Tag Archives: Prague

Sometimes, you see things.

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I am sitting in a bar, watching a woman with no shirt serving beer to a man with no nose. Actually, I have seen that before, in this very bar. What I had not seen before was the event that drove me here.

First, a small detour. I was sitting in the Little Café Near Home when the call came in. I will be getting up absurdly early tomorrow morning. My last word from Athena had been costumes on Monday, shooting on Wednesday and Thursday. I got increasingly neurotic as I received no further word about costumes, and I sent Athena a couple of messages. No response. Tonight, while wrapping up my celebration of successful bumness, my phone rang. I am expected to be at a certain Metro station at 6 am. The good news: starting that early, overtime is a distinct possibility. The bad news: starting that early, I will be getting up even earlier.

But that’s not why I am here, now.

After the hokej (rhymes with hockey) game, Little Café Near Home cleared out. It was just me and Bechovins (rhymes with Bevins, only in Czech). Then another guy came in and started scooting furniture around in a nonsensical way. After some muddling he unplugged the now-quiet television and plugged in…

Guess. Go ahead and try. You won’t get it right, but if you guess something completely crazy and then read the next sentence, which will be more whacked-out than what you came up with, that will make the revelation all the choicer. Have you guessed? All right then.

…a hair clipper. Bechovins was getting a haircut. In a place that serves food. Faced with a choice between drinking in a bar where the only other guy was getting a haircut, drinking in a bar where women with no shirts serve men with no noses, and not drinking at all, I chose “B”.

The man with no nose is much more difficult not to stare at than the woman with no shirt. She is quite pretty, and if everyone here in the bar had a nose, she would be drawing my eye. Sadly for all, that is not the case. He has a piece of gauze taped with a big X over his face, and there is no bulge beneath. It has been this way long enough that I wonder why he has not come up with a better gauze holder, something more comfortable than tape. I don’t know how he lost his nose; there must be a story there. I hope that eventually he gets a new one. In the meantime, what bothers me most is the tape. But, like him, I am getting used to it.

Thanks!

Springtime in Prague

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Spring is here! It has nothing to do with the weather, although it is warm enough today for me to wear shorts. There are other signs, the subtle indicators that the season has changed. I was too wide-eyed last year to recognize the signs for what they were, but now I am a savvy veteran of the seasons.

It is road destruction season. Some bureaucrat in an anonymous building somewhere in the city pushed a button on his desk and thus did spring begin. Across the city piles of stones have appeared next to the patches of sand that used to be sidewalks. Entire streets have been dug up, creating larger piles of larger stones. Trams are diverted from their normal courses while crews stand around watching one guy with an arc welder work on the tracks.

I walked through downtown and the number of tourists has jumped dramatically in the last week, as well. Old Cars, tops down, slowly move through the crowds while tourists in the back seat snap photos. Crowds gather on the hour for the crushing disappointment that is the astronomical clock. Even in Strašnice you will find befuddled-looking folks holding maps of the city. There’s not much to see out in the Haunted City, but there they are. Some of the tourist traffic may be related to Easter holidays; we’ll see if it keeps up.

And here and there the signs are appearing in the windows of bars and pubs: Garden Open. Once more beer is available outdoors, and the city celebrates another winter endured, even as they turn a wary eye toward the river. The water level is high and still rising, and there’s a lot of snow in the mountains this year.

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Fringe Benefits

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The waiter here at U Kormidla just took the afternoon round of Slivovice (plum vodka) up to the people working in the kitchen. Hopefully that means they’ll be in an extra-good mood as they fix my lunch.

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Fresh Snow

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It is snowing this morning, here in the Haunted City. The flakes are light and fluffy, falling gently in the still air, covering the ground with several centimeters of pure white. (Note for Americans: centimeters is Czech for inches.) The old men and their wiener dogs are having a tough time of it this morning – the fluff is up well past weiner dog belly level and traction is tricky. Still they are out, doing what must be done. True Czechs, they know that snow comes and goes, but they will endure.

It is late enough, this morning, that others are out as well. Here at U Kormidla the joint is jumping in the very low-key way this place has. I am upstairs, and I’m trying not to stare as I figure out if one of the girls at a table I can see downstairs is one of my favorite bartenders at Cheap Beer Place. My eyes, it seems, are not what they were.

