DAY 10: THE GOLDEN ARCHES
PRAGUE DIARY
We got up early to go see the Castle.
Crossed the bridge and walked thru a residential area to get breakfast first.
The imposing architecture, the cathedrals, the spires the buildings rococo’d the fuck out, every ridge adorned with a beautifully carved figure, has an outer limit.
We were in the midst of soviet ugliness.
The breakfast place was cool and we sat outside in the sun. Only thing spoiling the scene was these wasps.
They were all over Gaby’s food. One would swoop into a dollop of apricot jam and fly off. Post on a car and look like he was smearing it all over his face.
Which I found endearing.
But it got to be enough of a nuisance to where I had to trap one of them in a cup.
He was jailed in there with an eggshell. And my affinity for him was growing as I watched him arduously climb to the top of the cup and fall into the shell.
I kept opening the bottom up a bit to let air in. Gaby told me to stop. She was ruthless.
Nobody fucks with her breakfast.
We walked over to the castle. Which is more of a complex of buildings than a proper castle.
The stick-out centerpiece is an old-ass cathedral which all the other buildings are built around.
As we walked thru the vast gardens leading up to the entrance, I had the blasphemous thought that all this beauty was created by unilateral wealth & power.
I’d been listening to Bertrand Russel’s History of Western Philosophy. And he was talking bout the cultural paucity of Sparta compared to Athens.
Sparta where nobody was rich and nobody was poor and everything was for the good of the state.
But they produced no art, no beauty, not a single contribution to civilization compared to the unequal flourishing of Pericles’s Athens.
When we got to the entrance, they were doing some military ceremony. Them guys in their costumes and muskets marching to the gate to the sound of bugles, shoes clacking like tap-shoes.
All that goofy pomp turned me off to the idea of money and power.
Apparently the Prague Castle is where the president of the Czech Republic now lives. I don’t know anything about him, but he looks a whole lot better in his official portrait than in the candid pictures of him.
A vanity which doesn’t seem to promise good leadership.
The first building we entered happened to be an exhibition of old masters.
The most impressive works were by Lucas Cranach a 16th century german painter.
He was hitting the christian motifs with a detail and style that stuck out in the gallery. And he had this portrait of a lady holding a finger fern.
That is: a literal mini little tree in her fingers.
That’s the kind of detail Gaby really likes.
The sheer amount of shit to explore in the castle is overwhelming.
But St. Vito’s cathedral gotta be the most impressive thing on the grounds. It is the visual focal point of the whole city.
When we were in Paris together a couple years ago, we walked around some big cathedral on the hill there and I was making a fool of myself cause I was wearing flip flops.
And each of my oafish steps echoed, reverberated, drew angry parisian looks.
Today I wore sneakers and got to enjoy the stained glass and reverent godawe ireless.
What ain’t impressive is the Bohemian crown jewels.
Gaby said it looked like a Burger King crown, like the jewels were goddamn gushers.
The place really wore us out, and we went off in search of some food.
I was so hungry that I was suggesting every restaurant. Which was annoying Gaby.
And I wanted to go to this english bookstore. But I told her I really needed a beer before we went in.
Why I couldn’t wait for us to find an actual restaurant before I got my beer she did not understand.
We went into a spot. She sat down in these plush comfy chairs. I thought they were too hot, so I made her move to a less comfortable wooden chair.
And I got my beer. That was only one of two times I annoyed her that day.
The other was later on at an antique store when I was looking for a bathroom, tearing doors open boorishly. And the clerk popped out on Gaby going,
“Sorry?!”
With an OD surly demeanor.
And she got in trouble on my behalf.
She did not, in fact, get annoyed later that night when we were at a cool bar, scheming on how to mingle with this english-speaking european crowd in the corner, and I spilled my whole beer all over the table.
They looked over when the beer fell. Didn’t seem like they wanted to befriend a clumsy american.
Gaby is quite used to my spilling. At least this time I didn’t get it on her.
I’ve spilled everything on her from water to beer to a full cup of hot coffee.
After that bar, we were starving, but it seemed like most of the restaurants were closed.
We had this late-night Uzbek place on our maps and were headed there when we happened to pass a McDonald’s in the Old Town.
That stopped us dead in our tracks and we ended up getting 2 McChickens, Nuggets, Chicken Strips, & fries.
They’re scanty as fuck with the ketchup: you gotta pay per pack.
You gotta pay for the bathroom too.
And the music they play in there (and all over the place in Prague) is solely weird songs in english I’ve never nearly heard.
With vague happy lyrics like,
“I love sunshine. I’m soaking in the sunshiiiiiine.”
After we scarfed our food the fuck down, we headed to a club Gaby’d heard some girl say was the funnest club she’d ever been to.
By the way, Prague seems very safe and clean almost always.
The only sketchy thing at all is these dudes that stand around together after midnight. In multiple areas.
All in Calvin Klein t-shirts, jeans, and a solid colored baseball cap like it’s a uniform.
And they solicit something. Not sure what tho. I would think it’s drugs but they let me and Gaby walk by unmolested.
Do we look that square?
There must be some crime going on around here, the police are always speeding off in a huff.
The club was in the basement of a bar which looked cool on the ground floor. Despite some tough looking grimace-faced czechs.
I got a beer.
We could hear the music blasting as we walked down the stairs.
At the entrance, there’s an enormous plastic cock behind a glass screen which moves forward and back on a wire.
But when we entered the dancefloor, there was no kinkworld activity like the cock seemed to promise. In fact, there was absolutely nobody there.
It was just us and the DJ.
I am an excellent dancer. Gaby struggles to keep up, but she does her diligent best.
Once we started dancing, a big czech came over and sat just on the outside of the dancefloor, stone-faced, watching us.
We made the best of the euro-techno music. Which I have to say I can’t imagine dancing to all night long.
Really don’t understand how anyone prefers that when they’ve heard hiphop or latin-american music.
But maybe there is still a shadow communist culture-force threatening death if they play anything else.
We got home late, exhausted from all the walking and dancing. Gaby was more tired than I was, but I was nice, and I let her go right to bed.