Prlog Day Five Black Lights and Evil Faeries Hit the Miniature Museum
Well on our penultimate day, we didn't want to let down the pace too much. We had important things to do on Saturday! After a bit of a slow start (Andrew was dead until a fair bit after his fifth cup of coffee), we decided to take the funicular (kind of like a monorail but it scales the side of steep inclines) up to the top of the Petrin.
Andrew had wanted to ride the funicular at least once, and I had wanted to see the miniature museum, so it worked out perfectly. It's a short walk through the Petrin Park to reach the monastery where the museum is located between several difference beer kiosks and tennis courts. A small (har har) museum, it features minute detail work done by Anatolij Koněnko. By minute detail, I mean elaborate camels passing through eyes of needles, and circus animals daintily adorning the wings of mosquitoes. Jesus on a poppyseed (which may be my new "gosh golly" expression).
The entire display is set up under separate microscopes for viewing. Only a room or two, but oddly fascinating and well worth the otherwise beautiful walk through yet another edenic Prague park. Sure, Andrew and I adventured a little bit and ended up scaling some off-groomer mountain type trails on the way back, but we did relocate the tower and then the Funicular for a downwards ride.
The funicular is indeed FUN as promised. It is also apparently mostly interesting to lazy people. The ride down was sparsely populated. Us, a mom and child, and another couple crammed into the first car of several. The ride up had been Standing Room Only, and by the time we reached the bottom of the hill around 10:00 a.m., they line was serpentine and crammed far outside the building. Little secret: it might be a glute-burning to scale that damned hill (having climbed the hill previously I can say that it is, I swear, sometimes perfectly vertical), but the real views are definitely on the way down.
The Funnest of Funniculars also conveniently dropped us back at the New Stage Theater Box office, where we waited in several different box office areas for consternated-but-polite Czech ladies to process Andrew's request to trade Friday night's failed tickets in for Saturday night's hopeful performance. Wait we did, but success nipped on our heels. We emerged with fresh tickets and hastened on our way to the Museum of Czech Cubism. Alack, no time machine. I'd forgotten our guide book was a bit ... dated. Actually our guidebook was drafted before the most recent flood, so we suspect certain "islands" referred to in our book no longer exist. The Czech Museum certainly doesn't, though a nice enough restaurant seems to have taken over the "Architecturally Cubist" building in which it lay (House of the Black Madonna).
With resolve to track down the pieces now further afoot, we returned to the hotel... or lunch.. or the hotel lobby and then wandering about the street.
Figuring I had control of the meals yesterday, I had determined to let lunch be Andrew's call today. Except I'm impossible to feed. Andrew's approach of "hey, there's a restaurant" was mired in "um, there's nothing I can eat... well, ok, I guess maybe... but that seems awfully expensive, do you really want to eat at... well wow compared to the last one... maybe just... let's go back to that one I saw several menus ago, which isn't looking as bad after these, except maybe this one will..." Yeah, thank god I sucked it up just around the time we found a suitable bar. I got a salad and Andrew got a magical skillet of meat not otherwise specified.
Because we're double-dippers in the realm of theater, we spent the afternoon at the exquisite State Opera House, where the National Theater was staging Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. A fascinating and evocative performance that really plays on the subconscious elements and abstracts the themes even further.
In this version, Friar Lawrence finds an ethereal foil in Queen Mab, the fateful driver of all action and something akin to death (she also looks great in a 1930's white vamp costume). Mab presents the play, each character her puppets, while the Friar despairingly attempts to thwart inevitable fate. At first I was concerned this lack of agency or the insertion of an insidious femme fatale would dull the emotional impact, but ultimately it let the heart wrenching really fly. The inventively intertwining choreography was set against abstract sets of scaffolding and projected words, which had an interesting effect against such a rococo theater setting.
Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling climate control, I fended off any headaches and Andrew stayed awake. Which speaks volumes if you know either of us at all well.
In fact, we missed our "napping" all together, given the fact that we were thoroughly theater-hopping last night. We got back from R&J around 5:00 p.m., and were due for another tussle with the black light theater at the New Stage at 8:00 p.m. Naturally, we would also have to leave earlier to make sure Andrew had his requisite coffee and/or espresso with special little tea cup, water, and frothed cream (he only touched the espresso, but I'm pleased to see part of the rituals associated with any coffee experience in Buenos Aires also available here... too bad about the missing coffee treats).