Ah, time. If I could just be like the older Czechs seem to be—somehow reconciled with its steady depredations, stoically enduring the everyday aches and pains of life as a side effect of not having died yet. Instead I spent yesterday stopped by a headache, unable to write anything that wasn’t pure poop, and turning for shelter from thought to a place where mental activity is optional and likely to be painful as well, headache or no. I went back and played online poker for fake money.

I described it already, the other time I tried it, so I won’t go into detail here, except to say that the only thing worse than playing poker with people who bet completely irrationally, seemingly without looking at their cards, is playing against those people and losing, which is what happened yesterday morning. That afternoon I had a mission: win back more fake money than I had lost. It took a while, and then I found myself playing with other players more at my level, my own mental acuity was recovering from its migrainal body-blow, and the shimmering in my vision went away, and I had a really good time. I ended up with a nice big pile of fake money and the ridiculous fantasy that maybe I should play for real money—I mean heck, I just made fifteen hundred bucks! Right?

Income thus assured I now must turn towards making at least a token effort to be a part of the world around me. I am behind on correspondences of all sorts, emails from nice people who are patient enough not to have written me off yet, people I haven’t seen in a long time, even phone text messages.

Yet all I really want to do right now is sit, sip my tea, and watch the snow drift down in the courtyard outside my window.

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A Night of Dark and Light

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Let’s go backwards tonight. We’ll start with now, and see if I can move backward faster than time moves forward. If it’s a tie, you will be stuck reading about the same moment until my fingers fail.

Now: Listening to a cover of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” by Linoleum at volumes that may not be healthy. This is good. Got the nice headphones on, so the neighbors are safe. I went looking for the original, a spacy, ethereal bit from around 1980, but this cover does justice.

Just as it was starting, Soup Boy withdrew his head and closed the door to my room. He had just come back from a quest to a bar/archery range. Yes, you read that right. Alcohol and deadly weapons. Of course it is not their policy to put the bows and arrows into the hands of dangerously drunk people. (I wasn’t there, mind you, but someone I knew once went there, and while they were going through the formalities he sat down and missed the chair, and after reassurances from his comrades the manager put a lethal weapon in his hands. Tonight, however, Soup Boy reported that the archery range was closed (hours are notoriously erratic there), so they were shooting pool instead.

I got a response back from fuego – he was home. We fired up Skype and discovered our favorite three words. He sent me a really cool tune called “Belladonna”. We unraveled bits of life and poked the decaying corpse of civilization with a stick. Or maybe I just complained that someone had consumed 2/3 of my hard-earned beers.

Soup Boy’s phone chimed on the sofa where it lay, to indicate it had received a text message. I unpacked my computer, plugged it in, and checked up on the ol’ media empire.

When I got home tonight, the place was empty. I wondered where everyone had gone, so I sent a message to Soup Boy and fuego.

I got off the metro just a little after midnight, and knowing that my beer supply at home was severely compromised, I turned to a haven I have not sought in a long time – Hanka’s Herna Snack Bar. The door was locked. It seems the place closes at midnight on Sundays. There were still people inside, and I might be mistaken, but the bartender may even have seen me and headed for the door as I turned my feet up the street. It’s hard to see into the place. I tromped toward home; the only other bar I knew was open between me and the domocile was a glitzy sports bar that is not the kind of place you sit alone with only your pivo for company and mutter to yourself in a vaguely insane manner. I decided to head home.

After Belladonna got off the metro at JzP and the doors to the train slid shut, I wondered if I should have offered to walk her home. Prague is a pretty safe town, but she had definitely wanted me to ride with her on the metro.

The three of us retired to a nearby café/club to discuss the movie and to just hang out. It was a pleasant time; the caffeine from the tea I drank combining well with the beer to make me jolly and chatty. Belladonna continued to try to hide the hole in her sweater, but I never did get the chance to suggest duct tape. Neither was in a position to stay out late, which was OK by me, although the conversation was pleasant. We spent a lot of time comparing cultures, and I would smile and nod as they discussed various med school classes. I was disappointed to learn that Firenze intended to return to El Salvador – Europe’s just not for her. I tried to talk her into running away to Shanghai with me. I don’t think she thought I was serious. I got a message from fuego saying he was at my place and had drunk some of my beer.

