Czechs and balances

November 14th, 2007

I had a great plan to try to make my trip to the Natural History musem seem interesting. but ultimately that would have been an exercise in fiction. True, the largest set of assembled dinosaur bones is here so that's something, and there are some interesting collections of professional and amateur taxidermy, but ultimately the experience was breid and underwhelming. My favorite part had to be "DNA - the code of life" which looked like some jizz in a lightbulb. Anyway, there are pictures. Enjoy the pseudo-educational mayhem.

November 15th, 2007

I know I did something today, but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was. I'm sure it involved wandering around a train station, probably Alexanderplatz, and wandering around. I still have not yet got around to enjoying Kaffe und Kuchen (coffee and cake), a Berlin tradition, but that's mostly because I haven't had anyone to enjoy it with. There are tons of places that offer this specialty, and I found a detailed listing of them in ExBerliner magazine, a rag for English speakers living in Berlin, which has been something of a godsend. Although cake doesn't necessarily need to be a group affair, so perhaps next week I'll hunker down for a slice and a cup.

November 16, 2007

Last night I was hit by wanderlust yet again. With Lina still off working in Bavaria, I had become a little bored of the Berlin shuffle and decided to venture into the unknown again. Destination: Prague. Prague! Glorious birthplace of decadent Bohemia! Prague! City of a thousand dreaming Absinthe fiends! Prague! A city in Czechsolvakia! I booked a pet friendly hotel, The Atlantic on Expedia for $80 US a night for two nights and began my version of preparing, which entails going to sleep and dealing with it in the morning. I had found a used copy of the borderline-retarded party manual to Europe called "Hanging Out in Europe" (2003 edition) which I had actually bought the first time I went. While there is a lot of focus on rave and disco foolishness, there are some nice sections on bars that might be less traveled, so I ripped out the Prague section, packed my bag and the sherpa, and headed out to Ostbahnhof bright and early Friday morning.

Upon arrival at the reservations desk I was greeted with this news: the Die Bahn union was on strike, and train service was limited, so I would have to take a bus from Hauptbahnhof (the brand new central station located near Potzdammer Platz) to Dresden at 11am, and then take a train from there to Prague. Fair enough. I had plenty of time, so we take the train to Hauptbahnhoff and wander around. At about a quarter to 11 I make my way to the busses, which was hard to find since it was actually a parling lot across the street and not in the station at all, just in time to see two busses completely full leaving the lot on the way to Dresden. Fuck. The reservation desk says the next bus won't leave til 3pm. At this point I figured cancelling the reservations in Prague would be the best bet, and resume travelling the following weekend. However, Expedia's ridiculous adherence to policy would charge me $100 for cancelling my room on the same day, train strike or no. The blood rises and a dilemma approacheth: just eat the hundred bucks, or wait until 3pm and try the bus thing again. And then plan C appears like a phoenix rising from the bratwurst: Screw travelling with the little people, and screw you Expedia, you don't own me. I'll rent a car and drive my own damn self.

It has been one of my lifelong wishes since I was a kid to drive the autobahn. Childhood fantasies conjure visions of driving nearly 200 miles per hour in a Porche 911, as the Black Forest and various castles whoosh by in teutonic blurs. If not now, then when? But other people had similar ideas, and SixT, the rental house for the more swank autos was sold out. Fortunately Hertz was not. So what kind of car did I get? An Audi TT? A Boxter? A BMW M3?

Can you say Opel Astra?

Sadly, none of the cool cars, not even Volkswagens, were allowed by Hertz to drive into the Czech Republic. Apparently, The Opel fleet is expendible. It wasn't a bad car, a small hatchback with decent oomph, but not the performance monster I had dreamt of. But it was a good car to get aquainted with in Berlin and the autobahn. I splurged for the extra GPS, without which I would mostlikely still be lost somewhere in the CR, hunting wild boar for survival. I bought a couple cds at the Virgin store in the train station; Einsterzende Neubauten's new one, Alles Wieder Offen, and seminal Düsseldorf experimental duo Neu!'s album Neu! 2, and so thus amed with krautrock my soundtrack was in place.

After an interminable amount of time getting out of the city (My GPS, a British accented woman's voice whom I dubbed the Navigatrix, seemed confused in the city center), we finally made our way from Berlin and onto the open bahn. "In three hundred meters, enter the motorway on the right" says the lady in the electronic mapbox, and it's on. I immediately floor it, thinking I will be rushed into the spawning mayhem of Germans in transit. Nah. There's a nice merging lane for ou to get aquainted with the traffic flow, and driving the highway is a stress-free affair. Primarily two lanes in either direction; stay to the right, hit the left lane to pass. Occasionally you'll see some brights flashing behind you, and these are the guys who are diving at top speed, 200 kmh or more. Try as I might I couldn't push the Opel past 180, and that was downhill with a substantial amount of terrifying wobble. So I kept it in the safe zone of 120-140 kmh, enjoying the freedom to go faster with out being hassled by the fünf-null.

