Ottawa is one of my favourite Canadian cities, and I have been there half a dozen times. My last trip was in October 2006, when I gave an invited paper to the Access conference for technical librarians. I also lived here in the winter of 1986, when I was working as a co-op student with Statistics Canada. They had interviewed me for two different jobs, one as a writer/editor, and another as a database developer/programmer, and I got both the jobs. It was my first time in Ottawa, and I loved StatsCan, who rewarded my eclectic interests with a wide range of tasks. I edited a highly technical article on computer chip design. I wrote radio spots about interesting statistics (did you know that Canadians chew an average of 1 kg of chewing gum each year?). I worked on speeches for the 1986 census. I also got to write an obituary for the late chief statistician of Canada, Simon Goldberg, which meant I interviewed all the top brass at the time, including the current chief statistician of Canada, Ivan Felligi. They made me take out the part where someone once got so made at Goldberg that they tore the telephone out of the wall and threw it at him. I guess it wasn’t setting quite the right tone for an obituary.
Air Canada
I’ve been on a variety of airlines lately. I have to say that Cathay Pacific has been a clear winner for their efficiency and courtesy. Air Canada was interesting to me, because I had forgotten that you have to buy your dinner. I think it is a good way to cut down on some of the waste produced by eating on a plane, since that many fewer people do it. I was also surprised by the variety and high quality of the choices on the individual entertainment systems, which no longer communicated what I believe to be a wholly eastern Canadian belief that what I really wanted to do was watch an hour of local news before I could do anything else.
Johnny Depp
I elected to watch the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Susan had mentioned that it was surprisingly good, and it was pleasant to see that they let Johnny Depp act again. The plot was interesting, with a good mixture of the apocalyptic and supernatural. The two women leads were easier than ever before on the eyes. There’s a nice scene straight out of Evil Roy Slade, only this time it’s Keira Knightley who turns out upon inspection to be carrying an entire pile of concealed weapons. And Chow Yun Fat was in it. I enjoyed the description of his character by another pirate, the murderous traitor Captain Barbossa, who says “he’s much like myself, but absent my merciful nature and sense of fair play.” Aside from a nonsensical Disney marriage ceremony, it was as much like a real movie as you could hope for. Keira didn’t even have to have a baby to complete the nuclear family.
The Minto Suite Hotel
The name says “suite” and they mean it. Every room has both a bedroom and a living room, intended for small meetings. I asked to see the floor plans, and the largest room available has a boardroom between the bedroom and the small meeting room. Ray has us in what they call single-bedroom suites, which means I also have two bathrooms and a “Pullman kitchen” which is concealed behind what appears to be another set of lobby closet doors. I never found it on my own, and had to be alerted to its existence by Richard Cunningham. There is also a small room dedicated to ironing, located off the entrance bathroom. Even more important, at $150 a night, the price is reasonable. This is now my hotel of choice in Ottawa.
Disposable toothbrushes
Why a guy forgets his toothbrush, I’ll never know. But there I was, and the fellow at the front desk obligingly went and found me one. It suddenly explained to me the disposable toothbrushes at the Kimberley Hotel in Hong Kong, which had an unusual grey plastic handle. They were the communist factory version of the white one they give away here, by Gilchrist and Soames. Unlike the Chinese disposable toothbrush, this one appears to be reusable, since I’ve brushed my teeth half a dozen times and none of the bristles have fallen out yet. There was no tiny toothpaste included, though.
Bistro 115
Christian Vandendorpe recommended this restaurant for our group dinner, and as you might expect if you know Christian, it was a great choice. For an appetizer, I had half a poached pear piled high with a kind of soft whipped blue cheese, set on a pomegranate reduction with fresh pomegranate seeds thrown in, all on a delicious radicio salad. As an entrée, I ate their specialty, a confit of duck leg with a sauce made out of the grapes they grow in their courtyard out back. The duck was crispy in parts and tender in other places, and absolutely worth flying to Ottawa to eat. http://www.bistro115.com/
Friday, November 30, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Hong Kong
The airport on Lantau Island has to be one of the most exciting places in the world to land. I often say that Hong Kong consists of two big islands and a strip along the coast, but in fact there are dozens of little islands, and as you fly in low over the ocean, you get to see a lot of them. In Prague the standard building was 6 storeys. In Hong Kong, I’m guessing it is closer to 60, and many are 80 or more. I saw a note somewhere that says 90 is the tallest. The effect is a cityscape that feels dynamic. It is like they leave things alone and then suddenly build a skyscraper. That may not actually be the case, but that’s the impression you get when you fly in. It helps that Lantau island is a nature preserve of sorts, so there is mostly bush and exposed rock as you drive toward the bridge, making a big contrast with the inhabited parts. It also helps that the water is packed with ships of all sizes, and that even the bridges are amazing. You can’t build suspension bridges this big, with cables thicker than my torso, but there they are, suspended all the same.
The Beijing Olympics
There are five little cartoon characters on the Beijing Olympic signs at the airport. They look like a cross between Manga and the characters in Lillo and Stitch. One has fire coming out of his head and another has leaves and a third has waves of water. I’m not sure if they represent elementals or categories of sports, or maybe cities? The text was illegible at the distance I was standing, but each one had a Chinese name under it, and the slogan seemed to be something about pulling together with Beijing. Okay, so I looked it up online and it is of course more complicated. They stand for friendship and peace and other positive attributes. Here's a quotation:
"Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals -- the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow -- and the Olympic Flame."
So they are five elements, and five animals, and in addition, their names spell out "Welcome to Beijing." There's more here:
http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/n214068254.shtml
Hong Kong Movies
On the way into town, I saw signs for two new movies. The first had a young actress I didn’t recognize. The movie was called In Love with the Dead. I'm guessing that it isn't a blockbuster, and the branding wasn’t scary, either—it was all pink and lacy. The other movie starred Tony Leung, who is in the running with Chow Yun Fat and Andy Lau to be the Gerard Depardieu of Hong Kong movies. You will remember Tony Leung from his lovable monk in one of the Chinese Ghost Story films, his lovable rogue who marries the princess in Chinese Odyssey 2000, and his lovable swordsman who has bad luck with his choice of girlfriend Maggie Cheung in Hero. We went past the billboard pretty fast, but I think the new movie is called Just Caution.
Two More Gift Shops
I never know when I get someplace if I am near a real attraction, such as people would travel far to visit, or if I am near the local thing that is not very interesting. Today I wandered over to two attractions within three blocks of my hotel: the Hong Kong Science Museum and the Hong Kong History Museum. It is Sunday, so the former was knee deep in enthusiastic youngsters, which along with the interactive display promotions told me most of what I wanted to know. The special exhibit is called Soaring Dinosaurs, but I think it might actually be primarily about Chinese Dinosaurs rather than flying ones per se. The keynote of the gift shop was a cartoon character named Ein-O, who had wild hair and a white moustache and seemed to know something about a lot of subjects, which was of course not really true about his model. Across the courtyard was the History Museum, which appeared to be empty. There were me and the staff, and a couple of American tourists wandered in eventually. The history museum had a very nice gift shop with a wide range of cultural products, none of which I purchased, although I was tempted by the many t-shirts with slogans from the Art of War, a bilingual little red book, and a green glazed clay flute.
Grocery Stores
Much as airlines have their national flavour, so do corner grocery stores. In Siena, for instance, we found at a little small-town corner store a wider variety of good meat and cheese than we would normally expect in a supermarket in Edmonton. I thought I’d gained enough weight at the cheese boards of Europe, which should be fine here since cheese is not on the menu, so I determined to get some healthy food. I passed by the seaweed-flavoured potato chips and the cans of wheat grass juice, which I understand can be taken at either end, and found instead a can of instant Quaker Oats, much like a large coffee can. When you pop the lid, there is an internal seal of aluminum. I had resourcefully bought myself a bowl for a dollar, so I was able to pour hot water over some of these oats to find that they set up much more glutinously than the ones I’m used to, but maybe that’s because they are “instant” rather than “quick.” The Tropicana orange juice seemed familiar, until I opened it to realize that it has no internal seal, but that’s okay because the lid itself has one like a water bottle. It was nice to see stacks of fresh dragon fruit and some others I didn’t recognize, a bit like small white mangoes. I got a paper cylinder of digestive biscuits which may in fact consist largely of ground-up Chinese newspaper, but they taste great.
Noisy Streets and Quiet Streets
It isn’t surprising to find streets here packed with people. When I told my bus driver at the airport that I was staying in Tsim Sha Tsui, he laughed and said, “ah yes, the shopping district.” My particular street is dedicated to wedding dresses, maternity dresses, and tailors, not necessarily in that order. A typical shop name here is the one on the corner, called "Marry Claire." I was flagged down by enough east Indian men interested in having me get a suit made that I almost began to wonder if I needed one. I don’t, of course, but they may wear me down yet. Turning the corner, however, I find myself in an empty street and am able to walk several blocks without really having to share the sidewalk with anyone. I walked far enough to see the entrance to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the conference will start tomorrow morning. It was only a few minutes away—closer even than it looked on Google Earth, although of course it is quite a large campus.
Miramar Tower
I wandered into the Miramar Tower this evening, only to realize that it was where I had eaten the first part of an ill-fated dinner on my last trip. Two of Rosan’s pals had kindly agreed to show me their city. The first, Shum Yuk Wo, was waiting for me every day after my conference, and really treated me like a king. He jokingly told me that his name could be read as “Sum of the Five Virtues” and I would agree with that reading wholeheartedly. Rosan’s second friend, whose name I never learned, tried to take me out for a good dinner, but my jet lag hit me hard that night, and I had to go back to the hotel early and collapse. Imagine my surprise on seeing the restaurant again. At the time, I had no idea what part of the city we’d gone to.
