Café Mia

I find myself in a very small place right now, a new (for me) little kavarna in fuego’s neighborhood. It is a nice place, warm, with four tables and three barstools. While it doesn’t have a fireplace, it does have a gas space heater that would probably be very pleasant to sit in front of in the event that winter were to make another attempt.

I am at the smallest table, with my laptop in my lap to leave room for beer on the table. (The tea was excellent, but I am starting to twitch.) In the wicker chair opposite mine, the bartender also has a notebook open in her lap. The only other customers are a pair of the bartender’s girlfriends; the very tall brunette is drinking espresso while the blonde sips her dark beer.

That’s it. Me, three pretty girls, and beer. This is a very good place to be.

An aritficial rose, by any other name…

I am in a café called Meduza right now; it is early afternoon and there is already far too much caffeine in my system. fuego tells me that I should recognize the place, having seen the movie Hostel — in the film the place is ostensibly in Amsterdam, and some semblance of plot development occurs there. If you watch the movie (I don’t recommend it, but those things happen), you can snap out of your coma for that scene and tell yourself, “hey, Jerry wrote a blog episode there!”

If I look up from my laptop and past fuego’s shoulder, there is a woman drinking some sort of tall, layered drink that might involve chocolate. She is distracting; I think she is used to people looking at her, but for me the fascination is a little different than the effect she is trying to achieve, I suspect. By any empirical measure she is attractive; her hair is long, with multiple layers of varying blondeness, her eyebrows are perfect arches over her wide brown eyes. Her skin is a deep salon bronze, her lip color carefully selected to match. Her clothes are simple but work well on her. The overall effect isn’t beautiful, however, and certainly not pretty; she is well-crafted.

As I wrote that last sentence she was joined by a friend (an English tutor, it turns out), very American, and I will admit that the artificial woman’s voice is very pleasant, smooth and low so that her words stay at her table, in sharp contrast to the penetrating nasal quality of the newcomer. So she’s got that going for her, and that’s a pretty good thing. She’s got the Czech cheekbones as well. The natural qualities are there, but she has chosen to hide them beneath a layer of artifice, an attempt at perfection that undermines and distracts from what is already there.

Clearly, this woman needs a coach, someone in her corner to give her the confidence to let her genuine qualities speak for themselves. Someone like me. She’s caught me looking her way a couple of times, and I know what she’s thinking: “That guy obviously has a discerning eye and a healthy disdain for convention. I bet I could learn a lot from him.” It’s either that or she’s thinking “Someone should teach that guy to dress better, and trim that scruffy beard.”

It could be either one. Fifty-fifty, I figure.

Saxkova Palačinkarna

I’m going to start with a nitpick. Either my chair is just a bit too low or my table is just a little too high. So far, that is my only complaint, and it does force me to sit up straight as I type.

As I intimated in my previous post, I was in search of a place to hang and write tonight. I poked my head into a number of crowded bars, but even ones with a table available just didn’t do it for me. I tromped around the neighborhood, looking for a place with the right atmosphere. (Note: the typical neighborhood bar in the Czech Republic has three things: A tap, tables, and a TV. There is little further attempt to create any sort of atmosphere, as it is assumed the smoke will obscure the far wall anyway.) Tonight every place with any sort of atmosphere had a private party in it, except the place with a big hole in the floor where the restrooms used to be.

I’ve walked past this place many times, usually on the weekends. It is close to Vinarna Jana, which I wrote about recently, and like that place has restrictive hours that mean when I can’t find one of my regular places to go, I can’t come here, either. This place isn’t much to look at on the outside, so it’s never been a high priority for me. That, my friends, is about to change. This is a very comfortable place.

(I’ve noticed in my writings that ‘comfortable’ is a word I use quite a lot, and not just to describe places. I consciously go back and change it when editing, although for me there’s really not much better than ‘comfortable’. It is, for me, a superlative.)

Somewhat larger than the Little Café Near Home, it is still one of the smaller places I’ve partonized in this country. The section I’m in has five tables, a couple of them pretty large, and there are three more through the arched-brick opening to the bar. The light is low; the textured paint gives a terra cotta feel. One wall is dominated by a mural depicting a lovely Old Europe boulevard, impressionistic and executed in earth tones. Dark wood floors, solid wooden furniture, and wood ceiling beams complete the effect.

Palačinkarna is Czech for creperie, which is French for place with lots of yummy crepes on the menu. I can’t wait to be hungry here. I haven’t seen the product, but the prices look quite reasonable. It is quiet in here, and well-ventilated. Of course, the fact that there are more female patrons here than male has nothing at all to do with my judgement, except that the distaff like smoky beer barns even less than I do.

I could go on, but as I type, I’m watching my battery dwindle to nothing. There has to be an outlet around here somewhere.

Edited to add: There is, in fact, an outlet right by my table. The mornings I wake up with something to write but know if I even glance at the Internet it’ll be noon before I get anything done, you can find me right here.

Rainy Afternoon

It’s a gray day here in the city of 100 spires, the air chilly but not freezing, perhaps 5C or so. I’ll be meeting up with fuego later to watch the Czechs take the ice against the Finns, but in the meantime I find myself outside my usual neighborhood. I let my feet guide me. I passed up on the Zlatý Had (Golden Snake), traveled one more block and now I am sitting now in Kavárna V sebém nebi. It’s a very pleasant place. I’m sitting by the window, watching as the world drifts past outside — pretty girls with colorful umbrellas, workers in coveralls hunched over with cigarettes clamped firmly between stoic lips, baby carriages with elaborate clear plastic rain covers.

There was something else that it took me a while to put my finger on, but now I have it. They make the coffee quietly here. I think we’ve managed to somehow deafen ourselves to it, but the modern coffee house is a very noisy place. The grinders are noisy, and the steam valve makes a racket. Now I’m sitting here as the guy behind the bar is very quietly steaming up a latté (or whatever it is one steams up), and now that I know it’s possible to make coffee without making noise, I am all the more perplexed by people’s tolerance of all those other loud places.

Right now the music is a funky, almost calypso cover of “Smoke on the Water”. The conversation around me is muted as well, since there is little background noise to compete with. When I got here I was the only one (at least on the ground floor), but other customers have arrived in a steady stream. They know each other, that much is obvious, and the mood is brightening even as the day gets darker.