We got out of the movie and spent a moment looking at each other, wondering, what the hell was that?. I think the reasons we disliked the movie were not all the same, but the overall we agreed. Hostel blows. The movie starts with breasts and moves on to dismemberment; it is a movie that you would expect a group of fourteen-year-olds to write as they sit around a table at the pizzeria whacked out on Mountain Dew, each one trying to outdo the others: “You know what would be really, really sick…” All would laugh at the fingers-on-the-floor gag and then move on to the next shock-for-shock’s sake schlock. The writing was bad, the acting was poor, the editing was shit. There were points where the dancing and the music were so disconnected that the audience laughed. Continuity was a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t disaster.

One bit player put in a very good performance.

We settled into our seats while the ever-longer sequence of advertisements played. I am not exaggerating to say that movies here start twenty minutes after the projectors roll. Belladonna smelled good. I thought about the garlic soup and wondered if maybe I didn’t. She was fiddling with her sweater to conceal a hole in a not-too-embarassing area on her upper chest. I began to compose a duct-tape joke about it.

Firenze showed up and we bid farewell to Sophie. I gave Sophie a hard time because each time I’ve met her she’s left almost immediately.

I put away Kundera’s essays on the art of the novel when Belladonna and Sophie arrived. They sat down and I finished my Pilsner as we waited for Firenze. We talked about this and that, nothing earth-shattering. I reflected on my good fortune to be there, then, in a movie theatre lobby, sipping a beer, sharing conversation with two pretty and intelligent girls.

I think that is where I will begin the story for tonight.

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I’m a trendsetter…

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There are six tables in the little café near home. I was sitting in here, all alone, when suddenly the hordes descended. I was on a roll, word-wise, however, so I held my ground.

There is a very pretty girl who spends a lot of time here, and her boyfriend often brings his laptop when he eventually arrives. So I am no longer the only guy with technology who spends time here. I was pretty absorbed in my work, so I wasn’t monitoring the ebb and flow of humanity through the joint, but when I got up for a brief urine break I noticed a third laptop in action. Six tables, three laptops. Not bad for a place without WiFi.

But while the third laptop was interesting, the operator was arresting. Seated at the glowing screen she has the librarian look — blonde hair pulled back, glasses, printed material laid out next to the keyboard, a look of intense concentration on her face. And lips. Then she got up to select what tea she wanted, and, well, dang.

Amazingly, it has happened. Not to my benefit, I think, but I have seen someone who makes the computer an accessory that is downright sexy. There are some accouterments that not everyone can wear. I once saw a pretty girl, late at night, outside an all-night auto parts store, poking under the hood of her Mustang, face lit by the glow from the flashlight propped on the fender. (Honestly, I don’t remember if it was a Mustang, but if it wasn’t, it should have been.) While she remains the sexiest woman I have ever seen, laptop girl tonight was up there.

Lets face it. You’ve got your supermodels, who make a career of simply looking good, and then there are the truly sexy women. Granted, the most successful models are capable of exuding some intangible force of personality, but like a chain restaurant, they are constrained by the need to appeal to the widest possible audience. You are not going to see the woman I saw tonight in any fashion magazine. She wasn’t selling that. Women who fix cars, or work on laptops in cafés, women in the act of resourcefulness and creativity, thinking not about how they look but about how they’re going to get the job done, those are my kind of folks. On the right face, concentration can be very sexy.

She’s gone now – the time you are moving through reading this is much different than my time. Gone forever, probably. I’m not sure she did me any favors tonight raising the geek chic bar the way she did. Before I was an exotic foreign writer. Not bad. Now I’m a scruffy writer. I’m OK with that – it’s certainly true, after all, and my laptop, beat and battered, fits the look well.

Thanks!

See Spot Run

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I know the names of five of the regular dogs at this café, and three of them are Dino.

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And, here I am…

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I’ve got Internet in the ol’ domocile now. Actually, I’ve had it for a few days. Why, then, the sudden silence in the Media Empire? The answer is surprisingly simple: I have Internet in my home now.

You see, the first few days of near-unlimited high-speed access to every one and zero the world has to offer are a heady time. Oh yes, there is a virtual world calling out, saying only ‘taste me, swim in my fantasy’, and that is what I have done. The ones, the zeroes, they have thrown themselves at my retinas and eardrums by the billions, sacrificed and lost now in the transience of flashing neurons. But that’s OK, they were just copies of other ones and zeroes. The supply, it seems, is limitless, and soon it appears the distribution of them will be virtually unlimited as well.

