Day 45 - Dresden

I will have to write this email as quickly as I can, as I have already used up a little over half of my allotted internet access for the day. At this hostel, the worst in which I have stayed since I was in Nuremberg, one gets one solid three-hour block of internet use per day, after which one has to pay. It is kind of funny to complain about this - I feel a little like a 12-year-old boy complaining that he only has fifty text messages per day - but I find limits on internet use discommodious and restrictive. That being said, I will try to write this before my time runs out. Due to technical difficulties, I will not be able to post this email on my blog, but such is life: there is no beating computers.

I escaped from the Czech Republic today. The train ride out of the country was better than any that I had had over the past two weeks for three chief reasons: it was not in a Czech train, it was taking me away from the Czech Republic, and it led me past more interesting landscapes than I had seen in ages. At first, we passed villages with impressive churches surrounded, naturally, by buildings with caved-in roofs and half-collapsed walls. These gave way to villages that were far too clean, orderly, and well-maintained to have anything to do with the Czech Republic, and those villages, in turn, gave way to spectacular rock formations, wooded hills, and even a couple of castles. As we approached Dresden, the conductor said a whole bunch of stuff in German and added, in English, that we would be arriving in Dresden in a few minutes (by which he meant something like twenty-five minutes). The train itself, despite being air-conditioned, was still afflicted by its passage through the Czech Republic. It left Prague ten minutes late and grew about five minutes later with every stop: at every new city in the Czech Republic, a new announcement was made, in which the conductor apologized for the train's lateness and added five or so more minutes to it until we left the Czech Republic. At that point, the announcements stopped, and one can only presume that the train kept closer to its schedule.

I was ineffably relieved as soon as I stepped off the train in Dresden. While my Google map's directions were, as usual, wildly incorrect about the way from the train station to my hostel, I had reentered civilization. I was once again in a city with trees, parks, and ornate plazas. There were real street signs, like in North America; the streets were not littered with garbage and cigarette butts; buildings were not covered in graffiti or missing siding; some buildings looked like they had been built within the last two hundred years; and the air, while thick with cigarette smoke and exhaust from cars, was so much cleaner than in the Czech Republic that one wanted to breathe it in with one's entire body in giant gulps. People did not scowl at me when I passed them; people working in the service industry were happy to chat with me; and one man, a little later in the evening, asked me if I needed help and explained which monuments in the city center would still be open for viewing when he saw me looking confused and staring at my map. If Eastern Germany is poorer than Western Germany, it is still a hundred times more affluent and pleasant than the Czech Republic, and my return to it was like a return to life.

My first order of business was, naturally, to find my hostel. I knew where it was thanks to a map in the train station - Dresden has maps everywhere, another difference between it and Prague. There is a little city map every hundred or two hundred meters in Dresden's city center, while one would be lucky to find one or two of them in the whole of Prague. As I walked towards my hostel, I marveled at the liveliness of the people around me and the level of upkeep of the buildings to my left and right. Dresden has a great many very new buildings, from banks to shopping malls, and even has bookstores, unlike Prague. I ducked into the first bakery that I saw after passing far enough away from the train station to get low-quality food for too much money, and I was surprised at the cheapness of everything there. The bakery reminded me both how tasty German pastries are and how I do not actually want to have them every day, as one eventually gets tired of them, like anything else; one comes to crave healthier food, as odd as that might sound. When I found the cross street leading up to my hostel, I saw the word "hostel" written in spray paint on the side of a nearby, midget-like building that looked like a rundown schoolroom. In another minute or two, I was at the foot of my hostel in Dresden.

I suppose that I should not spend too much time describing the hostel in which I am staying: while it colors my impressions of Dresden and offsets my experience a little, it does not reflect any intrinsic features of Dresden, as far as I know. The hostel owner could not tell me anything useful about the city; she gave me the worst city map that I have seen on this entire trip; she led me to a stuffy room with lockers that require one to bring one's own lock (which I have done, by dint of having bought one perforce at a similar hostel that I visited, perhaps a month ago); she told me that breakfast, if I wanted it, would cost 5 Euros; and so on. This is not a hostel in which people interact with one another. It has limited internet access. It has a very uncomfortable common room. While it is a pity to have to spend three days here, things could be a lot worse: one has sometimes to remind oneself that other people get up at 6:00 or 7:00 AM each day to work nine-to-five jobs, while I am in Europe. Many such people would happily trade places with me and stay in a lousy hostel for three days in order to escape their jobs.