We ventured off the highway and into the mountains, and the weather changed markedly. From the eternal gray bubble of the Berlin skyscape, we came to snow, gradually getting deeper and more prominent as made our ascent up the E55. The architecture changed too, as IKEAS and modern achitecture gave way to narrow, snow lined streets and alpine terraces. Somehow the Navigatrix became befuddled in the mountains, her satellite guidence becoming lost in the thinning air, and the phrase "calculating route" was heard with redundant frequency. I stayed true. At one point she even told me to make a u-turn, which would have sent me right back into the tyrolian villages I had just driven through. Thankfully as we summited she found her way, and we came to the Czech border, which involved a passport stamp, a quick police check on whatever Eastern European criminal database they were using, and a wave. And from here it gets crazy.

As we decend into the Czeck Republic, the buildings look the same as on the German side: A-framed structures surrounded by snow. But what's this building with red lights up ahead? As we drive by a hotel, I notice a wide window facing the street, and behind this window, bathed in warm reddish light, are two nearly naked women pressing their breasts against the glass and beckoning cars to pull over. More examples of this exist for the next 4 km, there are a string of "nightclubs", each filled with Czechoslovakian succubi attempting to lure innocent German motorists and their huge...exchange rate.

Had I known I'd be driving through Pussy Village I probably would have made the trip sooner.

I mean, I had been on the road for nearly four hours. A man can't expect to drive that long with getting some Eastern Bloc sumpin'-sumpin'. Luckily the Navigatrix scolded me into taking "the third exit at the roundabout" and kept me on task. Otter approved. We kept on.

After about 45 minutes we approached Prague proper, and I was a touch worried as the Hertz woman said that the GPS wouldn't be reliable in Prague, but such was not the case. It found the hotel easily and without incident. The room was ridiculously large for one person - a king-ish bed (okay, 2 doubles pushed together), 15 foot high ceilings, and my own bathroom. After travelling in budget hotels and hostels this was a big step up. And it was mere meters from Old Town, the storybook Prague that Hollywood has made into the very vision of "Europe" After checking in and plopping my bags down, I took Otter on an extended walk through the winding cobblestoned streets of Prague's Old Town. Night had already fallen, and the Winter crowds were in full force. I had assumed that it would be less packed in the Winter, and prehaps it was, but there was still a large amount of fellow wanderers, and the was certainly a bit of storybook romanticism to be felt strolling these streets in the crisp air of Winter.

My free map from the hotel was vague enough to be useless, and the gudebook section I had brought with me was even worse. It is very easy to get lost in Old Town, and even easier for me since I am famously navigationally-challenged. But getting lost here is like getting lost in Venice: you are never truly lost, and if you maintain a consistent direction you are likely to end up in a familiar place. I was specifically searching for a famous expat bar, Zalezna dvere, but I could not get my bearings never found it. However, I did find this statue of Franz Kafka, sitting atop a man who apparently has a vagina for a head.

We strolled to the left of Franz and continued on, making more winding turns and noticing resturant after resuraunt, and bar after bar, the ubiquitus Pilsner Urquell sign hangng from nearly every establishment. As I went deeper and deper into old town, we found ourselves at:

We took the other direction. Surely Zalezna dvere must be close by. We wandered past the Square, chased landmarks both familiar and foreign. We drilled deep ito the city's core, surely the most alien and forbidden section of Old Town, where no one had been in years, a section so forgotten it was accessible via only the most arcane knowledge. I am the minotaur in this maze, you devil. You have no secret I can't crack. And at the very next turn I found myself face to face with:

Franz, you son of a bitch.

I still couldn't find the damn bar. I was holding out for the brass ring, but tonight that was unattainable. I tried to make my way back to the hotel, since we had been walking for about two hours and the restaraunts were closing. I did succeed in getting somewhat lost, but I was at least far from the drunken Germans and Slavs, English students and American trust-fund babies. I found a tiny, tiny pub called the Orange Bar, which was too packed for me and my little dog. I made a note to come back, and we made our way back to the hotel were we both collapsed into sleep.

November 16, 2007

Our first full day in Prague. After a filling (an complimentary) breakfast of bacon, toast, some cheesy broccoli thing, juice, coffee and crepes, Otter and I strolled along the water to the Charles Bridge, gateway to Castle Prague. Tourists in abundance here, as well as as venders selling pictures of the bridge in photographic and artistic interpretations, trinket sellers, and boat trip shysters. I believe Otter was the only dog, and was probably overwhelmed at the amount of ankles crossing her eye level. Saturday monring is apparently a big day on the bridge, no matter whatthe weather.

