Peeking into the rock

One of the things that people who want to be experts on Prague like to do is to ascribe things that they don't approve of to the Communists. Prague was a Soviet Bloc country from roughly 1945 to 1989, almost forty-five years: long enough o start some tradtions and lose some others. So it seems likely that there is Soviet inlfuence in daily Prague life.

I need to stop here and say I am not an expert on Prague. I have spent an aggregate almost-four months there, spread out over about five years (and including bits of four seasons). I have read some thing and listened to some other things. So you can see, my knowledge of the city is shallow. So I'm trying not to overstep the boundaries of my knowledge here.

But some things are obvious if you pay attention and don't just make assumptions.

Here's the usual thing people mention: Prague is famous for its mysterious, coimplicated, intractable bureaucracies. There's corruption on the on hand, but pn the other there's also over-earnest upstanding and unbending rules worshipping. Transparency is not a thing in many of these places. Visitors from the US in particular like to blame this on the Soviets. "It's a leftover from Communism," they say.

Well, no, unless the Soviets had time machines and dove into history before the founding of the Austrian Empire. Just read any account of Prague history and the wheels of these institutions can be seen grinding away.

Honestly, the elaborate bureaucracy is not all bad. In some eras of history it served as a buffer between the people and the despots. And, you know, the rule of law is a pretty good thing: so the rule of regulation can be good too.

Something related to the bureaucracy story is the tale of the individualistic worker who subverted socialism by screwing off whenever he could. Again, this story is older than the Soviets. It's at least as old as The Good Soldier Švejk.

Architecture is a thing that people like to blame on the Soviets. Because at one time you have the amazing baroque ornamentation, and then you have the even more amazing art nouveau ornamentation, and then the art deco/cubist buildings (cubism being in this case a home-grown, stripped-down, ultra-blocky, spare and gargantuan version of art deco), and then...the war happened, and there's a huge push for cheap housing, and the buildings are plain and unornamented and sometimes downright ugly, so it has to be the Soviets' fault, right? Oh, and the buildings that are not just giant boxes are these weird space age geometric monstrosities with inorganic cantilevers and purposeless towers and doodads on them.

Except...if that's the case, did the Soviets also build these?
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/68929290@N05/6752306433/">an American aparftment building</a>
<a href="http://spnaopara.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/2013_0107as.jpg">a Brazilian apartment building</a>
<a href="http://www.urbanphoto.net/blog/2008/07/31/postwar-ugly-or-postwar-chic/">a raft of Canadian apartment buildings</a>

You can argue about how ugly these examples are, but the point is that this is the kind of styling that erupted all over the world in the postwar era. In all cases the motivations were similar: deliver a certain quality of life to the greatest number of people as quickly and cheaply as possible, while inspiring them to spend money and build a consumer economy.

And now for a different angle. Right now, there's a lot of right wing politics going on in Prague, which should surprise nobody. But the right wing politicians use a different language to speak to their constituents than their counterparts in the US. They talk about cutting taxes, of course, and attempt to get ordinary citizens to identify with the rich and powerful so they will vote against their own interests. But the narrative they are selling is different. The election posters say things like "We won't let our parks be sold for development!" "We think you should have better roads!"--and one that will be familiar to Canadians: "We'll build ten metro stops!"

Of course this is all stupid, because (1) the ten metro stops were committed to years and years ago, and just entered the ophase of building where the results are becoming tangible; (2) the right wing candidates are proposing tax cuts that will endanger any more transportation projects: (3) the candidates will have no authority in zoning or in deciding which public assets to sell. But the point is that Prague politicians sell themselves as supporting infrastructure and services, unlike for example US politicians.

I know there was more, but I can't think of it now. I have more to say about prague and architecture, though.

Yesterday we rode the funicular up Petřín Hill to walk around the rose garden and the Secret Garden, which is one of the most beautiful gardens ever. It's not really a secret, though its entry is subtle. It's laid out on a hillside, with benches strewn about it. It smelled so sweetly of alyssum that I was just rapturous about it. This was the first really warm and sunny day in about a week. It's been seriously cloudy and rainy most days.

Coming down I chose to walk. Context: I have arthritis and assorted persistent muscle issues in my legs. I complain about them a lot so I don't suppose this is news. My second worst activity is walking downhill. My worst is walking downstairs. Petřín Hill is tall and steep (hence the very cool funicular, which by the way is accessible with a regular transit pass). So to say that I regretted this decision several times when I realized just how steep and long the path is and just how slow a walker I am going downhill is not an exaggeration. The view is lovely, though, and I saw some gorgeous and puzzling trees and a bit of the Hunger Wall. I regretted the decision a bit more later in the day when I was very slow and achy walking through the rest of our activities, and last nighjt when I was achy enough to have a hard time sleeping though I took tramadol (which only seems to work about half the time I use it though I only use it about half the time when I'm eligible to) but this morning I'm only achy in the "well, that was an underexercised function" way rather than the "oops, I damaged myself" way, so I don't regret it anymore.