When I left my hostel to explore the city (that is, after I bought a goodly amount of groceries for only 10 Euros - enough for three breakfasts and lunches), I had one of my best experiences of the entire trip. Dresden is a city of stupefying beauty, a city through which one walks with mouth agape - it is a city of royalty. One does not know where to begin with the rebuilt city center. In fact, since I broke off writing this email yesterday, I will begin with the comment that I do not really want to finish it; that is, I do not want to put a lot of work into making it look nicer. If I had managed to present my observations in a logical order, rather than slapping them together like bits of dough that will not stick, then you would have a coherent picture of what I experienced; alas, I was unfocussed when I wrote yesterday's post, and restoring a scrambled email to order will take more effort than I am willing to expend on it.

That being said, I left myself some notes that I can follow. I was excited to have found a giant bookstore (and a smaller one) yesterday, but I found out today that the books in it are even more expensive than the ones in Prague. I cannot bring myself to buy "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories" for 8.99 Euros. I saw a lesbian couple yesterday, the first that I had seen in Europe. I was supposed to note Dresden's pride in having fought against communism and its student life, but I mentioned those in my email about Bautzen. Food here is very cheap in both bakeries and grocery stores, but restaurants are extraordinary-expensive and primarily feature foreign food. I was supposed to mention my plans for the next few days, but I do not want to bother that. I enjoyed the breeze coming off of the Elba; I should have mentioned that in my description of the city's air quality. People seem alive. That ties in with the bit about lesbians and students: this appears to be a live-and-let-live city, in addition to being one in which new ideas are generated and people campaign for fairness and improved human rights. I wanted to mention another health issue that came up, which consisted of spastic pains in my upper torso and an inflamed lymph node in my left armpit (That reads risibly.), but it seems to have gone away. People here are happy to engage one in conversation and even, occasionally, smile, unlike anywhere in the Czech Republic. I was going to write about my computer's no longer being able to copy and paste, which feels like saying that one has forgotten how to zip up one's pants, but the problem magically resolved itself, as computer problems often do, when I restarted my computer. I am not a big fan of the computer that I bought, despite its being light and its having been cheap, and I wish that I had been willing to shell out the money for a MacBook Air in the first place, as it would have cost a little less than the iPad plus this Microsoft laptop and would have delivered a better product.

My final two points of note are these: Dresden is a princely city, and ancient Greek literature is interesting. Dresden was clearly a city of royalty, as its most important architectural monuments lay sprawled across one side of the Elbe like lounging giants. It is hard to describe just how beautiful the city center is - one has to see it in person, to experience it, to grasp its beauty. It is the type of beauty that penetrates one's being and leaves one awe-struck: it seems too potent to exist in real life. I will not try to describe it, as I lack the poetic vigor, or imagination, or something else, to do it.
Greek literature, on the other hand, I will describe at length - at least, insofar as my impatience allows. I am not so much in a rush to finish this post (for want of internet time, out of a desire to go immediately to bed, &c.) as either tired of writing or uninterested in engaging in serious literary criticism. I am lucky that Euripides turned out to be a first-rate writer. That is, he should have done so, given the 2,500-year agreement on his greatness, but he might not have, as the style of Greek tragedies may have been anathema to me, or he could have turned out merely to not suit my taste, as the Victorian novelists have done. A few points worth noting about Greek literature are that characters in it often plunge headlong into abysses of despair or suffer other such surges of (usually negative) emotion; Euripides does a good job of making readers relate to his plays' main characters, sympathize with them, and wish desperately to know what happens to them next; the Greeks had ideas about purity that echo (not historically, but from the point of view of someone who has grown familiar with Christianity before encountering Greek literature) those of many Christians; the Greeks were exceedingly fatalistic, believing themselves helpless to oppose the fickle will of the gods, though they also believed that happy endings, so to speak, were possible; and the struggles that the protagonists of Greek tragedies undergo appear to closely mirror those that we experience today. Most interestingly from a sociological point of view, reading "Ion" revealed to me that the ancient Greeks were racist! Those who were born in Athens looked down on those born outside of it, like Muscovites, and would not even always refer to them as Greek. Women were treated like property in ancient Greece, slave labor was used everywhere, and society was rigidly stratified. It is curious that we look on ancient Greece as an ethereal society of beauty, rightness, and truth, when it was really just a society, like any other. The Greeks' scientific, philosophical, and architectural (and, perhaps, political - I would not know) advancements were colossal, but their society also had its blemishes (though it sounds like the nations surrounding it were not any more opposed to war than the Greeks themselves). Ancient Greece was not all peaches and cream!