Our down time was filled with some desperate internet injections, a hearty bit of snacking, and a few peanut butter and craisin sandwiches. Yeah, it was Adella's turn to pick dining options and she picked making sandwiches for Andrew and trotting out her bevy of travel-adapted weird foods for herself.
(A particular favorite I've discovered is pre-soaked chia seeds mixed with half a pack of plain oatmeal and a half scoop of vanilla protein powder and boiling water. Don't ask, but it's oddly tasty and filling. I also am so happy for plain shredded wheat, which travels well in purse baggies and goes splendidly with a little fruit.) To accompany our self-made room service, we added in a little more international television, hopping between British, Russian, German and Czech options.
But of course, you're all dying to know: Did Laterna Magicka acquit themselves? Were black light theater options redeemed in a second showing? What the smeg is black light theater anyways?? Um, it's... very... European. I was expected a pared down Cirque de Soleil, which isn't totally off, but not nearly as apt as I would have imagined. I'd say it was more like Fellini dropped acid and decided to produce a stage show tribute to the proleptical era of moving pictures. With a mix of Becket. And maybe a touch of Teletubbies. Kind of like a Harlequin show but with a live projector and several lighting effects to interact with the live aspect of the show.
Since this was a repertory piece, the original piece had aired in 1977. This is when all the on screen action was filmed. In this particular production, characters wander in and off screen, necessitating half decent lookalikes for the screen actors. Of course, the costumes and faces have drifted over time, which adds just one more layer of oddity. But really, the production itself maxed out on "you should be ten times more stoned for having watched this in the first place."
Plot... um, a bit Waiting for Godot mixed with Pee Wee Herman maybe? Two clowns wash up from a waterfall and encounter an evil circus master who tries to control them by showing them naked lady pictures and then manifesting the Venus rising in a Clamshell, whom he then turns into a Gypsy; and the clowns chase her around amorously for a spell until they all end up at the circus and the lady turns into a ballerina, while the circus master tames lions, but then the circus burns down and the clowns run away with/rescue the lady, who is then turned into a dancing doll who then escapes to the Netherlands and finds love and the clowns are sad, but eventually (SPOILER ALERT) they find other clowns and run off to join them. Something like that.
There wasn't nearly as much black light as I imagined, but there were heavy special effects via projected image on a few screens that were raised and lowered. And a few little black light touches that were fun to watch and would definitely have appealed to the nephews.
Probably not going to be my favorite new form of theater, but certainly a new genre to tuck under my belt of theatrical experience. I'd still maybe warrant that Romeo and Juliet was a touch more my speed.
And oh my, we've come to the final day. There's a lot to do, though I could honestly walk away this morning and feel we've already had more than a full trip. If I came back, I could certainly think of five more days of activities and then some, but we've certainly had a fitful start. Today's agenda includes tracking down that darned Czech Cubist art at the place that also has most of the National Museum's collection (main building is under construction until 2015). We may also finally have a Czech beer and maybe even - if we're really up to it - do the obligatory McDonald's international comparison.
All the bajillion photos from today can be found here.
Hip Hops Hurrah Tales of the Infinite Palace and the Tasty Bud
And with some rather grand rigamarole (read: tossing and turning in bed while we fruitlessly attempt to approximate "half a night's sleep" before our 3 a.m. slog to the lobby for airport shuttling), we're set to wrap up our grand Adventuremoon. But not without one or two final hip-hip-hoorahs. I've got designs on some serious pacing of the Frankfurt security gate. Don't get me started on the madcap loll through various passport control and security lines yet to come! This shall be a day to go down in infamy and/or a complete goulash of addled anamnesis and flashes of tv screen snippets.
But our true hoorahs perhaps were peaked out yesterday. We started with a follow up run that led to complete revival of the olden days of "Adella goes all Sweet Pea and takes off totally all over the place, until the run turns into a much grander endeavor than initial planned." Hey I made it back to the hotel alive!
