PART 1:  Czech Your Language Skills at the Door

Welcome back, you wild and crazy folks still holding out for a dependable blogger.  Good on you.  I imagine you’re also the kind of people that are still holding your breath for those Beanie Babies to appreciate in value.  I proffer no advice or judgement, but I DO have some 100% genuine snake oil that you may be interested in.  Just saying.

More to the point, after a great many hours slaving away in the bowels of the Landesbühenen Sachsen, I’m finally on holiday!  That’s right, for the next two weeks, I’m wandering about Europe on the parental dime.  Which gets sadder and sadder a sentiment as I rapidly approach 20 next month, but enough about my own mortality!

The next few posts on this blog will be from my various stops in and around The Continent.  First up:  The Czech Republic, as written from the goat-smelling train I’m leaving it on.  As usual, there’s a handful of pictures followed by stray thoughts.  I like this format, it’s the appropriate intersection on the graph of “How quippy I am” vs. “How lazy I am.”

• Double decker buses:  neat, but the basic physics of them concern me.  “Let’s get this giant, tall contraption and put it on a narrow set of wheels.  Next, let’s hollow out the bottom so people can force some luggage in there that in no way compensates for the bottom-heaviness we’ve removed in our hollowing.  Then, we fill the top full of people and send it around the curviest roads Europe has to offer.”  Every turn felt like it was going to be my last.
• Fresh off the bus from East Germany, new to a country that I entered under a heavy shroud of fog, surrounded by the newness of the most alien language I’ve ever seen written on signs, mystery abounds, I step down the stairs, shoulder my pack, aaaaaaaaaaand:  Burger King.  Thanks, globalization.
• Speaking of that alien language:  What the hell?  Does every word need the letter z?  Not only that, the word “of” is the letter z.  Beyond the deep-seated fascination with the letter z, the impressive length of every word suggests that they’re compensating for something.  For what I can only imagine.  In practice, the language sounds a lot like everyone is intentionally making up a pretend language just to mess with the foreigners.  And to borrow the inimitable Jonathan Stanton:  “Every letter has a damned quesadilla above it.”  A quesadilla indeed.
• According to my mother, I look like Jesus now.  So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
• My first interaction with a Czech citizen:  Me:  (Garbled and mostly incoherent attempt to ask how to get to the Old Town in German) Them:  “Oh, I don’t speak German.”  Me:  “Yeah, me neither.  Old Town, though?”  Them:  (Points vaguely) “That way.”
• My “scary red hair” identification of middle-aged German women still applies in other countries.  I’ll have to see if that’s a universal truth across the continent.  Stay tuned as my unscientific study continues.
• Great moment in Czech history:  Three catholics thrown out of 50 foot window into pile of shit.  Survived.  There are plaques, a tour, and everything.  Defenestration of Prague.  Look it up.
• “#1 Museum in Prague” translates approximately to “Listen to fabulously wealthy man narrate his family’s extravagant art collection.”  Most of that collection consists of portraits that various plaques informed us may or may not actually be of this man’s family.  Highlight of the museum:  watching the steady progression of the effects of inbreeding on the upper crust of European society through the ages.  There’s a whole room toward the end full of the most comically hideous women ever painted.  Somewhere, at some point, a portrait artist was almost certainly hanged for them.
• When designing a museum, if you ever find yourself saying:  “Yeah, we should make our museum a long, narrow corridor, approximately wide enough for two people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, with low ceilings, and one entrance/exit somewhere arbitrarily in the middle which requires you to ascend and descend world’s worst flight of stairs,” you should be hanged with the honest portraitist.
• To the city of Prague:  Can I ask why the number 15 tram is the only tram that goes anywhere of use?  Second question:  why does it only run every hour, sometimes, when it feels like it?
• Along the far-too-many steps up to the Prague Castle, before getting to the exceptionally militant checkpoint, there’s a moment of quasi-religious, deeply spiritual respite:  A Czech man in a black cowboy hat and vest combo, with his most pronounced, thick, incomprehensible accent, singing and strumming the seminal Eagle’s hit “Hotel California.”
• With the utmost cultural sensitivity and genuine curiosity:  Why are the vast majority of Asian tourists speed-running the great landmarks and museums across Europe?  They are generally locked in a dead sprint, eyes focused straight ahead, oblivious to the things they paid admission to run by.
• For the first time since my arrival in Europe, miraculously enough, my mattress was not two pitifully narrow mattresses held together by a rice-paper fitted sheet, but one, contiguous mattress.
• Apparently the carp (that’s right, the fish) is a symbol of Christmas to the Czech people.  Traditionally, the carp swims in the family tub for a day or two before being killed, cleaned, and eaten.  As an aside:  this also said to be the day the baby Jesus brings the Christmas tree.  I’m not touching that one.  You can look that up, too.  My question is:  where’s the song about the Christmas carp? O’ Christmas Carp, O’ Christmas Carp or Carp, the Herald Angels Sing or On the First Day of Christmas my true love gave to me:  a carp.  She put it in my tub.  Said she wanted to wear my skin.  Didn’t work out.  

There it is:  Prague.  In more or less a thousand words and some questionable iPhone pictures.

Look forward to more sardonic musings on Europe.