Peeking into the rock

First: Nanny Ogg had the right idea. I keep hearing this dialog in my head:

"Sprechen sie Cestina?"

"Mais oui, pero hablo nur un peu, only poquito, okay? Not much, but tengo a few palabras."

Okay. Today. It snowed all night. Amiruth said it was blizzarding on him when he came home last night but I'm not sure what blizzard means to him, having lived in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Manchester UK, none of which is known for its snow.

It continued to snow lightly all day, which meant that I was worried some of the time about slipping on icy spots. Other than that, though, it was lovely, lovely, a quiet SUnday afternoon in Prague. Very quiet: a lot of businesses in Prague are utterly closed on Sunday. Others don't open till one, and others close at two. Fortunately, I didn't much care.

I have been searching in a not very urgent way for a printer so I can print out the half of my ride voucher that I somehow lost before coming here. Also, as you all know, I have been searching for fabric stores. Well, I found both today, when all I was doing was wandering around. I took the tram to Narodni Trida and loafed around there taking pictures. And then I kept walking till I saw the fabric store on Lazarska. Naturally it was closed but I have one more day and I have sat down with Frank's five volumes of Czech dictionary to get some vocabulary relevant to the subject (no direct equivalent to eyelet lace, so I will have to use the phrase -- latka s vysivani a dirky -- the s in vysivani has a hacek and is pronounced sh -- which means cloth with embroidery and holes).

Then I went to Kavarna (cafe) Adria which is only overpriced relative to places outside the city center and I had, well, pork, cabbage and knedlicky. Czech food is a bit on the boring side a lot of the time, but there are some really nice salads. Knedlicky is kind of useless, though. It's just white, white bread, steamed instead of baked. It tastes of nothing at all unless the gravy on your pork is very strong tasting. Or you have mustard. The cabbage was cooked to a puree -- do the French call that fondant as well? I think so -- with vinegar, bay leaf, and caraway. This was amazingly good. Mooshy cabbage doesn't sound good, but it was.

So then I set off for the National Technical Museum, which is in Holosevice. This is one of those serendipitous things too. I found a museum, and found the way in, which was puzzling as I had apparently arrived at the rear, where there was a pictorial sign urging patrons to leash their dogs before entering. And then the doors were puzzling also, because they were so heavy they seemed locked, but they had these cool statues of tractors in front of them. And the nice man who showed me which heavy door to open showed me the way downstairs to the cash desk and the permanent tractor exhibit (some of you may have figured out the punchline to this story already). And I wandered around there though I couldn't read the captions because they were, naturally, in Czech. And then I went upstairs and on the stairs there was a riveting exhibit of photographs of nineteenth-century Czech farmers in the USA (got the picture yet?). And upstairs there was an exhibit about the guy who designed the major parks and some other public gardens in the region, and his botanical illustrations. And on another floor between the other floors there was an exhibition of elaborate, finely detailed paper models of mainly combines and cows and wind and water mills.

I bought the catalog of the public garden guy exhibit, though the person at the desk showed it to me to warn me it too was in Czech (no really! Czech? Why would a the catalog of a Czech museum's exhibit about a Czech garden designer be in Czech?), and I also bought a kids' magazine that has robot and spacecraft models to make and comic strips about the golem and the Soviet space shuttle having alien adventures. I stopped in the lobby and looked at all the leaflets about the various other exhibits in Prague, thinking "hmm, the National Agriculture Museum, that would be interesting." I remembered that a lot of the pieces in the exhibits I'd seen today were credited to the collections in the National Agriculture Museum, and that there was a place on the map for it, though I had not found it today. And then I set out into the snow again to look for the Belvedere, which I'm still not exactly sure what it is because I never found it, and on nthe fence around this other big brick building next to the museum was a sign in Czech and English apologizing because the National Technical Museum will be closed for several months . .

I looked back at the building I just came out of having had a lovely time and I notice that the letterws on the side actually say something other than Technical, something that starts with Z . . . and apparently means "agricultural." See, serendipity working for me again, because it lead me to the wrong building, which turned out to be the right building to come to, because if I had gone to the right building, I would have noticed that it was closed and come away again without seeing the purple tractor or having blindingly clear insights as to the real working principles behind nineteenth-century (18th?) public garden design, or even getting myself a Czech children's magazine all about paper robots and stuff.

So I was wandering around sort of edging my way home and when I got out of the tram at Namesti Republiky I had a whim to go into the Palladium again for no reason. And I found a Lekarna (pharmacy) that was open on Sunday! Which was good, because I really, really needed another package of paracetimol to make it home with. And then I actually found the Sparky's Darky (darky means gifts, but it's a toy store- hracek) which had a ton of krtek (little mole)swag, some of which was not outrageously overpriced, so I went nuts and bought a bunch of it and now I wish I had bought more, because I'm just that crazy.

I stopped at Tesco at Novy Smichov and bought pickles to take home with me and also stuff to make cabbage salad for Frank and Amiruth and I did make salad and soon, soon, I will go eat it and then I will go back to the hostel to sleep until tomorrow when I check out, and then I will be home in something less than 48 hours -- noonish on Tuesday, not Wednesday as I said at one point when I added instead of subtracting the time difference.

I should have been having an argument with Ted about now, as we bickered exhaustedly and worried each other about getting out of the country on time. I should have had to fight over the krtek stuff. I should have had a fuzzy flannel shoulder to curl up with.