Crossing the bridge brought us to the ascent of another narrow shopping district that winds much the same as Old Town, except in an uphill direction. Various resturaunts, cafe's absinthe hucksters and postcard line these streets which lead to Prague's buggest attraction, Castle Prague. The trip to the castle, despite the many crowds and merchandising opportunists, is still an enticing affair, as most westerners have an old word affection for anything cobble-stoned.

We arrived at Prague Castle at the precise moment of the changing of the guard, a ceremony much like it’s British counterpoint, the castle even containing the guardposts inhabited by unflinching Czech Beefeaters, only without the tall, funny hats. As Otter was prohibited to making the tour of the castle, and the line was for entrance was too long for me to really want to try to smuggle her in, we made do with touring the grounds, enjoying both the stunning examples of gothic architecture and the view of Old Town from the other side of the river.

After walking back to the hotel, I set Otter down for a nap and continued on my way to the next destination, the Globe Bookstore, the supposed center of literary Prague. After finally finding the place through a combination of misunderstood map directions and general wanderings, I have to admit that it was a little underwhelming. Perhaps my reading of guidebook descriptions had set the bar a little high (Ginsberg read here?), but the shop itself was pleasant enough, just not what I expected by something given the title of the “center of Literary Prague.” Essentially an expat bookstore and café stocking books mostly in English, it did contain a large number of Czech Translations which are difficult to find elsewhere, so I stocked up. Herman Ungar’s The Maimed, Film maker Jan Svenkmeyer’s treatise on creativity, Transmutations, and two by Vítězslav Nezval, Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, the basis for a bizarre ’70 film about a young girl’s first period and , uh, witches (the soundtrack of which I’ve been somewhat obsessed with), and Edition 69, a George Bataille-like story of surreal eroticism filed with crazy collages of lobsters with penises. And thus armed I once again attempted to find Zalezna devere.

A metro stop brought me nearby, and when I finally found the address I was standing face to face with…an Indian restaurant. Cripes. An internet search after I got home told me that the bar had moved to a new address a year ago, but I was not connected on this trip. Feeling somewhat dejected (and thirsty) I crusied back the central square and bought a “hot dog classic style” – a steamed frank served in a hollowed out baguette type of roll with ketchup and mustard squirted inside, and a can of Gambrinius, Prague’s other famous beer.

Still feeling peckish I went back to Old Town, and made the amusing discovery once I stepped off the metro that I was in fact within a short walking distance from the hotel, the winding streets giving one the illusion of having travelled longer distances. I decided to eat at Caffrey’s, an Irish pub known for good food, and I managed to snag a table in a bar full of fairly drunk Irish football fans with very short hair. I had a steak with Jameson sauce, and despite not being traditional Czech food, it was fucking delicious. Two Pilsners and a full stomach later, I headed back to the hotel to take Otter for a walk.

While we’re walking, Otter decides it’s time for a deuce, and while I’ve become kind of accustomed in Berlin to not picking up after her, in Prague they’ve been making great strides in the field of dogshit elimination, and as she finishes her biz I hear a man saying something in Chech behind me, not really yelling, but definitely saying whatever it was with some degree of consternation. I turn around and he points to a pole in the ground that I had at first not even noticed, thinking it was a parking meter. Turns out it is a paper bag dispenser, specifically designed for keeping the streets of Prague crap free. Inside the bag is a piece of cardboard, pre-scored to create a shit shovel so that one never has to touch the stuff. I was so excited by the poop kit I ripped about ten of them from the dispenser. I was sure to never walk Otter without one while I was there.

Hotel>Otter sleeps>Me out again. I wanted to make a stop at the Orange Bar, the tiny drinkhole I had seen on the previous nights wanderings. Tonight it was nearly as crowded and I saw a set available, but I was ordering my beer a swarm of American tourists came in and snagged it. I was thereby forced to take a seat with a table of native Czechs, far more agreeable to the annoying 20-something crowd to my left. I met a guy who is actually PHP developer, who has sort of a freelance gig like mine. When I asked him about the Hooker town I had passed through he explained that it was a well known center of prostitution, and was not representative of the rest of The Republic. He told me I should visit Cambodia. Not because of the prostitution, but that it was a nice place to visit. Fair enough. I also met a Russian woman, and upon finding that I was American she immediately said “Bill Gates.” Perfect.

I drove back the next day. I approached the border and looked for my lady friends from the other night but apparently they don’t get up before noon. Oh well. Usually neither do I.