The clouds in the sky are so thin that their salmon-pink barely stands out against the pale, almost-green twilight sky. Sparrows are coursing through the air. The patch of sky that I can see is unchanging, as though the whole sky were settling into sleep. Since this has nothing to do with what I saw yesterday, I had better cut myself off here. Dresden makes Prague look like a joke until one remembers that the latter had charms of its own.

Edit: the sky was not unchanging. The pink of the clouds has faded, so that they are no longer visible at all, and the sky is now an almost-unbroken, depthless pool of blue, with only a thin bar of ochre at the skyline, rising from the tops of trees. Watching the sunset unfold, in auspicious circumstances, must be one of the most enjoyable experiences on earth. I am lucky to have glanced through the open door leading onto the terrace at the right moment and have seen the dying sunset's evolution. It is neat that one chance glance can give one so much pleasure.

This is a view of the lake in the palace gardens.

 

Day 44 - Plzen

I have learned something! Based on past experiments in trying to see too many places at once and my frustration at planning so many trips to small towns, I have cut the Harz mountains out of my trip and added one more day to my stay in Berlin, which is a gigantic city that should have as many cultural riches as Vienna; a day-and-a-half would have been too little time to see it all. It is strange to have finished so much of this trip that I only have three more cities in which to stay before I fly to Amsterdam: I planned this trip so far in advance of embarking on it that I am surprised every time I consider that the printed names of cities on my itinerary correspond to real, physical cities through which one can walk. My overriding feeling, at this point in my trip, is a desire to return to Europe a few more times to see more of it, but you have heard enough of that already, and it has nothing to do with my visit to Plzen today.

My only real observation on the way from Prague to Plzen was that Czech people cannot survive at temperatures lower than 30 degrees Celcius. Although the compartments of the train in which I was riding had windows that opened, the Czechs elected to leave them closed, and, when I opened them with the consent of other people in the cabin, they would close them after a few minutes. I spent the train ride to Plzen hoping that I was sweating enough to smell foul and, as such, get back at the other people in the compartment.

Plzen is a provincial town, of which I was reminded as soon as I got a city map. It was, however, a city not without charm. It has the second-largest synagogue in Europe, a few nice churches, a decent amount of statuary and plaques for a small town, including one statue commemorating the Americans' having liberated it at the end of World War II, and a well-preserved town hall. I forgot to mention, the other day, that the cathedral at Kutna Hora had the nicest stained glass windows that I had seen since visiting Metz. It is clear that people in the Czech Republic have had vastly-different ideas about religious architecture in different epochs, as some churches lack stained glass entirely; some have strictly-ornamental stained glass windows; some have allegorical stained glass windows; they have different types of arches, naves, and ceilings; and their interiors have wildly-differing levels of statuary and other ornamentation. The cathedral that I saw today was supported (on the inside) by Ionic columns, which I had not seen more than once or twice (Wurzburg jumps to mind; some of its chief buildings may have been developed by foreign architects, as they do not look distinctly German) in Germany.