Vivienne Westwood
One of the shops in Miramar Tower is Vivienne Westwood of London, which you will recall as the place Gwen Stefani wants to clean out when she collects all her pirate treasure. I walked three times past the various windows, inside and out, before I worked up enough courage to go in and look at the wild designs. There were three salespeople and only me in the store. The tiny young woman who drew the short straw and came over to greet me seemed very nervous as I looked through the racks. She appeared to believe there could only be the kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding that would end in tears. At one point, she got my attention to explain that I was looking at the women’s clothes, and that the men’s were over there. I reassured her that I just wanted to see some of the clothes. I also looked at the prices, which were extravagant but not insane. You could get a sweater for $3500 HK, which is $320 or so Canadian. There was a very nice sleaveless summer dress, the kind you can crinkle up in your backpack, for HK$7500.
Books and Films
It has occurred to me that what a person looks to buy when traveling can be a significant indicator of personality. Tonight I found myself, as I often do, at a bookstore that also sold movies. I bought a Tsui Hark “Classic” edition DVD, which I believe to be his remake of The Seven Samurai, set in rural China. The English title is Seven Swords. I’ve always liked Tsui Hark movies, and The Seven Samurai too, so how could this be wrong? Well, in fact it is an adaptation of another book, called Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian. So I guess we’ll see how that works out. I also bought Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. I haven’t read it before, and for some reason I always want to buy something by Italo Calvino when I am overseas. I first read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller during my English undergrad degree, so maybe that has something to do with this impulse. I am regressing to a time that was characterized by the strange combination of uncertainty and confidence.
Seven Swords
Okay, so say that the bandits aren’t after food, but are instead a face-painted bounty-hunting army collecting the heads of martial artists, since a government decree has made martial arts illegal. Actually they collect everyone heads, then say they were martial artists. The seven samurai are supernatural swordsmen who’ve been on a spiritual retreat in the mountains, because their general under the previous regime, Fu, gave up torturing and killing. And the villagers aren’t helpless sufferers, but are instead members of the Heaven and Earth society, and residents of Martial Village. They are still no match, however, for the variously inventive eye-gouging, limb-removing, head-cutting-off weapons of the mercenaries. The decapitating umbrella is a good example--the blades are on the outside and he inverts it over your head, then spins it. The villagers are rescued and led into the mountains, where all the adults are eventually slaughtered by a traitor in their midst. Otherwise, the plot is the same. Well, except that one of the seven swordsmen is a woman, and the one raised by wolves never goes anywhere without an aerial somersault. He is played by an actor from the Beijing Opera. When the seven swords attack the mercenary fortress, they begin while Fu is negotiating outside the walls with the mercenary leader. They use the fortress’s own flags as torches to burn the place down, smash all the wine, and feed a laxative to the horses. When the mercenary leader gets the report, he says, “They weren’t attacking—they were slowing down my attack.” Pure Tsui Hark fun from start to finish. Did I mention Andy Lau is in it?
Value for Money
The Canadian dollar is currently strong, which means you can get almost eight Hong Kong dollars for one of ours. When I was here in 2000, it was closer to five. Given these arithmetical facts, I decided that since I needed some shirts, I might as well get dress shirts. So, turning down offers from east Indian tailors to the right of me and to the left, I wandered along until I found Shopper’s Boulevard. It is one of the places Shum Yuk Wo considered too expensive for me to bother about on my last trip, although he walked me along it so I could see the stores. They are arranged like a strip mall, except the weather is nice enough that the fronts are all open, and there is a very wide sidewalk out in front, wider than many streets, with millions of tiny red and white lights suspended above it. It goes for blocks and blocks--I never reached the end of it. None of these small stores spill out into the sidewalk like you might expect. They are too classy for that, or perhaps there’s some local regulation against it. In any case, I stopped at a likely store and tried on a nice-looking shirt, which they said was the largest they had. It fit okay across my shoulders, but the sleeves were on the edge of being too short. Strolling further, I stopped at a place that seemed to have the right attitude, with brands named Alexander the Great and Caesar. I tried on another shirt that was too small in the sleeve, but the saleswoman swore that she had something bigger. After a bit of digging around, discussion, and giggling, she and her colleagues came up with three shirts that fit perfectly, so I bought them all. As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had despaired of finding a shirt big enough, and was happy that they’d had some. They broke out laughing again, then decided to let me in on the joke. “You are size triple-X,” they explained.
Hong Kong Signs
The signs here are a strange mixture of the UK and the vernacular, which in some cases is just a transliteration of the Chinese and in others is something else. I am in the Kimberley hotel, for example, on Kimberley Road, which is very convenient, except that there is also a Kimberley Street. Nearby are Nathan, Granville, and Chatham Roads, as well as Haiphong, Tak Shing, and Mody. I saw a herbalist whose shop included the word “Swallowingness,” which seems to me something I would like to have from a herbal medicine. The red-bordered yield signs say “Give Way,” as they do in London, and there’s the familiar writing on the street telling you which way to look. One of my favourites is a cartoon sign used by the construction workers, which shows a man in a hardhat covering his ears. For the conference, Sharon has arranged a number of very large format signs, printed on canvas and hung on ropes spiralling through the many gromets. Some of these signs are posted in permanent frames, and at night the staff at the university protect them with pre-fitted cloth covers. The regal staircase leading into the university has the IASDR identity secured to the risers, so as you walk toward it, the effect is of a giant poster welcoming you. I complimented her on it the first time we ran into each other. “It’s very grand, isn’t it?” she said, a bit apologetically.
Disposable Toothbrushes
One of the conveniences here at the Kimberley hotel is the disposable toothbrushes. The cleaning staff leave two in boxes every day in the bathroom. They are the size of a regular toothbrush, although they make me think there must be a 50s mainland factory involved somewhere. The handles are ribbed cylinders, made of industrial gray plastic. I left a used one in a glass my first day, and came back to find it had been thrown out and a new box left in its place. This just seemed extravagant to me, so the next day I tucked one away for reuse. However, after I brushed my teeth the next morning, I had to spit out toothbrush bristles. They really are good for just one or two uses. The toothpaste tube is also unbelievably tiny, as though it were from a doll’s house--perhaps a 50s dollhouse somewhere on the mainland.
Mr. Brown Cappuccino Coffee
Well, who could resist it, really. It’s sold at the grocery store in a short soda-style can. Their logotype is a loose reference to Second Cup, only inside the circle of the name there’s an insane bearded man in a white suit winking at you and giving a thumbs up. The instructions state that you shouldn’t heat the contents for longer than three days, and that if you spot any milk flakes, that’s normal: “Tiny milk flakes may be occasionally found in the coffee and this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality at all.” I think it is the “at all” at the end that I really like. It leaves you with the sense of “methinks they protest too much.” I just wish they’d put a full stop before it: “… no effect on the product quality. At all.” I am tempted to make this into a standard disclaimer about myself, for use maybe on course handouts. “Dr Ruecker will occasionally appear to be speaking gibberish, but this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality. At all.” Mr. Brown’s coffee naturally bears no real resemblance to coffee, but it is sweet rather than bitter, so it is definitely a good breakfast beverage. And I didn’t notice any milk flakes. At all.
What to Buy
Shopping in Hong Kong is an exercise in absurdity, since the range and complexity of the choices is overwhelming. On my visit here in 2000, I found myself wondering at the end of the trip if it might prove difficult to bring my expensive bottle of alcohol full of pickled snakes through Canadian customs. So on this trip, I tried to set myself a few simple ground rules that might be suitable for a beginner, such as “don’t buy any clothes made out of dried banana leaves,” and “stay out of that alley.” Prepared in this manner, I went out today with about HK$1500 in my pocket, and it took less than an hour for the local salespeople to strip me down to a few coins. One thing to remember is that no clothing items are to be bought for the prices indicated. I got my three triple-X shirts the other day for less than half the advertised price, really with no effort on my part. My lucky strategy was to stand in the middle of the store and look confused. By the time I gathered my wits, I found I had been awarded a 60% discount on everything I wanted. If I had blinked a couple of more times, and perhaps glanced again at my watch, I’m sure I’d have saved another twenty dollars. Today I was trying to be efficient, with the result that at the first store I confused and upset the young salesman, who began offering me discounts after I’d already agreed to buy. As I left the store, I could see that he was clearly still rattled by the experience. It seemed to touch on his conscience a little. A while later I found myself in the basement of an office supply store, wondering if I needed a metal sign for my office that said in both Chinese and English: “Please do not spit.” I decided enough was enough, and, gathering my collection of bulldog clips in colours and sizes I’ve never seen before, I headed back to the hotel.
The Kimberley Hotel
I am staying in a place that has been a wonderful base of operations. It is surrounded by enthusiastic East Indian tailors, for one thing, and the sidewalk is littered with elegant young brides-to-be, looking like they might shake out a water sleeve at any moment and begin singing about their childhoods in the Imperial Court. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the crowd, some of whom would scorn to read a sign that says “Please do not spit,” no matter how many languages it were written in. My room has a bilingual control panel beside the bed that controls all the lights, alarms, air conditioning, and notifications to the staff. I push a button that says “Do not disturb,” and no one does, because there is a light outside the door that I’ve activated. I push the other button that says “Make up room,” and I’ve barely walked down the street to buy a classic Wong Kar Wai film when I return home to find the room has in fact been made up during my brief absence. I just stopped off at the desk downstairs to ask for a few extra hours on my room, and everyone was happy to oblige. A manager directed me to one of the counter people, but just as I stepped up, a large and florid Australian man, recently arrived from the airport and clearly Overcome By Events, lurched in front of me. The manager returned and led me by the elbow to another of his staff. “I’m so sorry,” he said, apologetically indicating the person attempting to deal with the Australian. “She is busy.”