There's a certain trajectory with any travel. You start big on your list of "things I'd like to do before leaving." That's because you have that nervous burst of initial energy, sure. But it's also because several attractions are complementary and easily piled atop each other. The longer you stay, the more you begin to whittle your list down to the ones that require a little more logistical specialization and the occasional bout of prioritization.
And thus had we reached our curve. We'd done the easily walkable attractions that bled well nigh into each other. We'd done the shows and tours that commenced in the muck of two billion other tourist-lures. We'd reached every attraction through every park that was within some semblance of walking distance. We were down to the meatier museums, cemeteries, day tours, and excursions requiring public transit or hired vehicles.
Sometimes museums are brief little larks. Sometimes, like my last day in Paris at the Louvre, they are trips unto themselves and you'll come out of a day's wandering with thousands more sites within the museum walls to wander.
Veletržní Palace turns out to be less of a wee lark and more of a day-trip. This is largely because it has absorbed The National Gallery's Art of the 19th, 20th and 21st Century Permanent Collection, as well as the Black Madonna's Museum of Czech Cubism's entire collection. Additionally, it has its own exhibits of technical and decorative arts to complement the evolving time periods. "Palace" is a tad misleading. This is a building established in the early Twentieth Century to serve as The Fair Trade Palace. It served as something of a mall thorugh several destructions and rebuilds (one of the exhibits was on its destruction by fire in the 1970s).
The displays encompass a pretty thorough tour of Pre-Modern Modern and Contemporary European art, including copious scads of your usual names - a room of Picassos,
Rodin every which way, Gaugin, Cezanne, Klimt
Renoir, Munch, Monet, Manet - as well as the Czech luminaries - Mucha (of course)
Fila, Kubista, Gutfreund, Čapek, and Benes, Pavel Janák, Gočár, Hofman,Chochol, Procházka,...
It has a floor of set designs. A floor of Art Deco furnishings. A floor and then some of architectural models.
And the building is quite deception. What looks like a fairly contained little round of four floors, actually contains a main wing on each floor several times the size.
After two floors, we realized that two and a half hours had passed and we were yet to hit the big money exhibits up top (we foiled the system and started on the lower floors, ensuring complete disarray of their carefully cultivated chronological evolution). Affirming with some desperate and hungrily butchered English (the butchering was on our part: we were really quite tired and hungry) that we could leave and return, we attempted to go to the Museum Cafe. This seemed otherwise occupied with a strange photo shoot, so we finally went abreast to grab a bit of Prague Pizzeria pickings. I ended up with a greek salad on steroids (so good I ate until my stomach was near bursting before ceding the final pile of fresh feta and olives to Andrew) and Andrew got a calzone that looked to be the size of a small puppy.
Thus fortified, we returned to our self-cultivation for another two and a half hours. We'd originally planned quite the day. The museum was conceived of as a brief warm-up for the excursions to come. Metro tickets were involved. Citadels were to be stormed, cemeteries observed, and tv towers scaled. We didn't quite get to all those. We thought we might still have time to hit the creepy baby tv tower, but by the time we figure out the trams and decided where we might even consider buying a ticket, we'd walked almost entirely back to the hotel and it was pretty well into dinner time. Our feet gave in and we came back to the hotel for a desperately needed moment of repose.
Never fear, the best was still yet to come. Despite all inclination to add more weary wandering to the mix, we saved the most important for last: Czech Budweiser.
If you're at all into beer, you may be aware that there are two companies with rights to the name Budweiser. One is Milwaukee's agua blecka, known as the choice of really cheap college students who are not hip enough to want something slightly ironic in their choice of piss water. The other turns out to be a crisp, fine, and entirely Czech lager (and other flavors) that can be found dominating the Czech Republic and much of European flavor preferences. Yes, trade disputes come up, but they both have legal rights to the name. You'll find this beer called Czechvar in the US, incidentally.
During our runs, Andrew and I had passed a boat with Budweiser emblazoned on the awning. Naturally, we had to investigate, and it was quite the appropriate way to toast our belated honeymoon a/k/a (given we've had time to age our matrimonial bliss) mead-moon. And hell, if Andrew gets one to two drinks a month, he'd best make them count.
We lingered for another longer-than-planned spell, but of a fully different nature, before shuffling back home (all that museum shuffling trained us well) and pretending to sleep in restive bouts for a few hours. Now the packing is almost done and the shuttling is nigh. Time to locate the final ziploc bags, recheck that passport and stay conscious just long enough to make it through security!
