I do not have too much to say today, and I am in a noisy room at the moment, so I will keep this post short. I got to the bus station well ahead of time today with the help of a local, who told me which kind of ticket to buy for the subway. I immediately felt more comfortable than I had on any other travel day over the past couple of weeks. I had a reserved seat on the bus, which was air-conditioned and full up with tourists. Each of the tour bus' four stops was clearly announced; we were given complimentary hot drinks and headphones for our individual TVs; and our luggage was taken care of for us. I felt like I was on a real trip, as though I were on an airplane, and I had enough entertainment to last me for hours! I would have liked to stare out of the window for several hours, watch a movie for a couple of hours, and sleep for a few hours; it seemed a pity to me that the bus ride would only last for three hours. I noticed little on the way to Cesky Krumlov, except that the Czech Republic has the same kind of roadside stalls as Russia does. People here try to sell fruit, tires, woodcuts, flowers, and anything else that they can sell at the side of the road, something that one rarely sees, as far as I know, in Canada.
While Cesky Krumlov was full of happy tourists, it disappointed me. It seemed like a city in which the only things to do were to get drunk and get gout: almost every building was either a restaurant, a guesthouse (i.e., a fancy hotel), or a souvenir shop. With a population of roughly 15,000 people, the city is tiny, and one can see all of it over the course of an hour without much difficulty; it lacks the variety and depth of larger cities and has, hopefully, definitively proven to me that small towns are not worth visiting. If Cesky Krumlov were wiped off of the map, nobody would care or even notice; it has contributed nothing whatsoever to world culture and has nothing to teach us. I have been frustrated by my decision to spend so much time in Eastern Europe, though I would have been almost sure to make a similar trip to this one down the road if I had not done so now. To sum up my frustrations, I now consider it insane to visit Eastern Europe before having seen Rome, Paris, London, and other centers of culture. One day in Rome would fill me with more impressions than a lifetime in the Czech Republic if one ignores Prague, its only worthwhile city. The problem is that I do not want to visit only the capitals or most famous cities of the countries that I see, as I tend to assume that there is more to see in them than their capitals. In order to explore a country thoroughly, one has to spend some time in it, which precludes one's jumping from country to country, or at least makes it very inconvenient. Right now, I feel like I am digging in an empty well in searching for culture in the Czech Republic, but I am also learning more about my preferences and about travel in general. My chief mistake was probably to visit this part of the world before having seen the better parts of Europe; one has to visit the places at the top of one's list before passing on to places that are lower on the list, naturally.
That being said, my day was not actually bad; I merely regret being here instead of elsewhere, like many people who make the proverbial assumption about grass' greenness. I have noticed that Czech people say hello and goodbye to people when they, respectively, enter and exit the cabins of trains. The trains in and around Prague are air-conditioned, quiet, and clean, and one can easily make one's way around with English here; Prague is completely different from the rest of the Czech Republic. I saw my first Italian tourists of this trip just the other day; to my disappointment, they did not burst into tears, start singing, or describe cathedrals in the air with their hands, though they did talk a little as though they were in a soap opera. (I consider racial stereotypes funny. I hope that this does not read seriously.) Also, although I have been loath to mention it, as I first thought that I was misinterpreting the signs at gas stations here, I have finally accepted that gas prices in all of Europe are astronomical. People in Arkansas pay something like $3.80/gallon and were shocked when I told them that one paid $6.00/gallon in Vancouver; here, gas costs something like 38 crowns (something like two dollars) per liter, while in Germany it was around 1.70 Euros (if my memory holds) per liter. I could not believe, at first, that such numbers were real, but I have seen so many of them that I cannot possibly be mistaking them for something else. I do not know what else to say except that the roads are full of cars. People here somehow find a way to pay for gas.
I do not appear to have any other notes except that I found people's openly taking pictures of the choir boys in the performance the other day repulsive. They held their cameras high in the air, right in the middle of songs, as though they were photographing animals at the zoo, and not human beings, who would surely have preferred that the audience pay attention to their performance. My one other note is that I watched part of a movie today about the outbreak of an incurable disease that kills a bunch of people, causes panic, and so on. Part of the movie's premise was that international travel contributes to the rapid propagation of disease these days, meaning that an especially-tough strain could wipe us out. In fact, the U.S., to name the case most familiar with me, has already survived outbreaks of extremely-virulent diseases, the Spanish Flu and polio, in 1918-1919 and the mid-1950s. The idea that a single disease could kill the majority of people on this planet is outrageous for various reasons. Firstly, our bodies themselves are pretty good at developing antibodies for viruses; it is not in viruses' best interests, to anthropomorphize, to kill entire populations, as they need to spread to living hosts; different people have different starting levels of immunity to unknown diseases; people do not automatically get sick from contact with diseases persons; and so on, and so forth. I do not think that we are at risk of dying from the type of massive epidemic that can wipe out whole populations of, say, wheat or corn, which are genetically-modified to have the same levels of resistance to the same diseases. Finally, on the way to Cesky Krumlov I saw whole fields, thousands of square meters in area, of light-purple flowers that looked like poppies with their hair dyed, so to speak. I trust that the next few days will be interesting enough for me to not complain to excess and that my new knowledge about my preferences will guide the choices that I make in planning future trips. Goodbye!