An Evening Stroll
If you thought shopping at four in the afternoon was chaos, you should try it in the evening. I sauntered out at seven o’clock on my never-ending search for a nice shot glass, only to find that there are an order of magnitude more people on the busy streets than were there during work hours, and a far lower percentage were tourists. After a few blocks of dizzying activity, I decided maybe I could just watch a movie tonight, and try looking for shot glasses in the morning. With my unerring sense of direction, I headed home and found myself outside the hotel where I’d stayed ten years ago. I tried again and managed to make a giant loop, which at least gave me the reassuring sense that the things I was seeing were familiar to me. At one point, I even broke one of my own beginner’s rules (“don’t go down that alley”) and I joined a steady stream of people walking a dark, narrow path past discount electronics and street vendors. It doesn’t help that the controlled intersections are all arranged as what in Saskatoon they used to call “scramble corners,” so that all vehicular traffic stops while foot traffic can cross in every direction at once. These crosswalks have lights, but they also have a very useful beeping signal that speeds up when you are allowed to go, then chirps in bursts during warning mode. At last I found myself on my route home from campus, and before I knew it I was tripping over nervous young gazelles and shaking hands with East Indian tailors.
The Beijing Olympics
There are five little cartoon characters on the Beijing Olympic signs at the airport. They look like a cross between Manga and the characters in Lillo and Stitch. One has fire coming out of his head and another has leaves and a third has waves of water. I’m not sure if they represent elementals or categories of sports, or maybe cities? The text was illegible at the distance I was standing, but each one had a Chinese name under it, and the slogan seemed to be something about pulling together with Beijing. Okay, so I looked it up online and it is of course more complicated. They stand for friendship and peace and other positive attributes. Here's a quotation:
"Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals -- the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow -- and the Olympic Flame."
So they are five elements, and five animals, and in addition, their names spell out "Welcome to Beijing." There's more here:
http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/n214068254.shtml
Hong Kong Movies
On the way into town, I saw signs for two new movies. The first had a young actress I didn’t recognize. The movie was called In Love with the Dead. I'm guessing that it isn't a blockbuster, and the branding wasn’t scary, either—it was all pink and lacy. The other movie starred Tony Leung, who is in the running with Chow Yun Fat and Andy Lau to be the Gerard Depardieu of Hong Kong movies. You will remember Tony Leung from his lovable monk in one of the Chinese Ghost Story films, his lovable rogue who marries the princess in Chinese Odyssey 2000, and his lovable swordsman who has bad luck with his choice of girlfriend Maggie Cheung in Hero. We went past the billboard pretty fast, but I think the new movie is called Just Caution.
Two More Gift Shops
I never know when I get someplace if I am near a real attraction, such as people would travel far to visit, or if I am near the local thing that is not very interesting. Today I wandered over to two attractions within three blocks of my hotel: the Hong Kong Science Museum and the Hong Kong History Museum. It is Sunday, so the former was knee deep in enthusiastic youngsters, which along with the interactive display promotions told me most of what I wanted to know. The special exhibit is called Soaring Dinosaurs, but I think it might actually be primarily about Chinese Dinosaurs rather than flying ones per se. The keynote of the gift shop was a cartoon character named Ein-O, who had wild hair and a white moustache and seemed to know something about a lot of subjects, which was of course not really true about his model. Across the courtyard was the History Museum, which appeared to be empty. There were me and the staff, and a couple of American tourists wandered in eventually. The history museum had a very nice gift shop with a wide range of cultural products, none of which I purchased, although I was tempted by the many t-shirts with slogans from the Art of War, a bilingual little red book, and a green glazed clay flute.
Grocery Stores
Much as airlines have their national flavour, so do corner grocery stores. In Siena, for instance, we found at a little small-town corner store a wider variety of good meat and cheese than we would normally expect in a supermarket in Edmonton. I thought I’d gained enough weight at the cheese boards of Europe, which should be fine here since cheese is not on the menu, so I determined to get some healthy food. I passed by the seaweed-flavoured potato chips and the cans of wheat grass juice, which I understand can be taken at either end, and found instead a can of instant Quaker Oats, much like a large coffee can. When you pop the lid, there is an internal seal of aluminum. I had resourcefully bought myself a bowl for a dollar, so I was able to pour hot water over some of these oats to find that they set up much more glutinously than the ones I’m used to, but maybe that’s because they are “instant” rather than “quick.” The Tropicana orange juice seemed familiar, until I opened it to realize that it has no internal seal, but that’s okay because the lid itself has one like a water bottle. It was nice to see stacks of fresh dragon fruit and some others I didn’t recognize, a bit like small white mangoes. I got a paper cylinder of digestive biscuits which may in fact consist largely of ground-up Chinese newspaper, but they taste great.
Noisy Streets and Quiet Streets
It isn’t surprising to find streets here packed with people. When I told my bus driver at the airport that I was staying in Tsim Sha Tsui, he laughed and said, “ah yes, the shopping district.” My particular street is dedicated to wedding dresses, maternity dresses, and tailors, not necessarily in that order. A typical shop name here is the one on the corner, called "Marry Claire." I was flagged down by enough east Indian men interested in having me get a suit made that I almost began to wonder if I needed one. I don’t, of course, but they may wear me down yet. Turning the corner, however, I find myself in an empty street and am able to walk several blocks without really having to share the sidewalk with anyone. I walked far enough to see the entrance to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the conference will start tomorrow morning. It was only a few minutes away—closer even than it looked on Google Earth, although of course it is quite a large campus.
Miramar Tower
I wandered into the Miramar Tower this evening, only to realize that it was where I had eaten the first part of an ill-fated dinner on my last trip. Two of Rosan’s pals had kindly agreed to show me their city. The first, Shum Yuk Wo, was waiting for me every day after my conference, and really treated me like a king. He jokingly told me that his name could be read as “Sum of the Five Virtues” and I would agree with that reading wholeheartedly. Rosan’s second friend, whose name I never learned, tried to take me out for a good dinner, but my jet lag hit me hard that night, and I had to go back to the hotel early and collapse. Imagine my surprise on seeing the restaurant again. At the time, I had no idea what part of the city we’d gone to.
Vivienne Westwood
One of the shops in Miramar Tower is Vivienne Westwood of London, which you will recall as the place Gwen Stefani wants to clean out when she collects all her pirate treasure. I walked three times past the various windows, inside and out, before I worked up enough courage to go in and look at the wild designs. There were three salespeople and only me in the store. The tiny young woman who drew the short straw and came over to greet me seemed very nervous as I looked through the racks. She appeared to believe there could only be the kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding that would end in tears. At one point, she got my attention to explain that I was looking at the women’s clothes, and that the men’s were over there. I reassured her that I just wanted to see some of the clothes. I also looked at the prices, which were extravagant but not insane. You could get a sweater for $3500 HK, which is $320 or so Canadian. There was a very nice sleaveless summer dress, the kind you can crinkle up in your backpack, for HK$7500.
Books and Films
It has occurred to me that what a person looks to buy when traveling can be a significant indicator of personality. Tonight I found myself, as I often do, at a bookstore that also sold movies. I bought a Tsui Hark “Classic” edition DVD, which I believe to be his remake of The Seven Samurai, set in rural China. The English title is Seven Swords. I’ve always liked Tsui Hark movies, and The Seven Samurai too, so how could this be wrong? Well, in fact it is an adaptation of another book, called Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian. So I guess we’ll see how that works out. I also bought Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. I haven’t read it before, and for some reason I always want to buy something by Italo Calvino when I am overseas. I first read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller during my English undergrad degree, so maybe that has something to do with this impulse. I am regressing to a time that was characterized by the strange combination of uncertainty and confidence.
Seven Swords
Okay, so say that the bandits aren’t after food, but are instead a face-painted bounty-hunting army collecting the heads of martial artists, since a government decree has made martial arts illegal. Actually they collect everyone heads, then say they were martial artists. The seven samurai are supernatural swordsmen who’ve been on a spiritual retreat in the mountains, because their general under the previous regime, Fu, gave up torturing and killing. And the villagers aren’t helpless sufferers, but are instead members of the Heaven and Earth society, and residents of Martial Village. They are still no match, however, for the variously inventive eye-gouging, limb-removing, head-cutting-off weapons of the mercenaries. The decapitating umbrella is a good example--the blades are on the outside and he inverts it over your head, then spins it. The villagers are rescued and led into the mountains, where all the adults are eventually slaughtered by a traitor in their midst. Otherwise, the plot is the same. Well, except that one of the seven swordsmen is a woman, and the one raised by wolves never goes anywhere without an aerial somersault. He is played by an actor from the Beijing Opera. When the seven swords attack the mercenary fortress, they begin while Fu is negotiating outside the walls with the mercenary leader. They use the fortress’s own flags as torches to burn the place down, smash all the wine, and feed a laxative to the horses. When the mercenary leader gets the report, he says, “They weren’t attacking—they were slowing down my attack.” Pure Tsui Hark fun from start to finish. Did I mention Andy Lau is in it?
Value for Money
The Canadian dollar is currently strong, which means you can get almost eight Hong Kong dollars for one of ours. When I was here in 2000, it was closer to five. Given these arithmetical facts, I decided that since I needed some shirts, I might as well get dress shirts. So, turning down offers from east Indian tailors to the right of me and to the left, I wandered along until I found Shopper’s Boulevard. It is one of the places Shum Yuk Wo considered too expensive for me to bother about on my last trip, although he walked me along it so I could see the stores. They are arranged like a strip mall, except the weather is nice enough that the fronts are all open, and there is a very wide sidewalk out in front, wider than many streets, with millions of tiny red and white lights suspended above it. It goes for blocks and blocks--I never reached the end of it. None of these small stores spill out into the sidewalk like you might expect. They are too classy for that, or perhaps there’s some local regulation against it. In any case, I stopped at a likely store and tried on a nice-looking shirt, which they said was the largest they had. It fit okay across my shoulders, but the sleeves were on the edge of being too short. Strolling further, I stopped at a place that seemed to have the right attitude, with brands named Alexander the Great and Caesar. I tried on another shirt that was too small in the sleeve, but the saleswoman swore that she had something bigger. After a bit of digging around, discussion, and giggling, she and her colleagues came up with three shirts that fit perfectly, so I bought them all. As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had despaired of finding a shirt big enough, and was happy that they’d had some. They broke out laughing again, then decided to let me in on the joke. “You are size triple-X,” they explained.
