prague. I'm in Prague. I'm actually here. This is real." The experience of crossing Charles' Bridge is surreal. One is surrounded by tourists. Beggars prostrate themselves on the edges of the walkway, as though one were a prince. Somebody very skillfully plays generic "Old World Europe" music in the center of the bridge. One looks out across the shimmering waters at little tour boats and the hills flanking Prague. To one's front and back, and higher up on one of the hills, are the most beautiful buildings that one has ever seen. Every single block of Prague's old town is chock full of theaters, schools, museums, and buildings connected with governance (consulates, &c.). One is crossing a bridge that is more ornamented than the entirety of Hungary. Portrait artists recline all along the edges of the walkway, next to the beggars; they know that clients will come to them. One walks between two towers that were part of Prague's city walls in an age in which city walls were important. Swimming in this crowd of people, breathing the same air as they, one is aware of the reality and unreality of being in such a beautiful city and being able to see all of it with one's own two eyes. People dream for years of visiting Prague, and one is actually doing it, walking along the most iconic bridge of the most beautiful city in Europe, in the very center of all of the action.
I followed up by walk across Charles' Bridge by walking, briefly, through the part of the city center across the bridge, after which I walked up to its famous viewing tower. The walk up the hill was grueling for someone already tired from a lot of walking; even without its city limits, Prague is full of excellent walking (not quite hiking - they are too tame to be called that) paths, though the paths are very poorly marked. I walked from the viewing tower to the city's castle, passing by a huge number of churches just behind the castle on the way there, and finished up my day by having an inferior meal to the one that I had had the day before. While the baked pork, bread dumpling, and cabbage meal that I had eaten the day before had been phenomenal (by far the best food that I had eaten since I was in Salzburg, and the best meat that I had had on this entire trip), I did not want to order its equivalent in the restaurant in which I was eating; one has, after all, to try new dishes. I discovered, as I ate, that Czech waiters grow incredibly rude (for waiters) when one does not order any drinks, which is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it is better to simply be in France, where one is invariably treated well no matter what one orders. Secondly, a waiter's treating a client poorly inevitably leads to the client's tipping poorly. Presumably, waiters get uppity when clients do not order drinks because it is expect that clients who order drinks will tip better; however, clients who do not order drinks can tip very well (especially when they are foreigners who are accustomed to tipping 15%) - the expectation that clients will tip poorly is a self-fulfilling prophecy! I left the restaurant yesterday determined to eat at the restaurant at which I had eaten the day before for my next two meals out.
I am starting to run out of time to write, and I have not yet covered half of my notes; I will have to cover the rest of my notes in brief. I have found, as at some places in the past, that the other people staying at this hostel are generally pretty interesting, and I have spent much more time talking to them than I initially expected to do. I have not yet visited any Czech bakeries (discounting the one that I visited on my first day, which was more like a French bakery endued with reasonable prices); they seem to be less visible here than in Western Europe. Prague is the only city that I have seen except for Ljubljana in which people continue to drive normally, as though nothing were amiss, when emergency vehicles with sirens on try to pass them. There is a huge number of phone booths here (the old-fashioned kind), as in much of Eastern Europe; it is reassuring to know that people who do not have cell phones can find an ordinary phone to use, if necessary. Prague has a huge number of reminders of World War II, as opposed to Bratislava's memorials specifically honoring Slovakia's independence. I applaud the Czech Republic, like Germany, for outwardly acknowledging the atrocities committed in the 20th century and trying to understand their causes, rather than pushing them under the rug. I take back what I said about Czech people's not all smoking - everyone in this city smokes with the same fervor as the citizens of the other countries that I have visited. Perhaps all of the non-smokers have moved to Brno, and even there they are a minority. I experienced the usual dilemma yesterday of trying to determine which foods to buy and how much food to buy; besides not finding any decent fruit, I did a good job. Finally, to my delight, I heard some Russians discussing the oddities of the Czech language, such as the fact that "stale" means "fresh" and the root for the word "red" is "worm."
I left the cathedral fuming about religion and its deleteriousness. As I crossed Charles' Bridge onto the side of Prague that contains its castle, I could not smiling to myself and thinking, "I'm in Prague. I'm in Prague. I'm actually here. This is real." The experience of crossing Charles' Bridge is surreal. One is surrounded by tourists. Beggars prostrate themselves on the edges of the walkway, as though one were a prince. Somebody very skillfully plays generic "Old World Europe" music in the center of the bridge. One looks out across the shimmering waters at little tour boats and the hills flanking Prague. To one's front and back, and higher up on one of the hills, are the most beautiful buildings that one has ever seen. Every single block of Prague's old town is chock full of theaters, schools, museums, and buildings connected with governance (consulates, &c.). One is crossing a bridge that is more ornamented than the entirety of Hungary. Portrait artists recline all along the edges of the walkway, next to the beggars; they know that clients will come to them. One walks between two towers that were part of Prague's city walls in an age in which city walls were important. Swimming in this crowd of people, breathing the same air as they, one is aware of the reality and unreality of being in such a beautiful city and being able to see all of it with one's own two eyes. People dream for years of visiting Prague, and one is actually doing it, walking along the most iconic bridge of the most beautiful city in Europe, in the very center of all of the action.