The digifest is wearing off now, as I have had my fill of ridiculous japanese animation and my brain is exploding from the information regarding moving Jer’s Novel Writer to the GCC 4.0 (Apple version) compiler, which I will have to do to get my programs onto the Intel Macs.

On a related note, as my productivity recovered in the last few days I released a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer (0.6.0.0), and wrote a hell of a lot of Pirates. Just got to get learning Czech back onto the schedule and I’m golden!

Thanks!

Arrgh!

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Still no Internet at home (long story getting longer), and today they’re filming something (probably a commercial) at the bowling alley, and that seems to mean no Internet here, either. Of course I didn’t realize that until after I ordered food.

On the other hand, I do have a good view of the thoroughly uninteresting production in the lanes below. The one good part is that the dude is a really bad bowler, so time after time he’s rolling the ball, then turning and doing a high five with the pretty girl as his ball trundles off course. Rack ’em up and try again, sparky!

The owner of the place just came by to ask if I was using the WiFi, and when I explained that it wasn’t working today he was surprised. Maybe I’ll get some love here soon.

Thanks!

A bit of picture-taking

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Another warm day here in the city of a thousand spires, although not as unashamedly sunny as yesterday. I stayed in bed a little extra, but started getting antsy. I got up and sat at the computer for a while, poking at one project, prodding another, but not feeling inspired. I had been lamenting not putting the camera to use more often, so I loaded up the gear and headed to one of the many graveyards nearby, one that has a large church in the middle of it. I had ideas of the bare winter branches framing the spire against the sky, while grave markers huddled like sheep beneath.

There’s a reason I call what I do picture-taking rather than photography. My first observation: when a I look at something, it is amazing how much I do not see. A shot that I think is going to be a picture of a spire behind some trees turns out to be a picture of trees. Where the heck did that evergreen come from – the one taking up a third of the frame? Granted, I do try to include a little extra in the shot, with the intention of cropping later, but sometimes it’s just ridiculous.

One important technique for separating foreground and background is depth of focus, making the object of the picture sharp while keeping the rest of the busy world indistinct. I have many, many pictures that, in retrospect, would have benefitted greatly from a judicious use of that tool. (I can’t tell you how many snowy angel carvings in the very cluttered Olšansky Hřbitovy are lost to the background.) So today I was standing in a much more orderly graveyard, scratching my noggin, trying to remember which way to adjust the aperture to reduce the depth of focus, so my object is sharp and the rest isn’t. I remembered incorrectly, and cranked the aperture far in the wrong direction. I now have lots of pictures displaying the surrounding noise with remarkable clarity.

Live and learn, I guess, though in my case the latter half of that axiom has yet to kick in.

Thanks!

At the Helm in Strašnice

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U Kormidla is a new place (I think). It is a longer walk to come here than it is to go to Little Café Near Home, but if today is an indication, there are definitely times when the extra walk is worth it. The bar has a nautical theme, celebrating the Czech Republic’s long and highly regarded maritime tradition (‘Ahoy’ is, after all, the most common informal greeting.)

I made my way down the stairs from street level, and my immediate impression was highly favorable. Two pretty girls sat at the corner of the bar, not smoking. There was a large group filling the back of the place, all dressed in black (we’re in cemetary country, out here in StraÅ¡nice), also not smoking. I made myself comfortable, enjoyed the smoothness of a Kozel dark, and communicated easily with the waiter with his nice, slow diction.

It is not a big place (although it dwarfs Little Café Near Home), dim but not dark, filled with rich wood and occasional brass highlights. It tiptoes dangerously on the borderline of kitsch, but overall it works. All these non-smokers in here is probably a fluke, but even when someone does light up the fumes are whisked away from where I sit. There is a staircase that leads up to a few more tables and the kitchen. My Bora-Bora chicken was heavier than I would expect from an island delicacy, but hey, this is the Czech Republic.

It is time for me to mosey along, now, but I will be back.

Thanks!

Sunday Morning

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It is a balmy morning, well above freezing, easily the warmest day of this year. The sun was shining brightly as I made my way through the quiet streets of Strašnice; the only others out at this time on a Sunday morning are the old men and their wiener dogs.