Hong Kong Signs
The signs here are a strange mixture of the UK and the vernacular, which in some cases is just a transliteration of the Chinese and in others is something else. I am in the Kimberley hotel, for example, on Kimberley Road, which is very convenient, except that there is also a Kimberley Street. Nearby are Nathan, Granville, and Chatham Roads, as well as Haiphong, Tak Shing, and Mody. I saw a herbalist whose shop included the word “Swallowingness,” which seems to me something I would like to have from a herbal medicine. The red-bordered yield signs say “Give Way,” as they do in London, and there’s the familiar writing on the street telling you which way to look. One of my favourites is a cartoon sign used by the construction workers, which shows a man in a hardhat covering his ears. For the conference, Sharon has arranged a number of very large format signs, printed on canvas and hung on ropes spiralling through the many gromets. Some of these signs are posted in permanent frames, and at night the staff at the university protect them with pre-fitted cloth covers. The regal staircase leading into the university has the IASDR identity secured to the risers, so as you walk toward it, the effect is of a giant poster welcoming you. I complimented her on it the first time we ran into each other. “It’s very grand, isn’t it?” she said, a bit apologetically.
Disposable Toothbrushes
One of the conveniences here at the Kimberley hotel is the disposable toothbrushes. The cleaning staff leave two in boxes every day in the bathroom. They are the size of a regular toothbrush, although they make me think there must be a 50s mainland factory involved somewhere. The handles are ribbed cylinders, made of industrial gray plastic. I left a used one in a glass my first day, and came back to find it had been thrown out and a new box left in its place. This just seemed extravagant to me, so the next day I tucked one away for reuse. However, after I brushed my teeth the next morning, I had to spit out toothbrush bristles. They really are good for just one or two uses. The toothpaste tube is also unbelievably tiny, as though it were from a doll’s house--perhaps a 50s dollhouse somewhere on the mainland.
Mr. Brown Cappuccino Coffee
Well, who could resist it, really. It’s sold at the grocery store in a short soda-style can. Their logotype is a loose reference to Second Cup, only inside the circle of the name there’s an insane bearded man in a white suit winking at you and giving a thumbs up. The instructions state that you shouldn’t heat the contents for longer than three days, and that if you spot any milk flakes, that’s normal: “Tiny milk flakes may be occasionally found in the coffee and this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality at all.” I think it is the “at all” at the end that I really like. It leaves you with the sense of “methinks they protest too much.” I just wish they’d put a full stop before it: “… no effect on the product quality. At all.” I am tempted to make this into a standard disclaimer about myself, for use maybe on course handouts. “Dr Ruecker will occasionally appear to be speaking gibberish, but this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality. At all.” Mr. Brown’s coffee naturally bears no real resemblance to coffee, but it is sweet rather than bitter, so it is definitely a good breakfast beverage. And I didn’t notice any milk flakes. At all.
What to Buy
Shopping in Hong Kong is an exercise in absurdity, since the range and complexity of the choices is overwhelming. On my visit here in 2000, I found myself wondering at the end of the trip if it might prove difficult to bring my expensive bottle of alcohol full of pickled snakes through Canadian customs. So on this trip, I tried to set myself a few simple ground rules that might be suitable for a beginner, such as “don’t buy any clothes made out of dried banana leaves,” and “stay out of that alley.” Prepared in this manner, I went out today with about HK$1500 in my pocket, and it took less than an hour for the local salespeople to strip me down to a few coins. One thing to remember is that no clothing items are to be bought for the prices indicated. I got my three triple-X shirts the other day for less than half the advertised price, really with no effort on my part. My lucky strategy was to stand in the middle of the store and look confused. By the time I gathered my wits, I found I had been awarded a 60% discount on everything I wanted. If I had blinked a couple of more times, and perhaps glanced again at my watch, I’m sure I’d have saved another twenty dollars. Today I was trying to be efficient, with the result that at the first store I confused and upset the young salesman, who began offering me discounts after I’d already agreed to buy. As I left the store, I could see that he was clearly still rattled by the experience. It seemed to touch on his conscience a little. A while later I found myself in the basement of an office supply store, wondering if I needed a metal sign for my office that said in both Chinese and English: “Please do not spit.” I decided enough was enough, and, gathering my collection of bulldog clips in colours and sizes I’ve never seen before, I headed back to the hotel.
The Kimberley Hotel
I am staying in a place that has been a wonderful base of operations. It is surrounded by enthusiastic East Indian tailors, for one thing, and the sidewalk is littered with elegant young brides-to-be, looking like they might shake out a water sleeve at any moment and begin singing about their childhoods in the Imperial Court. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the crowd, some of whom would scorn to read a sign that says “Please do not spit,” no matter how many languages it were written in. My room has a bilingual control panel beside the bed that controls all the lights, alarms, air conditioning, and notifications to the staff. I push a button that says “Do not disturb,” and no one does, because there is a light outside the door that I’ve activated. I push the other button that says “Make up room,” and I’ve barely walked down the street to buy a classic Wong Kar Wai film when I return home to find the room has in fact been made up during my brief absence. I just stopped off at the desk downstairs to ask for a few extra hours on my room, and everyone was happy to oblige. A manager directed me to one of the counter people, but just as I stepped up, a large and florid Australian man, recently arrived from the airport and clearly Overcome By Events, lurched in front of me. The manager returned and led me by the elbow to another of his staff. “I’m so sorry,” he said, apologetically indicating the person attempting to deal with the Australian. “She is busy.”
An Evening Stroll
If you thought shopping at four in the afternoon was chaos, you should try it in the evening. I sauntered out at seven o’clock on my never-ending search for a nice shot glass, only to find that there are an order of magnitude more people on the busy streets than were there during work hours, and a far lower percentage were tourists. After a few blocks of dizzying activity, I decided maybe I could just watch a movie tonight, and try looking for shot glasses in the morning. With my unerring sense of direction, I headed home and found myself outside the hotel where I’d stayed ten years ago. I tried again and managed to make a giant loop, which at least gave me the reassuring sense that the things I was seeing were familiar to me. At one point, I even broke one of my own beginner’s rules (“don’t go down that alley”) and I joined a steady stream of people walking a dark, narrow path past discount electronics and street vendors. It doesn’t help that the controlled intersections are all arranged as what in Saskatoon they used to call “scramble corners,” so that all vehicular traffic stops while foot traffic can cross in every direction at once. These crosswalks have lights, but they also have a very useful beeping signal that speeds up when you are allowed to go, then chirps in bursts during warning mode. At last I found myself on my route home from campus, and before I knew it I was tripping over nervous young gazelles and shaking hands with East Indian tailors.
Heathrow
Heathrow Airport is so large and I spend enough time connecting there that I am tempted to treat it as its own travel location. Certainly on this trip, when I had seven hours there, I felt myself inclined to buy postcards and send them out. Only the unexpected appearance of an available power plug for the laptop held me back.
British Airways
I have to say that for in-flight magazines, it is hard to beat the British Airways one, called High Life. BA.com is their site, which I hope contains half the interesting articles and useful advice I found in their print version. I was particularly struck by the travel tips, which included suggested itineraries for a two or three day trip, as well as details of good places to stay and eat in various cities, including the kinds of prices you could expect to pay at the places they recommended. They had articles on Paris (Hotel des Grandes Ecoles at 100 Euros/night), St Petersburg (one of the mini-hotels: Sonata, Nevsky Inn, Kristoff, Pyaty Ugol, the Rakhmaninov, for 50-100 Euros), and New York (Hotel Belleclaire at $130 US). I almost feel now like I could stand to go to St Petersburg, despite my earlier reservations about needing three weeks to get a visa. Oh--and I almost forgot, Tobago (the Blue Haven hotel).
Radio Interference
Pilots and flight attendants and people like that are forever asking everyone to turn off their cell phones during flights. I’ve always felt a bit like Toby Ziegler in the pilot episode of West Wing, when he expresses incredulity that a $30 purchase from Radio Shack could compromise the electronics on a brand new aircraft worth millions of dollars. But our British Airways pilot came on the intercom as we lifted off from Prague, to say that someone was using a cell phone onboard and it was screwing up the transmissions from Air Traffic Control. Luckily it wasn’t me. I have no idea if Aaron Sorkin was on board.
Fire for Lunch
My one regret about BA is that they allowed Lister from Red Dwarf to choose the sandwiches. You will recall that he subsisted, unlike the Cat, on a diet of chicken vindaloo. I thought I was lucky when it turned out that only half my sandwich was curry-based, but then I ate the other half, which was canned tuna infused with what I now believe to be essence of hell. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much fun of those 12th century Benedictine monks.
A Decent Cappuccino
Terminal 1 at Heathrow, on the other hand, has been undergoing a facelift. I had heard rumours, but hadn’t gotten the ocular proof until this afternoon. There are a number of very good stores, and the quality of the food is much improved since my last visit. I stopped and got a respectable club sandwich and a decent cappuccino at Pret a Manger, who you will remember has the slogan “Eat with your head.” Susan and I lived on their food a few years ago when we took an apartment for ten days in Soho. The coffee alone has enough moral fibre for three travelers, since it is not only free trade, but also a couple of other commendable things that I forget now but appreciated at the time. Having just watched Babel with Stefan, Milena, and Piotr, I am particularly conscious of the many opportunities for international miscommunication. Give your rifle as a gift to your fine native guide, and next thing you know Cate Blanchett is bleeding all over the handwoven carpets.