Look! A tourist town!
While Cesky Krumlov was full of happy tourists, it disappointed me. It seemed like a city in which the only things to do were to get drunk and get gout: almost every building was either a restaurant, a guesthouse (i.e., a fancy hotel), or a souvenir shop. With a population of roughly 15,000 people, the city is tiny, and one can see all of it over the course of an hour without much difficulty; it lacks the variety and depth of larger cities and has, hopefully, definitively proven to me that small towns are not worth visiting. If Cesky Krumlov were wiped off of the map, nobody would care or even notice; it has contributed nothing whatsoever to world culture and has nothing to teach us. I have been frustrated by my decision to spend so much time in Eastern Europe, though I would have been almost sure to make a similar trip to this one down the road if I had not done so now. To sum up my frustrations, I now consider it insane to visit Eastern Europe before having seen Rome, Paris, London, and other centers of culture. One day in Rome would fill me with more impressions than a lifetime in the Czech Republic if one ignores Prague, its only worthwhile city. The problem is that I do not want to visit only the capitals or most famous cities of the countries that I see, as I tend to assume that there is more to see in them than their capitals. In order to explore a country thoroughly, one has to spend some time in it, which precludes one's jumping from country to country, or at least makes it very inconvenient. Right now, I feel like I am digging in an empty well in searching for culture in the Czech Republic, but I am also learning more about my preferences and about travel in general. My chief mistake was probably to visit this part of the world before having seen the better parts of Europe; one has to visit the places at the top of one's list before passing on to places that are lower on the list, naturally.
That being said, my day was not actually bad; I merely regret being here instead of elsewhere, like many people who make the proverbial assumption about grass' greenness. I have noticed that Czech people say hello and goodbye to people when they, respectively, enter and exit the cabins of trains. The trains in and around Prague are air-conditioned, quiet, and clean, and one can easily make one's way around with English here; Prague is completely different from the rest of the Czech Republic. I saw my first Italian tourists of this trip just the other day; to my disappointment, they did not burst into tears, start singing, or describe cathedrals in the air with their hands, though they did talk a little as though they were in a soap opera. (I consider racial stereotypes funny. I hope that this does not read seriously.) Also, although I have been loath to mention it, as I first thought that I was misinterpreting the signs at gas stations here, I have finally accepted that gas prices in all of Europe are astronomical. People in Arkansas pay something like $3.80/gallon and were shocked when I told them that one paid $6.00/gallon in Vancouver; here, gas costs something like 38 crowns (something like two dollars) per liter, while in Germany it was around 1.70 Euros (if my memory holds) per liter. I could not believe, at first, that such numbers were real, but I have seen so many of them that I cannot possibly be mistaking them for something else. I do not know what else to say except that the roads are full of cars. People here somehow find a way to pay for gas.
I do not appear to have any other notes except that I found people's openly taking pictures of the choir boys in the performance the other day repulsive. They held their cameras high in the air, right in the middle of songs, as though they were photographing animals at the zoo, and not human beings, who would surely have preferred that the audience pay attention to their performance. My one other note is that I watched part of a movie today about the outbreak of an incurable disease that kills a bunch of people, causes panic, and so on. Part of the movie's premise was that international travel contributes to the rapid propagation of disease these days, meaning that an especially-tough strain could wipe us out. In fact, the U.S., to name the case most familiar with me, has already survived outbreaks of extremely-virulent diseases, the Spanish Flu and polio, in 1918-1919 and the mid-1950s. The idea that a single disease could kill the majority of people on this planet is outrageous for various reasons. Firstly, our bodies themselves are pretty good at developing antibodies for viruses; it is not in viruses' best interests, to anthropomorphize, to kill entire populations, as they need to spread to living hosts; different people have different starting levels of immunity to unknown diseases; people do not automatically get sick from contact with diseases persons; and so on, and so forth. I do not think that we are at risk of dying from the type of massive epidemic that can wipe out whole populations of, say, wheat or corn, which are genetically-modified to have the same levels of resistance to the same diseases. Finally, on the way to Cesky Krumlov I saw whole fields, thousands of square meters in area, of light-purple flowers that looked like poppies with their hair dyed, so to speak. I trust that the next few days will be interesting enough for me to not complain to excess and that my new knowledge about my preferences will guide the choices that I make in planning future trips. Goodbye!
Look! A tourist town!
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