I do not have too much else to say about my day except that I slept on the way back to Prague and could not find a bookstore with reasonably-priced books in any part of the city reachable by foot; I hereby label Prague a city of anti-intellectuals who wish to halt the spread of knowledge. Prague was especially redolent this evening: on its exciting days, the city smells like a dumpster. Cigarettes litter the ground like cherry blossoms in the spring; the people working at the train station are practically useless; there was a total of two benches in the entire Plzen train station, including the platforms themselves; even Czech people in the Plzen train station had to ask one another which trains were going where, as there was no information on the platforms themselves; the people working at the Plzen tourist office were cadaverous and rude; graffiti covered every available square inch of concrete in Plzen; and the people of Plzen, as soon as I stepped outside of the main tourist area, looked at me with a hard, aggressive glance, as though I were impinging on their territory. I have nothing to regret about leaving the Czech Republic except that I came here in the first place - that and dogs' being allowed in train stations, which I like because I am fond of dogs. For every woman who drives one to the train station and railroad personnel who help one try to work out an optimal schedule of travel to and from Kutna Hora (a woman was worried the other day that I would not have time to see all of the sights based on the arrival and departure times that I had mentioned), there is a person like the woman who gave me information about trains to Dresden and could not tell me anything about their price, explaining that I had to visit a different part of the train station to inquire about prices (as opposed to times), or the woman working next to her, who answered, to a young man from England who asked her where he could fill up his water bottle, that she only gave information about train times. When I bumped into the young man as I was leaving the ticket office and explained that water fountains do not exist in Czech railway stations and that people here are often rude, he summed up the experience of interacting with the Czech better than I ever could: "Why did she have to be like that? It's so unnecessary!" The rudeness of most people here does seem, to Westerners, entirely unnecessary, and the only explanation for it is that life in developing nations sucks for residents and tourists alike.

Tomorrow, I will say the last Czech words of my life when I ask someone at the railway office for a one-way ticket to Dresden. If I could plan this trip over again, I would have spent one-fifth as much time in Eastern Europe as I did, twice as much time in France, and infinitely more time in Belgium: travelling in first-world countries with well-developed tourist industries is a better option than travelling through Eastern Europe; if I want to look at poor people, I can drive to Surrey for the price of gas. My advice to anyone considering travelling in this area is to spend two days in Prague, one day in Budapest, and zero days anywhere else in this neighborhood. Dresden is a good entry (or exit) point for Prague, and Vienna serves that role for Budapest. Hopefully, the trips that I take in future years will involve fewer wasted days in places that I should never have visited in the first place. I admit that I have had some pleasant days here and that I saw some somewhat interesting things, and I admit that a quiet town like Plzen is not that much less culturally-significant than smallish German cities like Mainz and Wiesbaden, but one does not regret having seen small German towns, for some reason, while spending a single unnecessary day in Eastern Europe feels like a waste. I admit that I plan to visit Serbia for two days and Bulgaria for three days next year, but I will only visit cities in those countries that are of obvious cultural importance. I forgot to mention that trains in this part of the world are always late. While that does not necessarily ruin one's day, it is annoying, like a bee sting, as one should not have to put up with tardy trains and does not have to do so in superior countries. The Czech Republic might be worth visiting in seventy or eighty years, when it has finally found its way into the twenty-first century, but until then, avoid it like the plague, the survival of which people in the Czech Republic celebrate with various statues, the country's lone contribution to world culture.

 

Oops! I forgot to generate another cultural stereotypes. Prague appears to be very popular with young women from England. A whole troupe of them visited this hostel the other day and immediately imposed their own order on it. Young England women, assuming that all of them are similar to the few whom I saw the other day, which is assuredly the case, dress provocatively, use the word "literally" as an intensifier, take hours to prepare to "go out" (i.e., go to bars and nightclubs), and appear to spend most of their time drinking, singing, taking pictures of themselves, and discussing how ugly their acquaintances back in England look in their photos. I have met a couple of people from Brazil who have reinforced my negative impression of Latin Americans and a Latin American man who directly contradicts it, so I will ignore him (as my impressions of people from other countries do not admit of contradictions). A few young people from the States just arrived who look so confused as to make me glad that I did not travel in my early 20s, as I would have had no idea what to do with myself. I suppose that I have run out of things to say for now!

 

This synagogue is massive.

 

An awkward announcement

Dear readers,

I was unable to make a post yesterday and will be unable to do so today because of technical difficulties. In the oddest turn of events that I have experienced with a computer, my "copy and paste" function is broken. When I copy sections of text, my computer does not acknowledge them, instead pasting things that I copied hours ago. I do not know how to fix this. If I manage to fix it, I will be able to keep making new posts; otherwise, this blog will die for the time being. I hate computers and cannot believe that this one has stopped copying and pasting. Who would have imagined that one of a computer's most basic functions could break down?