It's been a wonderful trip and I've got several more reflections to sift through on our long ride home. Until then, I raise a mug of herbal tea to Prague and wish you all a wonderful night/evening/morning/whatever. See ya on the other side or at least on the way
Many more museum photos and other odds and ends from Day 6 can be found here.
The De-Prlog Slog Back Home Return of the DINKS (yawn and hellooo)
Despite U.S. Customs best attempts to keep us out, the boyfrianceband and I have repatriated ourselves to the good(ish and/or sometimes morally ambiguous to downright evil) old(ish, except compared to most other countries one might visit) US of A (well unitedish...).
I immediately went to get my blood let, since there's technically a blood test I should have timed for smack-dab in the middle of my fabulous vacation. Trying to find a lab in the Czech Republic that would fax my results over to the appropriate doctor and take my insurance seemed like a bit of a challenge. Anyways, the phlebotomist commented that a week really didn't seem like that long given the arduous travel involved on either end.
I agree and disagree in equal measures. For one, in the last week I've theoretically lost two pounds. I'm guessing some of that is jet lag related, but it is definitely on trend for every other travel Adella ever takes. Not that there wasn't fantastic food there. Not that I didn't also pack a suitcase full of food. But without a kitchen and a lot of nibbles-while-cooking, I'd better be pretty sedentary to keep any semblance of weight up. And we were decidedly not sedentary. It wasn't much more than my usual treadmill walking (albeit over much rougher territory and up a lot more hills), but it was between 3-5 cumulative hours of actual walking each day, plus museum shuffling and the like. Definitely got to Andrew (who usually has two speeds: charge full blast in a sprint or collapse on the bed). And we also did get two runs in.
My point being, unless we were fully committed to the longer haul with a kitchen and enough time to justify buying more cooking ingredients (I swear I eat an extra 500 calories a day nibbling while cooking alone), my body might not have tolerated much longer of a trip!
We were there just long enough to leave wanting more. And I definitely have a list of things we didn't get to that I'd like to do if we go back. These include: both cemeteries, the citadel, a day trip or two, that dagnabit tv tower, the rest of David Cerny's displays around town, The City Museum, actually going to a Smetana concert in the Municipal Hall, going to an opera in the National Theater... several more similar ideas that often involve more specialized museums, a couple of tours, and definitely climbing more stony steps to more spectacular views.
I do have a whole 'nother week in me for sure. But the energy for this kind of thing flags after the urgency flows past novelty and into the second week. There's a tipping point one reaches on travels between not enough and complete overstimulation. I'm still a wee bit burnt out on grandiose cathedrals, for instance, even if I make a few obligatory stops on whatever trip I've taken. I'm thinking perhaps that perfect tipping point was maybe a few more days out. Maybe an extra half a week would have been fine.
Back in the day, I used to take an entirely different approach to travel. This worked too if you had the time and could afford it. Basically going for a month or more eliminates the urgency, lets one get into a routine, and relax into a more measured schedule. But that's not happening any time soon, and I definitely couldn't pack enough peanut butter for that kind of trip. In the alternative, I'd country hop a day at a time, jamming in a month's worth of travelling in a long weekend and crashing for several days on my return.
But I do grant the phlebotamist's point: it is a ridiculous ratio of transit to actual fun travel. "Yesterday" (let's not even begin to try parsing the nine hour time difference and how that impacted one's sense of when travel began), we left our hotel at 3:30 a.m. (Prague time). That got us there with ample time to wait at the first airport for a 6:00 a.m. flight.
This was an hour, plus the half hour to taxi via bus from some random spot on the tarmac to the actual Frankfurt airport. Blessedly, we did not have to go back through security, so we made it to the gate with plenty of time to wait for our 10:00 a.m. (still Prague time).
Plenty of time for Andrew to "read" (and/or pass out in that way he does that makes my neck sympathetically sore) and for me to make several loops around the airport in my "can't sit, must walk" pre-travel urgency. Nice place for a walk, the Frankfurt airport. Very high-end. The restaurants are not your typical food court fare. They have dutch restaurants, bavarian pretzels, beer everywhere, and even a specialty stop for high end wines and caviar where other restaurants would have a Starbucks.