Then we had an extended discussion about lunch because we were goin to have ice cream at the best ice cream parlor in the world and thought we ought to have real food first. We have a deep divide when it comes to eating here. I want to explore Czech food and feel that it is a challenge to discover what is good about it. Frank has found two or three Czech things he can tolerate and is unwilling to eat them too frequently just to indulge me. Hana is in-between: she was raised with Czech food (well, Czech expat cooking in Canada anyway), and has a bigger repertoire of it that she likes, but she thinks it's not interesting as a subject. On the other hand, Frank would always like to go to the good burrito joint at Národní třída*, and my attitude is that I can always have burritos in Santa Cruz. We ended up desperate at Karlovo náměstí and jumping into a Chinese restaurant, not my choice but I had about a kilo of very nice green beans, which may be the only thing I didn't regret eating yesterday.

The world's best ice cream parlor is Italská Cukrárna . The plan was to get two of the composed ice cream dishes for the three of us but Frank didn't help eat the one I ordered and I don't have an effective off switch so I felt that I was never going to eat again. This was an erroneous feeling as we were invited to a dinner party at the home of one of the people who works for the web magazine Hana and Frank have been writing reviews for, and her husband is also a Canadian expat with New Mexican roots so he made burritos and also another writer brought a kind of torte rather like my windfall cake made of plums, apples, and hazelnuts from her garden, and the publisher brought a huge chocolate and raspberry cake in the shape of an orange ambulance as a goodbye present for Frank and Hana. By the way if you are going to visit Prague, you should check out the site for Opus Osm before you go: they have classical performing arts listings and you can plan what you're going to do.

Topics of conversation: complex relationship of Czechs to Russians, stories from the occupation, about how bad the police state is in the US and how crazy the bureaucracy is in Czech republic, food of course, language of course, translation, teaching, etc. Boss of Opus Osm brought a huge cake shaped like an orange ambulance as a goodbye present for Frank and Hana. The leftovers, and the hosts from last night as well as the boss, are coming here tonight for supper.

Only a Czech person would describe my skin as dark even at its most tanned, by the way.

Day before, went to Zlicin for grocery shopping (Frank and Hana seriously go grocery shopping four or five days a week), and on my part, just to look at the Metropole shopping center, which was rewarding due to whimsical promotions going on (I have pictures of gnomes and treasure boxes with peepholes, but internet connection being what it is, pictures have to wait). And then Hana and I went to the ballet to see Valmont, which was marvellously staged, danced, and costumed. We both thought it would be a lot better with live music, and the characters are all repellent, but it was wonderful, and so is the Estates theater (Stavovské divadlo) and so were our seats.

*The second article, the one about the metro station, contains an error: there is no "pair of lifts:" there are escalators.
edit to add: yes, there are elevators at one end of the platform. But they are semi-hidden, and the reason there is a pair of them is that you need both of them to get from the platform to the surface. One gets you to the mezzanine level and the other gets you to the street (and higher, as it feeds right into the shopping center/Tesco store above the station.

At noon on Sunday the village church bells go off for a long, long time here. Also they still have the noon civil defence whistles on I think Wednesday? I haven't heard the whistles but I heard the bells today while I was writing writing. That's all I did today. I wrote wrote wrote except taking time off to watch "Belle" on Frank's computer (personheadal_zorra is completely correct about this movie, by the way. So sad that they didn't make the movie they should have, but the staging is glorious). It rained all day anyhow.

I made the deadline for the anthology. And tomorrow I'm going to go run around town again. No more deadlines for a while, I think! I made three of them this month. I wrote about thirty-five thousand words this month. That is not prodigious but it is pretty good, I think.

Yesterday I went out to take pictures. I used to have thousands of pictures of Prague architecture and street scenes, but a computer crisis of my own making obliterated all but the tiny fraction I had posted to Picasa. So I thought I would replace some of them. I did this by hopping on a bus, changing to a tram, riding till I felt like hopping off, then walking around for a couple of hours taking pictures whenever I felt like it. Then I hopped back on the tram going back, hopped off again, took more pictures, hopped on again, etc. This is possible because I have a monthly metro pass I don't even have to show anybody unless they ask. Hop on, hop off, to my heart's delight. The annoying bit was when the door of the tram wouldn't open at my transfer spot in the way back home and I had to ride to the next stop, cross the track, and ride back to the correct stop. What was annoying about this is that while the day had been balmy and slightly cloudy, there was one very brief period of intense rain -- right when I had to cross the track, up to when I had to walk the block from the correct tram stop to the bus stop. By the time I got off the bus at the "centrum" down the way from Hana's apartment, the rain had slowed to nothing, but my shirt was wet. Fortunately the shirt I wore under it was only slightly damp, so I took off the top shirt and replaced it with the dry sweater I was carrying in my backpack.