Day 43 - Kutna Hora

I have mercifully little to say today, as I had a late start to my day, visited a small city, and even found time to watch a movie before writing this email. I was awoken shortly before 6:00 AM today when some of my roommates, drunk, returned from a night out, and, since I had slept for most of the night already, I had a hard time getting back to sleep and was sluggish all morning. I started my day by looking for a decent bookshop, as I am quickly running out of reading material. Alas, Prague is not the right city in which to be to find cheap books: none of the bookstores that I visited offered books in English for less than five dollars, and all of the books that were cheaper than about twelve dollars were terrible. I searched three bookstores before giving up and going to Kutna Hora without having made any purchases. If I were in Berlin, I would almost surely be able to find a cheap bookstore with a good English-language selection, but alas, it will almost be too late to matter by the time at which I visit Berlin. Such are the breaks, as they say.

I left for Kutna Hora at lunchtime today on a stuffy, overheated train with no display for upcoming stops and breaks that screeched intolerably every time the train stopped. I got off of the train in Kutna Hora flanked by tourists, all of us looking for the historic city center. Momentarily united, like a slime mold, we oozed along the pavement in search of cathedrals. I branched off from the main group with a couple of other individuals when I saw a nearby church, then I visited a second church and the city's famous ossuary. I bought a city map for one crown (roughly five cents; it looked better than the free map) from someone who was convinced that I could not possibly make it to the city center by foot (despite my having just come from that direction), whereafter I saw the old town's main sights, hopped on the train back to Prague, and fell asleep.

 

I walked through Prague's city center on the way from the train station to a nearby restaurant and discovered that it is incredibly alive in the evenings. Vendors fry traditional Czech snack food in little stalls, the smells of their different dishes intermixing in the air; street artists of every sort draw crowds of tourists; people everywhere play music; the odious, nameless odors of Prague's streets flood one's nostrils; hobos rummage in garbage cans; tourists take photos and bump into one another; and the energy of a thousand different activities pervades the central square. Some British tourists who, seeing that I had a map, asked me for directions agreed with me that it was a pity to see such cultural riches juxtaposed with evident poverty. They commented that the country's having been ravaged by Communist Russia for years must have left it indigent; it is possible that, given thirty or forty years, it will start catching up to its neighbors to the west, as life in the Czech Republic appears to be gradually improving. While people here are not outwardly unhappy, there is a huge amount of homelessness, the streets are filthy, and at least half of the city's buildings appear to be, if not on the verge of collapse, at least more decrepit than would be allowable in Western Europe. People here probably were outwardly unhappy thirty years ago; it seems likely that some progress, at least, has been made.

I do not have too many cultural notes today, though I have noted people's liking my efforts to use Czech. While people here do not like being spoken to in Russian (on which I have given up with young people, as they usually speak English), they lighten up considerably when I say things like "please," "thank you," and "goodbye" in their native language; a little effort can go a long way here. My main interest in the ossuary at Kutna Hora was that, unlike the ossuary at Brno, which appeared to have been made through strictly practical considerations, that at Kutna Hora appeared to have been made to mock death. Words written in human bones stuck to the walls; mountains of bones topped by skulls sat in recesses in the wall (alcoves?); a chandelier made of bones had human skulls as candleholders; and people's bones were often arranged as though to make them look, in some contradictory way, as though they were still living. The purpose of this type of display, as far as I can tell, was to make light of death and show that it cannot defeat us, which is a much different attitude than that adopted in the West. It is interesting that Western cultures are the only ones around that treat death with utter horror; as far as I know, other cultures accept death as a part of life.