After our two hour layover, we were consumed in a massive throbbing blob of a "line" and fought valiantly to reach our seats for the ten and a half hour flight. Oh god the sitting. I admit to making up a bladder infection to increase my frequency of mini walks to the bathrooms and back. I also took several excuses to retrieve things from my overhead bag that I didn't need. I just don't sit that well. I also maybe did some lunges and calf raises whenever Andrew went to the bathroom.
The trip was well punctuated, albeit not with much sleep. I think I got about three hours of very restless and uncomfortable tossing (courtesy only of two ibuprofen pms which served as much to decrease the discomfort of that kind of sitting as it did to drug me into a stupor). We did tandem-watch The Amazing Spiderman 2 (like Captain America 2, it was way too long for a movie theater, but long actually becomes an asset on trans-Atlantic flights) and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was not what I expected at all and thoroughly in a good way.
So, we technically landed in Seattle at about noon, which would be 9:00 p.m. Prague time. And of course then there was US Customs. We don't do that shit nearly as well as the Europeans. The Germans were so well organized that even the highly increased sensitivity on the security lines (nearly every one was bleeping off that metal detector and I had a bag search as well on the way to Prague), they manage to route people through Passport Control and security rapidly. Organized is not a word I'd affix to US Customs.
We were washed upon the shores of a roiling mob of international returnees. The signs were thoroughly confusing and nobody knew where to stand. Passport control for US citizens is now automated with self-checkout machines, which seem to discard the need to ever fill out that form they give you on the plane. In theory this should speed things up. In practice, I think it makes things worse. The line was absurdly long and several people had problems understanding the machines, requiring the intervention of several customs officials. The scanners didn't read passports well. We were still referred to an actual person by the end of ours. And of course, that was just step one. Then there was the zoo of baggage claim and the horror of a single customs line with no discernible end (at least until some staff member started wandering around with a mobile "end of line" sign while screaming at us to go somewhere other than where she was) eventually forced us into a serpentine queue around the various baggage carousels. At the end of our line we discovered a SOLE customs checker handling all the people passing through.
Needless to say that added an hour to our technical return to US soil. Which is actually much better than I feared, so I oughtn't complain too much. And the ride home was thoroughly mediated by my mother (anticipating that actually "vegetarian" meal options on planes still mean "huge globs of semi-fried cheese and mushy vegetables that Adella will foist onto Andrew") showing up with a cooler full of salad for me to eat.
So, we got back into Bellingham at about 3:00 p.m. local time, which would be midnight in Prague time. Not a full 24 hours of transit, but certainly a hefty chunk of time-change. And when you consider the two days of travel to five and a half days of being abroad, you don't reach the most delightful ratio.
I suspect that if we ever remembered the sheer hassle of travel, we'd never bother. Even back in my peripatetic days, I used to get an onset of sheer dread a few weeks before a trip as I started to remember the discomfort, confusion, and exhaustion involved. Probably why most of my trips were intentionally spontaneous and rarely too planned out. If I thought about it too much, I'd talk myself out of it in favor of a nearer destination.
But thank goodness we forget that part. Because it was so worth it. Travel, especially distant travel, forces one out of any semblance of comfort-zone. It negates the ability to fall-back on habit, overrides the easy fall-backs, and eliminates the quotidian concerns that don't matter as much as we think when we're rutted in context. Stripping one of that raiment of regularity allows for so much. There's an energy and drive for novelty and learning, there's an indulgence for spending a little more money here and there, there's risk, there's experiment, and with all of that there's some form of self-expansion and reintroduction. Sharing that with another person adds even more layers of nuance I think. And the memories that we craft together from our trip, the story we're developing about "us on this trip" adds and highlights ourselves as a couple. I really think that.
And of course, as always, there's the joy of "coming home." The reintroduction of familiarity in a new light. The reignited appreciated of all those little things you take for granted. The sonorous settle back into a missed routine. It's nice to be back there, even if it was equally nice to be abroad.
And hey, the internet is a lot faster here, so I'm back on it full scale! Well, after some major work catch up. Holy crap a lot happens even in a dull week! Wish me luck!!
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