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.