 

My final point of the day is that I have probably been overly-critical of Czech Republic; in short, by reviling the Czech Republic for its lack of infrastructure and its cultural insignificance, I have, in a sense, been complaining that my lemon meringue pie tastes like lemon. I cannot view this part of my trip as a total waste of time, as it has taught me not to root for cultural treasures in areas in which no one else in the world has found them - if they are out there, they are likely to be found - and not to visit small towns, Eastern Europe, or out-of-the-way places in general. The bike trip, in turn, taught me never to bike while on vacation, and especially not to do so as a means of long-distance transport. Perhaps the only way to learn about other places is to make mistakes along the way; perhaps travelling itself is an art at which one can grow more adept. I hope that my lessons from this trip carry over to future trips and, as such, save me future grief by forewarning me against future missteps. I need only to trust that the nothing will change in the world over the next few years that would prevent my continuing to take these trips.

I have, at this point, run out of things to say. I am going to visit Pilzen tomorrow, go to my favorite restaurant one more time, and, if time permits, watch another movie. Watching movies is one of my favorite leisure activities and brings me some of the same enjoyment as reading books; having not yet discussed movies at all in this blog, however, I do not want to jump into a discussion of them now. Based on the past few days, the fact that so much of my trip is already behind me, and my aversion to changing hostel bookings at the last minute, I expect that I may have to wait until I reach Leiden to catch up on sleep. I am looking forward to reentering Germany and hope that my travels through Eastern Europe have brought me some sort of latent new knowledge that a superior trip through Western Europe could not have brought me. My advice to all of you is to avoid Eastern Europe like the plague until you have seen more interesting parts of the world and are dying to see something new, as you will otherwise smolder with regret over having passed over gems in favor of dross. (Again, I am sure that I am judging the Czech Republic too harshly, and I should not be so quick to talk given that I enjoyed Slovakia and Prague. One disadvantage to my writing these emails without forethought is that you get to see my rawest, most biased, and most emotionally-tainted ideas. Hopefully, I will see things more objectively with time, as my ideas will mature. Goodbye!)

 

This is the approach to Kutna Hora's famous cathedral.

 

Day 42 - Cesky Krumlov

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!

 

Day 41 - Karlstejn

I am going to send you yesterday's email after today, anachronistically, as I have tons of notes for yesterday's email, while my impressions from today are fresher in my mind (though not at fresh as they were a few hours ago). I started my day out, predictably, by missing the train to Karlstejn. I slept through my alarm, fell into conversation with someone over breakfast, and got to the train station just as the train was leaving; having gotten more comfortable with train travel, and having therefore ceased to worry about not getting where I am going if I miss a connection or two, I have grown more lax about catching trains and often miss them these days. I walked to a part of Prague that I had not yet seen and was reminded that any given hundred square meters of this city are worth more than the whole rest of Eastern Europe combined. I regret, in fact, having wasted so much time in the rest of Eastern Europe, as I could have used that time doing something worthwhile, like seeing Belgium or Northern France, but I could not have known that without having seen it; one cannot predict, with perfect accuracy, which of one's travel destinations will be the most interesting.

 

My arrival in Karlstejn was unspectacular. The views on the way there were fine, and the walk leading up to the castle was quite pleasant. Parts of the walkway from the train station to the castle are, naturally, lined with all manner of cafes, restaurants, and souvenir shops, and the entire walkway has decent signage. When I got to the castle (which is not called Karlstejn; that is the near of the town nearest to it), I discovered that I would have to wait for an hour and a half in order to tour it, as all of the tours until 2:00 PM were sold out. I gave up on the castle and decided to start walking immediately towards Svaty Jan Pod Skalou, the monastery at the foot of a cliff, as I had already seen the exterior of the castle, and the walk to the monastery was at least half of the point of the trip; one of the few intelligent things that I did on my 2010 trip to Europe was to visit the castle at Montreux, which gave me a good idea of what castles in general were like in the Middle Ages. Seeing one more of the dozens of castles in this part of the world would not have significantly enlightened me.

The hike from the castle at Karlstejn to Svaty Jan Pod Skalou was both frustrating and picturesque. While the incredibly-dense forests of deciduous trees, through which one could not see any sky at all, were something that I had not seen before, the path to the monastery was marked only in the most exiguous fashion, and it included passing over fallen logs (which are a universal symbol of a trail's being closed or no longer in use. The Czechs, having not yet discovered symbols, do not know this.) multiple times. There was enough human activity in the area, although one could walk for thirty minutes without seeing anyone, that there was little risk of my being eaten by a bear, though I would recommend that people look up such risks before going on hiking trips; my only real note from the hike is that, while it is possible to hike in sandals, it is easier in hiking boots.