When I get around to uploading pictures I will show you the Art Nouveau Nationalist buildings with the amazing murals, the metro station at Luka (the one by home), and some Cubist and Baroque and Soviet-Era buildings. Also I went into Flora mall and took pictures of the international chain fast food joints in the food court, because while it has been years since I went into McDonalds or KFC in the US I am pretty sure these were more different here than just the deployment of Czech language.

For my own record keeping: most of my pictures were in Vinohrady (Prague 10) and near Karlovo Namesti (Prague 2) and all were within a block of the No.10 tram line or from the window of the No.174 bus (the one that runs to Motol). The stop I had to backtrack from was Motol Krematorium, but no pictures because it was raining hard and I had run my batteries down anyway.

In heading off for Strakonice for the last day of the bagpipe festival, I undertook a great adventure of the adventuring kind. The trip was under-planned and under-resourced (I should have printed out the program and maps of the town before I left California). Also, the bankomat gives out money in 1000 Kč bills, which is equivalent to about fifty dollars, and it's hard to buy things with them. I could have dressed warmer, but it wasn't super cold. But if you get inspired to go to the 2016 Strakonice bagpipe festival, remember that I told you that August in Southern Bohemia is almost autumnal. It sprinkles, so if you're afraid of the rain, prepare for it.

( in which Ms. Magoo blunders towards Strakonice )

No chance for pictures yet.

So nice to be here again, with family, and so familiar. And bitttersweet, as it is probably my last trip. Frank and Hana are mostly involved with geting ready to move to the UK. But that's nice too, because it means their lives are moving forward after a year in limbo.

I sat next to Norwegians on the flight over. I didn't know for sre they were Norwegians till we started talking in the last hour of the flight. Before tha, all I was sre of was that their language sounded as alian as Simlish, and not at all like the Norwegian of the announcements or my memory (the flight was on Norwegian). She was from "the valley" as she called it -- Hallingdal I think.

I saved a lot of money by flying on Norwegian but I also sufered more -- the seats were not especially narow, but they were hugely uncomfortabe.

I can't buy my tickets until my new new visa card comes (I am not sure but it is possible that I ran into a phishing site when trying to get "verified by visa" happening. No harm is done: I was suspicious early on, mopved my money out of the account until I could talk to the credit union, and discontinued the possibly-compromised card). So I'm getting ready in another way. I have stashes of lovely plaid and solid cottons so I am making new clothes (I haven't bought new ones in forever because I'm wearing out hand-me-downs from my stepmother). Today I spent a couple of hours modifying a jumper pattern. I fall between two sizes, so I had to draft the compromise anyway, so while I was at it I made some changes. There was no reason for the center seam in the skirt, so I fixed that (and yes, I do know how to tell if the center seam serves a sensible purpose). I also dropped the waist to a natural waist length (it was at that odd slightly-high length that all the dresses seemed to come in ten to twenty years ago), added more ease in the bust and hip, and raised the hem from what was supposed to be above-ankle length (actually floor-dragging for me) to below-knee length.

I used to like long skirts, but now I prefer below-knee length. I think it's because I'm too old to be a Hobbit.

The cloth is a nice midweight light green twill with white warp (like very lightweight denim, actually). The green is as light as leaf green, but it's bluer than that. The closest Pantone match I found was 360, but it's more saturated than my cloth.

So now I'm going to play sims for a bit, and then I'm going to sew my jumper up. Next is a campshirt of (what else) monotone green plaid, After that, we'll see. If I have time for it, a skirt, another shirt, a nightgown, and a camisole or two (the old fashioned kind that has a whole shirt front instead of spaghetti straps). I have the cloth for it.

At this point it no longer matters if it costs a bit more to make my own clothes. I absolutely cannot find the clothes I like anywhere. What I like is simple pants, shorts and skirts, with a decent amount of ease, in simple colors, plaids and stripes, and the occasional leaf print (and rarely, some kind of Ms. Frizzle print). What I do not like is the jumbly fancy-grunge print with random ugly-shiny embellishments on weird cloth that is pretty much all I can find in town, and I don't like necklines that go low or wovens that are cut close to the body. But this is all there is in my size range, in my price range, and in my geographical range. So fooey on it, Im making my own.

Srill reading "Pargue in Black and Gold." Almost finished! But I had to renew it, because I'm just reading the aftermath of the rebellions of 1848 and the book goes up to Masaryk. It's hard to maintain sympathy for anybody for very long. Poor exploited and maltrated Czechs --but everytime they get excited about anything, they go and burn down the Jewish Town and kill a bunch of Jews. Poor persecuted Jews -- but they bought the old factories, brought in the new machines, and lowered everybody's wages even though they didn't have to. Smart, internationalist Germans -- but they wail on the Czechs as often as they embrace them (I am talking about the German people in Prague). Even whenever there's a sympathetic individual they will eventually do something to piss me off (generally they do something racist, occasionally they just do something criminal, and frequently they do something to screw workers).