I followed up by walk across Charles' Bridge by walking, briefly, through the part of the city center across the bridge, after which I walked up to its famous viewing tower. The walk up the hill was grueling for someone already tired from a lot of walking; even without its city limits, Prague is full of excellent walking (not quite hiking - they are too tame to be called that) paths, though the paths are very poorly marked. I walked from the viewing tower to the city's castle, passing by a huge number of churches just behind the castle on the way there, and finished up my day by having an inferior meal to the one that I had had the day before. While the baked pork, bread dumpling, and cabbage meal that I had eaten the day before had been phenomenal (by far the best food that I had eaten since I was in Salzburg, and the best meat that I had had on this entire trip), I did not want to order its equivalent in the restaurant in which I was eating; one has, after all, to try new dishes. I discovered, as I ate, that Czech waiters grow incredibly rude (for waiters) when one does not order any drinks, which is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it is better to simply be in France, where one is invariably treated well no matter what one orders. Secondly, a waiter's treating a client poorly inevitably leads to the client's tipping poorly. Presumably, waiters get uppity when clients do not order drinks because it is expect that clients who order drinks will tip better; however, clients who do not order drinks can tip very well (especially when they are foreigners who are accustomed to tipping 15%) - the expectation that clients will tip poorly is a self-fulfilling prophecy! I left the restaurant yesterday determined to eat at the restaurant at which I had eaten the day before for my next two meals out.
I am starting to run out of time to write, and I have not yet covered half of my notes; I will have to cover the rest of my notes in brief. I have found, as at some places in the past, that the other people staying at this hostel are generally pretty interesting, and I have spent much more time talking to them than I initially expected to do. I have not yet visited any Czech bakeries (discounting the one that I visited on my first day, which was more like a French bakery endued with reasonable prices); they seem to be less visible here than in Western Europe. Prague is the only city that I have seen except for Ljubljana in which people continue to drive normally, as though nothing were amiss, when emergency vehicles with sirens on try to pass them. There is a huge number of phone booths here (the old-fashioned kind), as in much of Eastern Europe; it is reassuring to know that people who do not have cell phones can find an ordinary phone to use, if necessary. Prague has a huge number of reminders of World War II, as opposed to Bratislava's memorials specifically honoring Slovakia's independence. I applaud the Czech Republic, like Germany, for outwardly acknowledging the atrocities committed in the 20th century and trying to understand their causes, rather than pushing them under the rug. I take back what I said about Czech people's not all smoking - everyone in this city smokes with the same fervor as the citizens of the other countries that I have visited. Perhaps all of the non-smokers have moved to Brno, and even there they are a minority. I experienced the usual dilemma yesterday of trying to determine which foods to buy and how much food to buy; besides not finding any decent fruit, I did a good job. Finally, to my delight, I heard some Russians discussing the oddities of the Czech language, such as the fact that "stale" means "fresh" and the root for the word "red" is "worm."
My few remaining notes include that I have come across more mosquitoes in the Czech Republic (perhaps, because of the time of year) than I had in all of the other countries that I visited on this trip put together. Mosquitoes remind one how much better life is without them. I realized that I failed to articulate the cause of my anger about having to pay for bathrooms (in theory) here. While its being usury, and the fact that one should not have to pay to effectuate a basic human right, were part of what angered me, I was also angered that one has to pay to provide a service, rather than paying for a service provided. Specifically, I am doing the Czech people a favor by relieving myself discreetly rather than, say, urinating on the streets; I should be encouraged to do this, not discouraged by the requirement that I pay a fee in order to do it. My final note of interest is that Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet reminds one how hard it is to write good satire. Satire is defined in part by its use of often one-dimensional characters; it plays no caricatures of people to show some side of people or society in a negative light. Wile this can be used to great comic effect and can be a good tool for one's preaching one's worldview, it can also fall flat, as one quickly loses interest in characters who do not change or learn anything about the world, which is just the type of character that abounds in satire. It seems to me that satire has to be softened by aspects of realism (which is at least partially characterized by the use of so-called "full" characters who change over the course of a story or book) or to be jam-packed with provocative ideas, as it is in the case of Huxley, Aldington, and Orwell, in order to work. Bouvard and Pecuchet falls flat because its mockery of the story's two main characters grows old after about eighty pages: one understands that they are both buffoons and that they represent ways of being for which Flaubert does not care.
Prague is a city of boundless interest: the more that one has seen of it, the more there is left to see, in a sense, for exploration of its main sights can lead to exploration of lesser-known sights that one would not have noticed and to further appreciation of its history. I am not going to spend any more time exploring it, as I feel that two days is enough to see its essential sights and have heard that the Communism museum is underwhelming, but I expect that one could spend six months here and continue to appreciate the city in different ways each week (if not each day; one would need to work here and to spend weekends exploring it). I am set to take a bus to and from Cesky Krumlov tomorrow and cannot afford to miss it, as I booked a ticket, by necessity, in advance, and have to get up earlier than usual to catch it. My last two days here (I am writing this apocryphally, having not found time to do so yesterday.) should be relaxed. I regret having scheduled so much time for the Czech Republic and, more broadly, Eastern Europe, but what would life be without a few regrets? At least I know not to come back here and know a little more about my own preferences at this point; I should manage, over the next few years, to see everything that I would have seen had this part of my trip through Europe been shorter.
This is a shot of the crowd on Charles' Bridge.
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