What is any right-thinking non-wiener-dog-owning person doing out on a Sunday morning, no matter how bright and shiny it may be? What Siren song drew me from my home, my fortress of solitude, my haven in the hurly-burly world that is Strašnice? Fast food.

It was late when I got home last night. Really late. I was at Roma with fuego, and we all know how that can go. It was a night of Pirates and hockey. Pirates of the White Sand, I’m happy to report, is making progress. The version fuego brought back from the secret underground laboratories of North America is good enough we can actually show it to people, and many of the tweaks to make it even better are quite simple. Last night we worked up a list of improvements, and except for one really stupid bit that fuego seems to find delightful we’re in good shape. The last hour of the evening was dedicated to me finding new ways to explain how stupid that bit is.

I staggered home as the wee hours of the morning were growing up. I mounted the stairs and when I opened the door I was not hit by the blast of tropical air that Soup Boy prefers. He was still awake. Well, moving, anyway; awake might be a bit of a stretch. “Heater’s not working,” he managed to mumble. “No hot water, either.” I tried pushing the reset button on the heater, just as Soup Boy had already done, but you never know. He might not have pushed the button correctly. In this case, my button-pushing was no more effective than his, so I shuffled into my room and flopped into bed, too tired even to plug in the electric heater in my room.

This morning I awoke, perhaps a little later than usual, but usual is difficult to define. I shuffled around a bit, found a valve on the water heater to allow more water into the radiator system, and groped my way to the kitchen for some tea. Ah, tea, the leaf that built an empire, where would I be without your magical alkaloid? As the kettle hissed and burbled I stood, semi-conscious, contemplating the paper bag on the counter. Slowly the friendly logo and happy marketing slogans sank in. McDonald’s. As I looked at that bag the craving started, the conditioned reflex born of forty years of exposure to relentless marketing. I wanted some of that.

And so now I sit, far from home, tired, muddled, sated, nibbling the last of my fries, watching parents struggle with children who are not yet finished crawling through the giant hamster tubes. Man, I wish they had those when I was a tot.

Thanks!

Dancing ’till Dawn

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I was sitting at the Little Café Near Home, writing, when the message came. There’s some sort of Olympics Thing going on right now, so the TV was on, directly over my head, and the few other patrons were all turned in my direction but not looking at me. The two dogs in the place seemed indifferent to the sports, but were very disappointed that their owners were not allowing them to play. Such is the life of a large dog in a small café.

My phone chimed and when I got to a good stopping point in the prose, I hauled it out to find two messages from Belladonna. “Reserved Stones tickets”, one said; the other read “We’re going out tonight. Wanna come?” I slowly typed out a message to respond to both her texts, left out an important word, and sent my confusing reply, which was supposed to say that I was interested in the Rolling Stones in June but tonight I was working and would not be coming out to play.

Work was going well; I had thought of a very good nuance to the way Hunter is messed up in later chapters of The Monster Within. (Man, I’ll be glad when that book is published so I can get it out of my head.) Except for a brief stint of Internet access at the bowling alley I had been writing for 13 hours, but I wasn’t tired. When it works, you run with it. I was scruffy and wearing the same clothes as the day before. It was after 9 pm when Belladonna and Firenze finally convinced me I should come out. It was, after all, Saturday Night. I figured if they were going to stay out late enough I could scrub down and join them.

Stay out late enough? Hah. They weren’t even going to get started until midnight. The style here is to get to the club district before public transportation shuts down, and party until it starts back up again. So, at a time I would ordinarily be considering sweet slumber, I was heading back out the door. I found the designated place, was soon joined by the ladies, and after answering a few questions (“What do you mean, ‘the evening ended awkwardly and uncertainly’?”) we danced the night away.

It was fun. Toward the end my poor small-talk skills began to show — I’m good at listening but not so good at sustaining a conversation. I’m comfortable with silences; unfortunately the interesting things going on are all inside my head, where they stay.

The evening ended with a walk through silent cobbled streets, snow falling gently around us.

Thanks!

A night on the town.

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I have long thought it would be fun to go to a bar with a vast whiskey collection, throw down credit card, and have a knowledgeable bartender pour me a Tour of Scotland, providing wee sips of a wide variety of single malts and telling me about each one. Last night I came close.