Dorling Kindersley
The Eyewitness Travel guides were first recommended to me by Susan Hockey, whose advice I have tended to take. They not only describe everything you want described, but they also have instructions on how to get there, and cutaways of the buildings once you do. We kept saying we’d look for them in Cracow and Prague, but we never did. Here in Heathrow they have both, and they are lovely. They don’t, unfortunately, have one in stock for Hong Kong, although I did finally, for the first time in my life, buy a Berlitz phrase book. I saw how Milena used hers in Peru, which is a method I think I can manage. It consisted of finding a relevant phrase, and rather than stammering it out in amusing tourist gibberish, simply pointing at the text for the local person to read. I also noticed that they have an Eyewitness Guide to Canada, and couldn’t resist seeing what it said. All of western Canada, which they called central Canada, filled 20 pages in the middle of a 340 page book. The cities where I’ve spent most of my life were each accorded two columns on a three-column page. I’m seriously thinking of moving to Cracow.
British Airways
I have to say that for in-flight magazines, it is hard to beat the British Airways one, called High Life. BA.com is their site, which I hope contains half the interesting articles and useful advice I found in their print version. I was particularly struck by the travel tips, which included suggested itineraries for a two or three day trip, as well as details of good places to stay and eat in various cities, including the kinds of prices you could expect to pay at the places they recommended. They had articles on Paris (Hotel des Grandes Ecoles at 100 Euros/night), St Petersburg (one of the mini-hotels: Sonata, Nevsky Inn, Kristoff, Pyaty Ugol, the Rakhmaninov, for 50-100 Euros), and New York (Hotel Belleclaire at $130 US). I almost feel now like I could stand to go to St Petersburg, despite my earlier reservations about needing three weeks to get a visa. Oh--and I almost forgot, Tobago (the Blue Haven hotel).
Radio Interference
Pilots and flight attendants and people like that are forever asking everyone to turn off their cell phones during flights. I’ve always felt a bit like Toby Ziegler in the pilot episode of West Wing, when he expresses incredulity that a $30 purchase from Radio Shack could compromise the electronics on a brand new aircraft worth millions of dollars. But our British Airways pilot came on the intercom as we lifted off from Prague, to say that someone was using a cell phone onboard and it was screwing up the transmissions from Air Traffic Control. Luckily it wasn’t me. I have no idea if Aaron Sorkin was on board.
Fire for Lunch
My one regret about BA is that they allowed Lister from Red Dwarf to choose the sandwiches. You will recall that he subsisted, unlike the Cat, on a diet of chicken vindaloo. I thought I was lucky when it turned out that only half my sandwich was curry-based, but then I ate the other half, which was canned tuna infused with what I now believe to be essence of hell. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much fun of those 12th century Benedictine monks.
A Decent Cappuccino
Terminal 1 at Heathrow, on the other hand, has been undergoing a facelift. I had heard rumours, but hadn’t gotten the ocular proof until this afternoon. There are a number of very good stores, and the quality of the food is much improved since my last visit. I stopped and got a respectable club sandwich and a decent cappuccino at Pret a Manger, who you will remember has the slogan “Eat with your head.” Susan and I lived on their food a few years ago when we took an apartment for ten days in Soho. The coffee alone has enough moral fibre for three travelers, since it is not only free trade, but also a couple of other commendable things that I forget now but appreciated at the time. Having just watched Babel with Stefan, Milena, and Piotr, I am particularly conscious of the many opportunities for international miscommunication. Give your rifle as a gift to your fine native guide, and next thing you know Cate Blanchett is bleeding all over the handwoven carpets.
Dorling Kindersley
The Eyewitness Travel guides were first recommended to me by Susan Hockey, whose advice I have tended to take. They not only describe everything you want described, but they also have instructions on how to get there, and cutaways of the buildings once you do. We kept saying we’d look for them in Cracow and Prague, but we never did. Here in Heathrow they have both, and they are lovely. They don’t, unfortunately, have one in stock for Hong Kong, although I did finally, for the first time in my life, buy a Berlitz phrase book. I saw how Milena used hers in Peru, which is a method I think I can manage. It consisted of finding a relevant phrase, and rather than stammering it out in amusing tourist gibberish, simply pointing at the text for the local person to read. I also noticed that they have an Eyewitness Guide to Canada, and couldn’t resist seeing what it said. All of western Canada, which they called central Canada, filled 20 pages in the middle of a 340 page book. The cities where I’ve spent most of my life were each accorded two columns on a three-column page. I’m seriously thinking of moving to Cracow.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Prague
Prague, or Praha as it is known locally, is another of the cultural capitals of Europe. I found out from Piotr today that this designation is more than an idle fancy. In fact, there is a program that identifies them and they hold the designation for a while, perhaps a year, before passing it to the next. Krakow and Prague have both been cultural capitals, and Budapest is another on the list. Piotr also recommends visiting a city called Cluj, in Transylvania. I don't know if it is a cultural capital though. We have a similar program in Canada. This year Edmonton is the cultural capital.
Czech Air
Just as LOT airlines has its idiosyncrasies, so does Czech Air. One of them was in the design of the little tables that let down from the back of the chair in front of you. On this plane, there was a cupholder built into the back of the little table, so that if all you had were a cup, you didn't have to use the entire table. A less useful innovation is the advertising on the back of the disposable cloths covering the headrests. Ours held ads for a new model of the Skoda, which was originally a Czech car company, now owned by Volkswagen. This model features a light that shines sideways to help you see around upcoming corners. The text on the baggage tag was also interesting. Here's what it wanted to tell me: "This is not the luggage ticket described by Article 4 of the Warsaw Convention as amended by the Hague Protocol, 1955." "Okay," I thought. "Thanks for the heads-up on that." Another oddity on Czech Air was the in-flight magazine; the cover story was about Miss World, in the back there was a short story about adultery, and in the middle somewhere there was a separate set of tasteful nude photos.
Student Housing
We took a taxi from the airport, which was driven by an elderly Harpo Marx. Despite a somewhat irreverent approach to traffic signage, he managed to deliver us in one piece to a student dormitory. It is a huge complex with six storeys, and many of the balconies have gardens with hanging plants. The central space in front has a giant pole with klieg lights on it, and Milena swears there are air raid sirens up there too. The dorm rooms are quite large with a kitchen and a built-in bathtub that is actually long enough for me, which is something I haven't seen since I lived at Mary Noonan's B&B in Saskatoon. The bathroom sink is man-sized, and there is plenty of water pressure. Unfortunately, as in Krakow, the beds are more along the lines of cots. We are just a short walk from the subway, which is very good. In three fast stops it took us to the local shopping mall, and in five stops with a transfer will drop us in the heart of Prague, at the spot called Muzeum.
Secure Student Housing
Unfortunately, there are also guards on the main floor, who keep your keys when you leave the facility. When we checked in, they filled out a two-page ledger with information about each of us. There was a small moment of excitement when they realized that I was born in the Queen City, Regina. I didn't explain that it was in Saskatchewan, and if the Queen ever visited, it wasn't for long. The other noticeable thing is that there are plenty of locks. The door to the dorm room locks. There is an internal door that also locks, with an old-fashioned skeleton key. Between locking the outside door and unlocking the inside one, you are trapped in a small entranceway between two locked doors. There are four rooms to a hallway, and the door to that hallway also locks, and has a big sign on both sides to remind you to lock it. "I don't think that Canadian fire inspectors would approve of this," Milena says, as we turn the key to lock ourselves into the third layer of security, not counting the men at the front desk. Certainly leaving in a hurry would be impossible, but I guess there's always the balcony.
Too Cool for Cats
If you've ever wondered where all the cool kids went, they are in Prague. All ages, all sizes, many styles of them, but here they are, riding the subway, lounging against walls, talking energetically in pubs. Marley and her friends could walk in here, no questions asked. Here's a skinny blonde woman in her twenties, wearing a torn jacket and shit-kicking boots, standing with her feet absently turned out in fifth position. There's a middle aged guy in skinny plaid pants with bright yellow socks and a pair of what look to me like vintage Converse sneakers. On the corner are a couple of eighties rockers, perhaps Billy Idol and his younger brother, now working in industry and feeling the weather change in their bones. Nobody seems to look much at anybody else, but as you walk down the street you can't help but notice how cool everybody is, partly because there are so many cool people to look at and nobody compromises themselves by looking. Milena tells me that Vin Diesel's action movie TripleX is set in Prague. Piotr says the national passion is for conversation, usually over beer, and the pubs are like salons, with regulars who meet in a favorite location over well-established topics. The per capita consumption of beer in Prague is apparently one of the highest in the world.
City of Men
Based on the in-flight Men's magazine and the good plumbing, combined with the Spartan domestic interiors and the lack of a shower curtain, not to mention our time downtown with the many pubs, I am beginning to think that Prague is a man's city in the same way that Sweden is a country of women. Without the mitigating influence of the other gender, a number of creepy peculiarities can emerge. I think of those domestic interiors full of chintz curtains, lace doilies, and small porcelain objects, clearly designed to forestall abrupt movements by large creatures. Once we started looking for evidence to support this theory, there is of course plenty. Not that you can prove much using this method. But one of the pieces of evidence is in the quantities of things. Milena ordered a cup of tea one morning, and was delivered hot water in a glass large enough to hold an entire beer, with two large tea bags and three-quarters of a lemon to go with it.
A Murder of Goths
Well, maybe it was a gaggle. In any case, as we were walking along the street today, we came across a crowd of maybe 35 or 40 people, all Goths of various shapes and sizes, just standing together or sitting on the sidewalk. Other people were sort of wending a path through them, so we did the same. Afterward, I asked Milena and Piotr what they thought the Goths were waiting for. "It's a sale," Milena said. "Of black," Piotr added.
Escalators in Prague
The escalators here run at twice the speed of escalators everywhere else, and many of them are also twice as long. The people appear to be leaning forward on the uphill ones, as if they were leaning into a strong wind, which is sometimes the case if the escalator happens to be one coming out of the underground. Another peculiarity is that the handrail moves slightly faster than the escalator, so if you actually hold onto it, you end up slowly leaning over further and further. This isn't something anyone here actually notices, however, since they are too cool to use the handrails. Another thing they are too cool to do is leave each other alone while escalating. It is not uncommon to see couples pressed together with their tongues in each other's mouths.