My arrival at Svaty Jan Pod Skalou was disappointing. Firstly, it was unmarked, much like parts of the trail itself; secondly, it was an ugly monastery and was not actually built into the side of the cliff, but merely stationed next to it. The cave attached to the monastery was not, as I had been expecting, filled with separate rooms of worship full of glittering objects and lit by candles, but was, rather, one large room with a few rough divisions, in which were housed various dusty, old rocks. The rocks of which I speak were said to have significance because of having been connected with the life of Svaty Jan (Saint John): they included a boulder on which he was said to have bled when he was beaten up by a pastor, a boulder that presumably included the imprint of his hand, a boulder on which he had sat down to meditate, and so on. While the practice of fetishizing objects that may, potentially, have been connected with the life of someone hundreds of years ago in some obscure way was ridiculous, but even more ridiculous, to me, was the idea of worshipping someone who shut himself up from society in a cave to meditate. It seems to me that all societal progress is achieved collectively, as evidenced by artists', architects', scholars', engineers', and statesmen's having lived predominately in cultural centers before the advent of convenient worldwide communication; societal advancement requires that we have intercourse with one another (consider the propagation of the Arabic system of numerals, the exchange of ideas and customs via trade along spice routes, &c.). Rather than worshipping a hermit, whose soul achievement was to consider himself (or be considered - whichever) more holy than the rest of us, and carefully conserving the stones on which he sat, we should worship Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi and disseminate their ideas about fraternity, equality, non-violence, and open political discourse. Hermits are not going to lead us to a brighter future and do not accomplish much of anything that ordinary people cannot accomplish if they decide to break off from society.

The walk to Beroun, the town in which I ended my hike, was a bit of a letdown compared to the walk to the monastery, which took me passed brooks and little waterfalls, as, after an initial climb, it principally took me through flat and uninteresting terrain. When I got to Beroun, I found myself at the edge of a very ugly, industrial town, with no train station in sight. I walked up to a woman who was approaching her car and asked her which way it was to the train station. She had a hard time answering, though she gestured vaguely in its direction before evidently thinking, "Screw it," as she said, "I'll take you." I checked my sandals for mud, got in the car with her, and was driven through town to the train station.

The drive to the train station was completely unremarkable save for the fact that a complete stranger was going out of her way to drive me across town for no reward beyond the knowledge that she was a good Samaritan; while I still consider the Czech Republic a wretched (i.e., not very developed) country, my opinion of Czech people is now quite high. My day, as a whole, was fairly interesting, as the hike was a good change of pace from ordinary sightseeing and demonstrated, yet again, that there is nothing to see in Eastern Europe outside of Prague. One wishes that it were in better hands, as there might not be dog excrement on the sidewalks and graffiti on every square inch of every building if it belonged to the Germans or Austrians, but perhaps something distinctively Czech about it (whatever that means) might be lost if it were ceded to another country. I made my first dinner from the groceries that I bought the other day; I have enough food to last me until tomorrow, after which I will continue eating out, which is worth the money here. I have found it strangely difficult to find fresh fruit in Prague, though I got some very good cherries today (in a store that principally sold alcohol - go figure) for more money than they were worth and plan to do the same tomorrow, as cherries would go well with the cottage cheese that I bought yesterday, providing a valuable supplement to the peas and tortellini that I will be eating. Peas have become my go-to vegetable for dinners that I make myself on these trips, as they contain some of the same nutrients as spinach, which I consider to be the king of all vegetables in terms of salubrity, but which I do make abroad, as I fear its turning into a mushy mass that I will not be able to finish in the end, and they do not require any preparation (except for the addition of a bit of salt to them, when possible). I guess that my review of my day is that my first pilgrimage may turn out to have been my last; I am not that much into received saints. Perhaps people who have made an actual difference in this world will one day be worshipped (or, better yet, appreciated) as hermits are today!

 

My damned camera flipped Svaty Jan Pod Skalou upside-down.

 

Day 40 - Prague

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!

 

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."

 

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.