I spent this weekend in the beautiful, strange city of Prague. Frankly, it's an enigmatic little city, which makes me think I'd need to spend a couple of months or maybe decades there to write even two paragraphs about it that are true.
The friend I was visiting described the Czech language in a way that made sense to me in terms of the city, too. Czech has repeatedly had its insides carved out and recrafted. The way my friend explained all this made me think of an empty house with a beautiful facade and a bare-bones interior.
On the surface there are these incredible buildings in browns, light blues, dusty salmon pinks, butter creams, beiges, mint greens and butternut squash yellows, topped with red tiled roofs and greenly oxidizing spires. The twisty streets, cobbled with small square stones, bear names I can't even sound out because all of the letters wear different sounds. In the touristy parts of town, shops selling bohemian crystal, Russian dolls, and marionettes are as insidious as dandelions and foreigners crowd the streets. The entire city looks like it could be an opera set, with romantically mysterious and menacing forest as its backdrop.
But none of this feels a part of the deeper identity of the city. It's like if you scratched the surface you would find a bizarrely hedonistic and seamy underbelly. I think that Prague is a city of secrets, a city that never sleeps. Real Prague has got to be the blurry outlines of what you see when you look at the following things out of the corner of your eye: Who exactly is making reservations three days early at a local watering hole so they can order an entire roast pig? Why are they selling pot chocolate at the absinthe museum? What does all that graffiti mean? What's really in those bread dumplings? At 2:30 on a Thursday night why is the tram full in equal parts of club goers and little old ladies?
Just going with it,
Maria
The friend I was visiting described the Czech language in a way that made sense to me in terms of the city, too. Czech has repeatedly had its insides carved out and recrafted. The way my friend explained all this made me think of an empty house with a beautiful facade and a bare-bones interior.
On the surface there are these incredible buildings in browns, light blues, dusty salmon pinks, butter creams, beiges, mint greens and butternut squash yellows, topped with red tiled roofs and greenly oxidizing spires. The twisty streets, cobbled with small square stones, bear names I can't even sound out because all of the letters wear different sounds. In the touristy parts of town, shops selling bohemian crystal, Russian dolls, and marionettes are as insidious as dandelions and foreigners crowd the streets. The entire city looks like it could be an opera set, with romantically mysterious and menacing forest as its backdrop.
But none of this feels a part of the deeper identity of the city. It's like if you scratched the surface you would find a bizarrely hedonistic and seamy underbelly. I think that Prague is a city of secrets, a city that never sleeps. Real Prague has got to be the blurry outlines of what you see when you look at the following things out of the corner of your eye: Who exactly is making reservations three days early at a local watering hole so they can order an entire roast pig? Why are they selling pot chocolate at the absinthe museum? What does all that graffiti mean? What's really in those bread dumplings? At 2:30 on a Thursday night why is the tram full in equal parts of club goers and little old ladies?
Maria
No comments:
Post a Comment