There is a bar here in Prague, a copy of one in New York, apparently, called Books and Bar. Or was it Bar and Books? In any case, it is a bar, and shelves of books (mostly in German for some reason, and obviously not meant to be read) adorn one of the walls. It is more upscale than the places I usually find myself, but sometimes it’s fun to pretend I’m sophisticated, and since we had invited Belladonna to join us, it seemed like a good time to try a place that Soup Boy had been encouraging me to visit anyway. Soup Boy (storyboarder for Pirates and now my roommate) had invited some of his friends out as well, but only Little John was free. So we set out for the city center, hoping that Belladonna would also bring friends.

Another acquaintance of Soup Boy, who we will call Hole, spotted us entering the establishment and came in to say hi. We chatted a bit and then he went off to work out. The Boy and I sat, and soon after Belladonna arrived with two friends in tow, fellow med students. Conversation was pleasant and unforced, and when Little John arrived, adding his limitless energy to the affair, things were going quite nicely.

I ordered a flight of Whiskey – six small glasses of the good stuff. (I paid extra for the very, very good stuff, that cash from being an extra burning a hole in my pocket.) As I slowly made my way around the islands and the highlands I appreciated the variety of different flavors, how each achieved a different balance of Earth (peat), Air (vapors), Fire (alcohol’s ‘bite’), and Water (smoothness). Truly the booze of the gods, and I was hitchhiking through the pantheon.

Sometime while I was enjoying my travels Hole returned. Belladonna knew him, and did not like him—not at all. In a cascading guilt by association Soup Boy was demoted a few notches, and I took a hit as well. (This just after she had started to recover from learning my age. I am rather older than she thought—Firenze, bless her sweet heart, guessed I was 29—and Belladonna has about her an air of maturity that made me think she was older.)

A note about Little John. I’ve only met him a couple of times, but I’ve seen how his exuberance can really keep a gathering lively. There is a danger, though, that someone else can turn his power to the Dark Side, and that is what happened when Hole showed up. I don’t think Firenze was aware of the crude humor being directed at her, not at first anyway, but the evening’s vibe, which had survived a couple of bumps, was now deteriorating rapidly. A change of venue was called for.

So we went to another place new to me, called M1, where the seating, inconvenient for large groups, led to me having a very pleasant conversation with Firenze, Soup Boy chatting with Belladonna, and Little John and Hole hovering and getting bored. They eventually left, and the mood recovered, but the evening ended somewhat awkwardly and uncertainly. It was, overall, a lot of fun, and it’s (almost) always nice to get out and meet new people. Hopefully we’ll be able to hang out again sometime.

Thanks!

What are things coming to?

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No doubt about it, the young in the Czech Republic have not adopted all their parents’ ways of life.

After extensive research and a year of off-and-on procrastination, I decided which Internet service to get in my house. (I’ve been spending way too much time in the bowling alley lately, and the media empire has been suffering.) So after comparing numbers and features and gotchas it came time to figure out how to go about ordering the service. With some help from Soup Boy I looked over the Web site for a contact number. Nada. I mean, why would a telecommunications company ever want to do business over the phone.

What was listed was a bunch of addresses for retail outlet stores. One was listed on Starostrašnicka (translates to “Old Horrible Place”). Since I live in neighborhood of Horrible Place I figured that street couldn’t be far away.

I was right. It turns out I was on that very street and didn’t even know it. I left the bowling alley and half a block down was the store. What could be simpler? Of course, that was on Saturday, so it was closed.

I went back today and this is where things got decidedly un-czech. I walked into the Eurotel outlet, and after determining that his English was better than my Czech (no surprise there), He proceeded to provide friendly, efficient, and courteous service. He answered all my questions, and went through the paperwork and found all the information I would need to provide, so when I came back with a final decision we could take care of everything.

Kafka would be disoriented in that place, to say the least. That last bit, the proactive bit where he anticipated trouble and forestalled it, that is something you’re not often going to find coming from someone who sits behind a counter in this country, a land of bureaucratic line-standing and catch-22’s.

I have noticed, on the whole, that the younger generation here is much more service-oriented than those who lived under the communists, where service was almost a dirty word, and making extra work was considered patriotic. In this case, I’m glad to see the old ways dying.

Thanks!