The View from the Castle
Prague really does have some remarkable views. We rode the funicular today up the hill to the monastery, then walked the seventy-five miles or so over to the castle grounds. I insisted on stopping every two hours for ice cream. After the third stop, Piotr suggested maybe we should eat something more substantial than ice cream and we'd be able to last longer. That just sounds like crazy talk to me, since the ice cream here is very good, and they also seem to have a good attitude toward whipping cream. In any case, we finally ended up outside Prague castle, where you can see for miles out over the red tile roofs of the city. There is a stone railing lined with photographers and couples manhandling each other. The descent has dozens of equally attractive vistas, where the various cross-streets converge to give a series of unexpected views of the buildings.
Salvador Dali - more than just melted clocks
Who knew? Probably everyone but me. When Mike was young, he had the photo on his wall of Salvador Dali and all his things being thrown through the air. So we went today to an exhibition of Salvador Dali, and his famous surrealist work was not only the least interesting, it was also not the bulk of the exhibit. He did a whole series of ceramic tiles with colourful prints of horses-Don Quixote, St. George, Lady Godiva, and so on. They were just brilliant. There was a small statue of Durer's Rhinoceros. There were some gold plates, enameled with dark blue, then scratched to let the gold through. They had images of women, mostly, and one with a horse that reminded me of the handwriting exercises we used to do on the blackboard in Grade Four. He also had a whole room full of watercolour illustrations for Dante's Inferno. Many of these seemed to me not as interesting, but some of them were very fine.
Alfons Mucha - more than just calendar girls
Paired with the Dali exhibit was one for the Bohemian artist Mucha, who I knew primarily through his colour lithographs of seasonal ladies in filmy clothes. But he actually had a massive body of work, including designs for currency and stamps, and a set of images intended to be used for doing frescoes in the city hall, based on allegorical attributes like diligence, courage, industry, and so on. There were also plenty of lithographs of ladies in filmy clothing, including my personal favourite: a life-size poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Medea. She looks as mad as a hatter. Mucha's life wasn't without its own tribulations too, apparently, with various periods of what the flier describes as "horrible deprivation." Born in 1860, he died in 1939, "shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo."
Prague's Jewish Community
Lucie Dolezalova, who arranged the workshop here in Prague, also arranged an afternoon tour of several important Jewish sites in Prague. So I put on my paper yarmulke and followed our guide, who was basically Meryl Streep's younger, cuter sister, into the Old-New Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue still operating in the city. It has several peculiar features. For example, medieval law dictated that the Synagogue had to be a shorter building than the lowest Christian church in the city, so to make the interior still seem impressive, they dug the floor lower. Then the Gothic arches were a problem, since they form crosses, so they modified them so that they wouldn't. The place where the cantor stood has an interesting medieval convention-it has a half-step cut lower into the floor, so that the singer could step down into it when he sang the part about calling to God from out of the depths. Another interesting fact is that this is the Synagogue where the Rabbi Low created the Golem as a protector of the people. They say the Golem is still here, waiting in the attic, although I missed whether it was the attic of the Synagogue, which seems unlikely to me, or the palace. Our guide also pointed out a variety of numerological points around the building. For example, the columns were octagonal and there were two of them, totaling 18, which is a number that sounds like the word for "life." I got the impression that this kind of symbolism in the architecture isn't unusual, though.
Our next stop was the Jewish Museum, which had been a Synagogue at one time. After the Nazis transported and killed two out of every three Jewish people in the area, it wasn't needed any more. But at one point the Communist authorities agreed it could be used for commemorative purposes, so someone retrieved the Nazi records, and they wrote on the walls inside the building the names and demographic information about all the 80,000 people who'd been transported and killed. Then the Communists changed their minds, and whitewashed out the names. After they left, the people went back again and rewrote all the 80,000 names. It is one amazing interior.
Upstairs in the Jewish Museum is a selection from thousands of children's drawings made at Terezin, which was a "show camp" arranged outside Prague for the Red Cross to visit. They had music pavilions and artists, and children and old people, and coffee shops. There was even a local currency that showed Pharaoh holding Moses. The Red Cross visited in June 1944 and made a short documentary film. In October, the Nazis shipped everyone off to the ovens. But 45 suitcases packed with children's drawings remain.
After the harrowing experience of the children's drawings and the walls with the names, we went next to a Jewish cemetery, begun in the fifteenth century and closed in the 1780s. It is a relatively small plot of ground, but has 12 levels piled one on top of the other, so it is currently at the second storey of the nearby buildings. As they added each new layer, they tried to lift the tombstones up, with the result being a field of clusters of stones of various ages and degrees of dilapidation. When they buried someone, one tradition was to put a piece of broken glass on each of the eyes. Another was to write something complimentary on the gravestone. However, one of the stones in this cemetery apparently says "Here is buried a liar."
Finally, we stopped off at the Spanish Synagogue, which has a very unusual Moorish interior, a pipe organ, and a number of display cases with various objects. Even this beautiful building, however, has a horrific story associated with it. Rumour has it that the Spanish Synagogue was intended by the Nazis as a museum to a vanished race, since it was preserved intact during the war, packed as a warehouse with museum pieces. It is now a working Synagogue again.
Street people
The people who would like to ask if brother you can spare a dime differ from country to country. Although I never saw it, in Poland, apparently, they are often quite aggressive. Based on Piotr's description, I wouldn't have been surprised for the man with the belt to turn around afterward and demand a donation to his cause. In Prague, however, and in one spot in Cracow, the procedure appears to involve a degree of supplication that startled and alarmed both me and Milena. The person kneels in the street, not necessarily in a warm cozy spot, but perhaps where there is some refuse or mud. They have a container in front of them, and bend over with outstretched hands on either side of the hat or whatever it is. They don't look up, either. It was a singularly effective approach, at least for those of us who weren't used to it, but I think I rather prefer the chatty, sometimes even sociable, interactions we're used to on Whyte.
Piotr Michura - prince among men
It occurred to me just today that for almost three weeks now, Piotr has been kindly and quietly arranging my daily life. I've gotten used to saying "Piotr?" whenever I feel lost, and he pulls out a map. If I need to enter a building, I look again and there's the door, being held open by Piotr. Milena finally broke under the strain of this unremitting courtesy, and asked why he insisted on us going first. At that moment, we were about to descend a staircase into a restaurant. "You never know what's down there," Piotr said. I'm going to miss him in Hong Kong.
Museum Gift Shops
It is with the best of intentions, really it is, that we set out on our various treks to try to appreciate the art and culture of a place. But it sometimes happens, occasionally, that we arrive tired at the national Czech industrial crafts display, or that we realize too late that the Franz Kafka Museum is likely to be a bit depressing. On these occasions, we've developed the strategy of visiting just the gift shop. "You can get a lot," Milena says, "from a Museum Gift Shop. All the good stuff is reproduced in postcards and t-shirts and calendars. And you can take it home."
Amadeus
We had dinner on our last night in Prague at a nice little restaurant called Tri Stoleti, on Misenska Street. They had one of the freshest cheese boards we've eaten here, and we've eaten a lot of cheese boards. They also had a chocolate-based pasta sauce that Stefan and Milena seemed to find surprisingly good. You will recall this particular street because it was a location for the movie Amadeus. When Mozart's Requiem is playing, carriages are clattering over the cobblestones, and the buildings are looming on each side in a particularly medieval way, that's where I ate my dinner.
One Big Medieval Book
Lucie also kindly arranged a visit to a display of the world's largest illuminated manuscript. It was compiled, if that's the right word, in a 12th-century Benedictine monastery called Podlazic. The Codex Gigas contains a variety of texts, including a Bible and some spells. Most famous is probably a full-page illustration of the devil, who has two tongues and a green face. This image is one reason for the vernacular name of this book, which is The Devil's Bible. A single monk wrote the Codex Gigas by hand, and also illustrated, and illuminated it, then bound it in a massive binding. The project probably took ten years or more. The whole book is a metre tall and half a metre wide, and weighs 75 kg. It has more than five hundred pages, made from about 150 donkeys and calves. One of the photos on display included a section of parchment that had been repaired with stitching that looked like the sewing on a baseball.
The Company We Keep
The Codex Gigas display consisted of two floors of glass cases with archaeological materials and other medieval books, along with informational posters. On the second floor there was also a video, which was playing in Czech when I looked at it, and a series of photos of some of the pages. Luckily, we had a room full of medievalists from the workshop with us, and they were very informative on some of the details. "No, that's not a part that's been blacked out by censors-it's a dark background for gold lettering, which has since disappeared, or perhaps didn't register very well on the photo." "No, that's not a page they forgot to write-it's a list of the people who died at the monastery, and there were only enough of them to fill up the first quarter of the first column." Monique walked up at that point, glanced at the poster, and said something to our Hungarian colleague in medieval Latin by way of politely confirming her first impression. She was, of course, correct.
The Vault Room
The two long corridors of information were all very well and good, but the heart of the display was a locked and climate-controlled vault room, which contained a glass case with the actual manuscript in it. We got time-stamped tickets and were admitted at half-hour intervals. Behind the first doors was another empty room, where we promised that we had no hidden cameras or cell phones. Then the guide took us into the sanctum sanctorum, where an informational tape was playing in Czech, and the Codex Gigas was on display to the public, open to the famous spread with the devil on one hand and the kingdom of heaven on the other. I thought that the Kingdom of Heaven bore an uncanny resemblance to a game of Snakes and Ladders, but maybe that was just me.
Scholarly Privileges
I also sensed a certain level of academic frustration in the vault room. Here were a group of international scholars, well used to donning the cotton gloves and delicately handling the most precious documents on Earth, and they were being treated like tourists, restrained from this tasty stack of donkey hides by a glass case and an indifferent Czech official. One of our Romanian colleagues, an expert in eighteenth-century Moldavian missionary geography, actually went so far as to ask if there were any way to request that someone turn a page, but he was coldly rebuffed. So we never actually got to see any text in this giant codex-just the pictures of the fork-tongued devil and the Snakes and Ladders game. I didn't feel the sting quite so much as the others, partly because my command of medieval Czech could do with a bit of polishing.