I don't believe this is supposed to be a primary message of the book. I believe the primary message of the book is "Prague was never a Czech town in history: it was always a polyglot, multinational town, and the Slavs weren't even the first ones here." Something Czechs have had a hard time understanding. Alfons Mucha has a lot to answer for, himself, though he suffered suffieciently on behalf of his people.

Marx had some choice words for the nationalist actions in Prague. YOu can imagine: he thought they were being stupid. And they were.

Next up: I took out a book by Ian MacLeod called The light ages. I don't know anything about it except that it has magic and industry and perhaps some class consciousness?  Also somewhere I have Emma's copy of The Natural History of Dragons.

On other fronts: I finally got my bike tuned up and the brakes don't scream any more. I also got a good lock and a rack and rear baskets. Decided to hold off on the kickstand and the front basket for now. So today I went to the farmer's market and the library and used my new baskets. This will take some getting used to.

Using Plan F or G or something because the USB adapter for the tablet keyboard gave out and while there are USB to micro-USB adapters in Prague, they are for cell phones and don't work on the tablet even though they do fit(no, really: what the hell does the "universal" in USB actually mean?) -- I really should have just gotten a dog-damned laptop, and since the money has come from the tax return I might, once I figure out how much I need for other things. Anyway, what I'm doing now is sneaking my son's laptop when he is asleep or out with Hana waiting around in various embassies and passport offices (the things they have to do to keep their options open as they hunt for jobs anywhere but here are pretty arcane), or else, as now, off doing things for the English-language magazine they write for (something involving a recording studio and suffering in the heat, I understand).

So naturally, I'm working online, directly into Google Drive, which has its amusing moments. "Naturally" because I'm not junking up my son's computer with almost two hundred thousand words of files.

So, here's a known bug. If you zoom in or out on the text in Google Drive, the cursor becomes irretrievably misaligned with the text. Your solutions are: learn to assess where you really are in the text (which is not the same from event to event, but stays the same during each event), or close the file and reopen it. And guess what! The particulars of the way this laptop's touch pad is calibrated, combined with my clumsy hands that are used to three entirely different other machines, means that accidental zooms happen all the time.

Fortunately, nothing is lost but time, as Google Drive saves constantly and at light speed.

But what's really amusing? The spell check fussed at me for the word "fatherly." I clicked on it to find what it didn't like: I could not see any misspelling there. Alas, the problem was that Drive spell check was sure I had really meant "motherly." Really. The dictionary compiler apparently believes that we are a parthenogenic species.

On another front, I didn't go out for almost two days to give my knee a rest, and then when I went out it was still not perfect but I was able to crawl around at museum-gawking speed for like two and a half hours without deal-breaking pain, which indicates to me that I will be able to do some more sightseeing, research and shopping before I go home next week. This is good. I didn't travel nine thousand miles to sit around a small apartment, no matter how lovely the light is here.

This note is just for my records: this is two weeks off simvastatin and there's been no muscle pain and very little swelling. All this pain at the moment is bone on bone pain right in the knee. Also no marble-statue phenomenon, all soft flesh, and only a little localized tenderness over the ligaments in the thigh.

Tablet is cumbersome. The usb adapter for the keyboard broke which makes it worse. I can use Frank's laptop for a while now and then but he does need it so when I have it I am working. I discovered I misunderstood artillery placement and procedure so that's the middle of the book that needs some substantial rewriting (fortunately details and anecdotes, the structure remains the same).And I have discovered linden trees in a big way. Europeans probably already know all this. But when art nouveau drawings have improbable trees with roundish overlapping leaves, oblong bracts, and clusters of delicate flowers or round berries, those are not made up. Those are lindens. And when the beer stein says "auf der Linde ist est schoen" (there may be errors in that childhood recollection) that is an understatement. My goodness, linden smells sweet. It's not cloying but it is penetrating and demanding. And the trees grow quite big too. I feel quite smug for having already chosen it as a significant tree in the not-Prague miscellaneous urban tree people fantasies.
Most days I tourist a bit and fuss with my legs a bit and work a bit and socialize a bit. Yesterday I slept a lot because I seemed to have picked up a bug at the wonderful neighborhood swimming pool where Frank and Hana mostly messed around and I mostly swam and water-walked. There were only three or four lanes cordoned off and the rest was free swim and play, which was much better for me than the businesslike and inflexible way they tend to do it in the states.

So anyway I am taking a lot of pictures and I will share them -- or a few of them anyway -- when I get back.