Rough Talk about Podlazic
One of the informational posters describing the Benedictine monastery responsible for the Devil's Bible mentioned that a visiting Bishop once wrote a damning letter about the place. Whereas in earlier and happier times, he said, there were 40 monks busily acting like monks, now in this degenerate age the Abbot spends his whole time playing poker and they only do the masses twice a day. The poster went on to say that of course this was an exaggeration-it was very unlikely that there were ever as many as 40 monks at Podlazic.
The Library of the Queen of Sweden
The last thing I want to tell everyone about the Codex Gigas is the first thing I ever heard about it, namely that it was stolen by the Swedes when they raided the monastery four hundred years ago. It has been stored since then in the library of the Queen of Sweden. They haven't actually given it back, either, but instead it is on loan for the exhibit. "Four hundred years is too long," one of our colleagues said regretfully. "At that point, it's finder's keepers."
Central European Tour Guides
One of the ways to make a buck here in Prague is to set up as a tour guide. I noticed that Meryl Streep's sister was wearing a plastic identity card clipped to her jacket, that identified her as a registered guide, and at several places where we needed otherwise to buy tickets, because we were in her group they just waved us through. However, there also appear to be freelancers in this business, who stand in the central squares and hold up handwritten signs that indicate, usually in broken English, that they are top guides and can be trusted. Monique, our colleague from Paris, was amused by the crowds following these people, in part because the guides invariably held some kind of unique object in the air so that everyone would know where they were in the larger crowd. "If you ever get lonely here," Monique quipped, "you just have to hold up an umbrella and gather some followers."
Noon Clock Vigil
The central cathedral in the central square has a very fancy central clock on it. People gather from all over the world, idlers mostly who can't find regular employment, and stand around waiting for noon. We happened to be there one day, having gotten out of bed early to meet Stefan, and so we got to witness the procession of the saints. On the stroke of noon, doors open on either side of the clock, and the twelve apostles or somebody walks past the open doors, still inside the clock, but clearly moving. "That's it?" Milena asked. "Ah, those were heady times, in the Middle Ages," I told her. Then the crowd rapidly dispersed, each following their own umbrella-wielding leader.
Czech Air
Just as LOT airlines has its idiosyncrasies, so does Czech Air. One of them was in the design of the little tables that let down from the back of the chair in front of you. On this plane, there was a cupholder built into the back of the little table, so that if all you had were a cup, you didn't have to use the entire table. A less useful innovation is the advertising on the back of the disposable cloths covering the headrests. Ours held ads for a new model of the Skoda, which was originally a Czech car company, now owned by Volkswagen. This model features a light that shines sideways to help you see around upcoming corners. The text on the baggage tag was also interesting. Here's what it wanted to tell me: "This is not the luggage ticket described by Article 4 of the Warsaw Convention as amended by the Hague Protocol, 1955." "Okay," I thought. "Thanks for the heads-up on that." Another oddity on Czech Air was the in-flight magazine; the cover story was about Miss World, in the back there was a short story about adultery, and in the middle somewhere there was a separate set of tasteful nude photos.
Student Housing
We took a taxi from the airport, which was driven by an elderly Harpo Marx. Despite a somewhat irreverent approach to traffic signage, he managed to deliver us in one piece to a student dormitory. It is a huge complex with six storeys, and many of the balconies have gardens with hanging plants. The central space in front has a giant pole with klieg lights on it, and Milena swears there are air raid sirens up there too. The dorm rooms are quite large with a kitchen and a built-in bathtub that is actually long enough for me, which is something I haven't seen since I lived at Mary Noonan's B&B in Saskatoon. The bathroom sink is man-sized, and there is plenty of water pressure. Unfortunately, as in Krakow, the beds are more along the lines of cots. We are just a short walk from the subway, which is very good. In three fast stops it took us to the local shopping mall, and in five stops with a transfer will drop us in the heart of Prague, at the spot called Muzeum.
Secure Student Housing
Unfortunately, there are also guards on the main floor, who keep your keys when you leave the facility. When we checked in, they filled out a two-page ledger with information about each of us. There was a small moment of excitement when they realized that I was born in the Queen City, Regina. I didn't explain that it was in Saskatchewan, and if the Queen ever visited, it wasn't for long. The other noticeable thing is that there are plenty of locks. The door to the dorm room locks. There is an internal door that also locks, with an old-fashioned skeleton key. Between locking the outside door and unlocking the inside one, you are trapped in a small entranceway between two locked doors. There are four rooms to a hallway, and the door to that hallway also locks, and has a big sign on both sides to remind you to lock it. "I don't think that Canadian fire inspectors would approve of this," Milena says, as we turn the key to lock ourselves into the third layer of security, not counting the men at the front desk. Certainly leaving in a hurry would be impossible, but I guess there's always the balcony.
Too Cool for Cats
If you've ever wondered where all the cool kids went, they are in Prague. All ages, all sizes, many styles of them, but here they are, riding the subway, lounging against walls, talking energetically in pubs. Marley and her friends could walk in here, no questions asked. Here's a skinny blonde woman in her twenties, wearing a torn jacket and shit-kicking boots, standing with her feet absently turned out in fifth position. There's a middle aged guy in skinny plaid pants with bright yellow socks and a pair of what look to me like vintage Converse sneakers. On the corner are a couple of eighties rockers, perhaps Billy Idol and his younger brother, now working in industry and feeling the weather change in their bones. Nobody seems to look much at anybody else, but as you walk down the street you can't help but notice how cool everybody is, partly because there are so many cool people to look at and nobody compromises themselves by looking. Milena tells me that Vin Diesel's action movie TripleX is set in Prague. Piotr says the national passion is for conversation, usually over beer, and the pubs are like salons, with regulars who meet in a favorite location over well-established topics. The per capita consumption of beer in Prague is apparently one of the highest in the world.
City of Men
Based on the in-flight Men's magazine and the good plumbing, combined with the Spartan domestic interiors and the lack of a shower curtain, not to mention our time downtown with the many pubs, I am beginning to think that Prague is a man's city in the same way that Sweden is a country of women. Without the mitigating influence of the other gender, a number of creepy peculiarities can emerge. I think of those domestic interiors full of chintz curtains, lace doilies, and small porcelain objects, clearly designed to forestall abrupt movements by large creatures. Once we started looking for evidence to support this theory, there is of course plenty. Not that you can prove much using this method. But one of the pieces of evidence is in the quantities of things. Milena ordered a cup of tea one morning, and was delivered hot water in a glass large enough to hold an entire beer, with two large tea bags and three-quarters of a lemon to go with it.
A Murder of Goths
Well, maybe it was a gaggle. In any case, as we were walking along the street today, we came across a crowd of maybe 35 or 40 people, all Goths of various shapes and sizes, just standing together or sitting on the sidewalk. Other people were sort of wending a path through them, so we did the same. Afterward, I asked Milena and Piotr what they thought the Goths were waiting for. "It's a sale," Milena said. "Of black," Piotr added.
Escalators in Prague
The escalators here run at twice the speed of escalators everywhere else, and many of them are also twice as long. The people appear to be leaning forward on the uphill ones, as if they were leaning into a strong wind, which is sometimes the case if the escalator happens to be one coming out of the underground. Another peculiarity is that the handrail moves slightly faster than the escalator, so if you actually hold onto it, you end up slowly leaning over further and further. This isn't something anyone here actually notices, however, since they are too cool to use the handrails. Another thing they are too cool to do is leave each other alone while escalating. It is not uncommon to see couples pressed together with their tongues in each other's mouths.
The View from the Castle
Prague really does have some remarkable views. We rode the funicular today up the hill to the monastery, then walked the seventy-five miles or so over to the castle grounds. I insisted on stopping every two hours for ice cream. After the third stop, Piotr suggested maybe we should eat something more substantial than ice cream and we'd be able to last longer. That just sounds like crazy talk to me, since the ice cream here is very good, and they also seem to have a good attitude toward whipping cream. In any case, we finally ended up outside Prague castle, where you can see for miles out over the red tile roofs of the city. There is a stone railing lined with photographers and couples manhandling each other. The descent has dozens of equally attractive vistas, where the various cross-streets converge to give a series of unexpected views of the buildings.
Salvador Dali - more than just melted clocks
Who knew? Probably everyone but me. When Mike was young, he had the photo on his wall of Salvador Dali and all his things being thrown through the air. So we went today to an exhibition of Salvador Dali, and his famous surrealist work was not only the least interesting, it was also not the bulk of the exhibit. He did a whole series of ceramic tiles with colourful prints of horses-Don Quixote, St. George, Lady Godiva, and so on. They were just brilliant. There was a small statue of Durer's Rhinoceros. There were some gold plates, enameled with dark blue, then scratched to let the gold through. They had images of women, mostly, and one with a horse that reminded me of the handwriting exercises we used to do on the blackboard in Grade Four. He also had a whole room full of watercolour illustrations for Dante's Inferno. Many of these seemed to me not as interesting, but some of them were very fine.
Alfons Mucha - more than just calendar girls
Paired with the Dali exhibit was one for the Bohemian artist Mucha, who I knew primarily through his colour lithographs of seasonal ladies in filmy clothes. But he actually had a massive body of work, including designs for currency and stamps, and a set of images intended to be used for doing frescoes in the city hall, based on allegorical attributes like diligence, courage, industry, and so on. There were also plenty of lithographs of ladies in filmy clothing, including my personal favourite: a life-size poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Medea. She looks as mad as a hatter. Mucha's life wasn't without its own tribulations too, apparently, with various periods of what the flier describes as "horrible deprivation." Born in 1860, he died in 1939, "shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo."
Prague's Jewish Community
Lucie Dolezalova, who arranged the workshop here in Prague, also arranged an afternoon tour of several important Jewish sites in Prague. So I put on my paper yarmulke and followed our guide, who was basically Meryl Streep's younger, cuter sister, into the Old-New Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue still operating in the city. It has several peculiar features. For example, medieval law dictated that the Synagogue had to be a shorter building than the lowest Christian church in the city, so to make the interior still seem impressive, they dug the floor lower. Then the Gothic arches were a problem, since they form crosses, so they modified them so that they wouldn't. The place where the cantor stood has an interesting medieval convention-it has a half-step cut lower into the floor, so that the singer could step down into it when he sang the part about calling to God from out of the depths. Another interesting fact is that this is the Synagogue where the Rabbi Low created the Golem as a protector of the people. They say the Golem is still here, waiting in the attic, although I missed whether it was the attic of the Synagogue, which seems unlikely to me, or the palace. Our guide also pointed out a variety of numerological points around the building. For example, the columns were octagonal and there were two of them, totaling 18, which is a number that sounds like the word for "life." I got the impression that this kind of symbolism in the architecture isn't unusual, though.
Our next stop was the Jewish Museum, which had been a Synagogue at one time. After the Nazis transported and killed two out of every three Jewish people in the area, it wasn't needed any more. But at one point the Communist authorities agreed it could be used for commemorative purposes, so someone retrieved the Nazi records, and they wrote on the walls inside the building the names and demographic information about all the 80,000 people who'd been transported and killed. Then the Communists changed their minds, and whitewashed out the names. After they left, the people went back again and rewrote all the 80,000 names. It is one amazing interior.
Upstairs in the Jewish Museum is a selection from thousands of children's drawings made at Terezin, which was a "show camp" arranged outside Prague for the Red Cross to visit. They had music pavilions and artists, and children and old people, and coffee shops. There was even a local currency that showed Pharaoh holding Moses. The Red Cross visited in June 1944 and made a short documentary film. In October, the Nazis shipped everyone off to the ovens. But 45 suitcases packed with children's drawings remain.
After the harrowing experience of the children's drawings and the walls with the names, we went next to a Jewish cemetery, begun in the fifteenth century and closed in the 1780s. It is a relatively small plot of ground, but has 12 levels piled one on top of the other, so it is currently at the second storey of the nearby buildings. As they added each new layer, they tried to lift the tombstones up, with the result being a field of clusters of stones of various ages and degrees of dilapidation. When they buried someone, one tradition was to put a piece of broken glass on each of the eyes. Another was to write something complimentary on the gravestone. However, one of the stones in this cemetery apparently says "Here is buried a liar."
Finally, we stopped off at the Spanish Synagogue, which has a very unusual Moorish interior, a pipe organ, and a number of display cases with various objects. Even this beautiful building, however, has a horrific story associated with it. Rumour has it that the Spanish Synagogue was intended by the Nazis as a museum to a vanished race, since it was preserved intact during the war, packed as a warehouse with museum pieces. It is now a working Synagogue again.
Street people
The people who would like to ask if brother you can spare a dime differ from country to country. Although I never saw it, in Poland, apparently, they are often quite aggressive. Based on Piotr's description, I wouldn't have been surprised for the man with the belt to turn around afterward and demand a donation to his cause. In Prague, however, and in one spot in Cracow, the procedure appears to involve a degree of supplication that startled and alarmed both me and Milena. The person kneels in the street, not necessarily in a warm cozy spot, but perhaps where there is some refuse or mud. They have a container in front of them, and bend over with outstretched hands on either side of the hat or whatever it is. They don't look up, either. It was a singularly effective approach, at least for those of us who weren't used to it, but I think I rather prefer the chatty, sometimes even sociable, interactions we're used to on Whyte.
Piotr Michura - prince among men
It occurred to me just today that for almost three weeks now, Piotr has been kindly and quietly arranging my daily life. I've gotten used to saying "Piotr?" whenever I feel lost, and he pulls out a map. If I need to enter a building, I look again and there's the door, being held open by Piotr. Milena finally broke under the strain of this unremitting courtesy, and asked why he insisted on us going first. At that moment, we were about to descend a staircase into a restaurant. "You never know what's down there," Piotr said. I'm going to miss him in Hong Kong.
Museum Gift Shops
It is with the best of intentions, really it is, that we set out on our various treks to try to appreciate the art and culture of a place. But it sometimes happens, occasionally, that we arrive tired at the national Czech industrial crafts display, or that we realize too late that the Franz Kafka Museum is likely to be a bit depressing. On these occasions, we've developed the strategy of visiting just the gift shop. "You can get a lot," Milena says, "from a Museum Gift Shop. All the good stuff is reproduced in postcards and t-shirts and calendars. And you can take it home."
Amadeus
We had dinner on our last night in Prague at a nice little restaurant called Tri Stoleti, on Misenska Street. They had one of the freshest cheese boards we've eaten here, and we've eaten a lot of cheese boards. They also had a chocolate-based pasta sauce that Stefan and Milena seemed to find surprisingly good. You will recall this particular street because it was a location for the movie Amadeus. When Mozart's Requiem is playing, carriages are clattering over the cobblestones, and the buildings are looming on each side in a particularly medieval way, that's where I ate my dinner.
One Big Medieval Book
Lucie also kindly arranged a visit to a display of the world's largest illuminated manuscript. It was compiled, if that's the right word, in a 12th-century Benedictine monastery called Podlazic. The Codex Gigas contains a variety of texts, including a Bible and some spells. Most famous is probably a full-page illustration of the devil, who has two tongues and a green face. This image is one reason for the vernacular name of this book, which is The Devil's Bible. A single monk wrote the Codex Gigas by hand, and also illustrated, and illuminated it, then bound it in a massive binding. The project probably took ten years or more. The whole book is a metre tall and half a metre wide, and weighs 75 kg. It has more than five hundred pages, made from about 150 donkeys and calves. One of the photos on display included a section of parchment that had been repaired with stitching that looked like the sewing on a baseball.
The Company We Keep
The Codex Gigas display consisted of two floors of glass cases with archaeological materials and other medieval books, along with informational posters. On the second floor there was also a video, which was playing in Czech when I looked at it, and a series of photos of some of the pages. Luckily, we had a room full of medievalists from the workshop with us, and they were very informative on some of the details. "No, that's not a part that's been blacked out by censors-it's a dark background for gold lettering, which has since disappeared, or perhaps didn't register very well on the photo." "No, that's not a page they forgot to write-it's a list of the people who died at the monastery, and there were only enough of them to fill up the first quarter of the first column." Monique walked up at that point, glanced at the poster, and said something to our Hungarian colleague in medieval Latin by way of politely confirming her first impression. She was, of course, correct.
The Vault Room
The two long corridors of information were all very well and good, but the heart of the display was a locked and climate-controlled vault room, which contained a glass case with the actual manuscript in it. We got time-stamped tickets and were admitted at half-hour intervals. Behind the first doors was another empty room, where we promised that we had no hidden cameras or cell phones. Then the guide took us into the sanctum sanctorum, where an informational tape was playing in Czech, and the Codex Gigas was on display to the public, open to the famous spread with the devil on one hand and the kingdom of heaven on the other. I thought that the Kingdom of Heaven bore an uncanny resemblance to a game of Snakes and Ladders, but maybe that was just me.
Scholarly Privileges
I also sensed a certain level of academic frustration in the vault room. Here were a group of international scholars, well used to donning the cotton gloves and delicately handling the most precious documents on Earth, and they were being treated like tourists, restrained from this tasty stack of donkey hides by a glass case and an indifferent Czech official. One of our Romanian colleagues, an expert in eighteenth-century Moldavian missionary geography, actually went so far as to ask if there were any way to request that someone turn a page, but he was coldly rebuffed. So we never actually got to see any text in this giant codex-just the pictures of the fork-tongued devil and the Snakes and Ladders game. I didn't feel the sting quite so much as the others, partly because my command of medieval Czech could do with a bit of polishing.
Rough Talk about Podlazic
One of the informational posters describing the Benedictine monastery responsible for the Devil's Bible mentioned that a visiting Bishop once wrote a damning letter about the place. Whereas in earlier and happier times, he said, there were 40 monks busily acting like monks, now in this degenerate age the Abbot spends his whole time playing poker and they only do the masses twice a day. The poster went on to say that of course this was an exaggeration-it was very unlikely that there were ever as many as 40 monks at Podlazic.
The Library of the Queen of Sweden
The last thing I want to tell everyone about the Codex Gigas is the first thing I ever heard about it, namely that it was stolen by the Swedes when they raided the monastery four hundred years ago. It has been stored since then in the library of the Queen of Sweden. They haven't actually given it back, either, but instead it is on loan for the exhibit. "Four hundred years is too long," one of our colleagues said regretfully. "At that point, it's finder's keepers."
Central European Tour Guides
One of the ways to make a buck here in Prague is to set up as a tour guide. I noticed that Meryl Streep's sister was wearing a plastic identity card clipped to her jacket, that identified her as a registered guide, and at several places where we needed otherwise to buy tickets, because we were in her group they just waved us through. However, there also appear to be freelancers in this business, who stand in the central squares and hold up handwritten signs that indicate, usually in broken English, that they are top guides and can be trusted. Monique, our colleague from Paris, was amused by the crowds following these people, in part because the guides invariably held some kind of unique object in the air so that everyone would know where they were in the larger crowd. "If you ever get lonely here," Monique quipped, "you just have to hold up an umbrella and gather some followers."
Noon Clock Vigil
The central cathedral in the central square has a very fancy central clock on it. People gather from all over the world, idlers mostly who can't find regular employment, and stand around waiting for noon. We happened to be there one day, having gotten out of bed early to meet Stefan, and so we got to witness the procession of the saints. On the stroke of noon, doors open on either side of the clock, and the twelve apostles or somebody walks past the open doors, still inside the clock, but clearly moving. "That's it?" Milena asked. "Ah, those were heady times, in the Middle Ages," I told her. Then the crowd rapidly dispersed, each following their own umbrella-wielding leader.
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