The Literary City: Praha

You don't take your story with you; You spread your story around.

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I believe you deserve some sort of explanation, here. Right? Well, I would like to just (belatedly) relay to you some of my experiences in a land called Prague, then Berlin, and lastly, Finland. I will do these in chronological order (at least at the start. You never can tell what will happen when you get the ball a'rollin and you get the things flustering, you know?). Check this:

Praha!--
Hey. So Alison and I arrive in Prague late at night, and at the very very very last minute my friend Tom (who I met in Hyderabad) helped us out with a place to stay. Brieana has a really lovely apartment in Vinohrady and Alison and I stayed in a really luscious spare bedroom.
Our first day in Prague was unexpectedly and accidentally tourist-effed. We were just trying to see the old city and check out some stuff, but we accidentally were swallowed whole by the maddness and the mobs of tourism that are Prague. Oh, poor little Prague. Completely overtaken. It was so hard to see where the city even was underneath all of the tourism icing. Un. It was nasty. That might have been the most annoying and unpleasant tourist infestation that I've encountered yet. That night we went to dinner with Bri and a friend, drank fabulous Czech beer, and ended up at a club called Techtele Mechtele where we met Peter and Peter and had interesting chats about India and writing professions, respectively. We got back to the apartment, realized we'd left our keys upstairs, so knocked on her neighbors window (the light was on) at like 2 am and he actually came out and hooked us up!! Turns out he was ridiculously good-looking so Alison and I appropriately wrote him a secretive secret meeting note, slid it under his door, and then failed to make out secret meeting the next day.
In Prague, because Bri had wireless internet, we spent a fair amount of time doing "work": Alison her Marshall scholarship, and I planning the next phase of my trip, post-Alison. The next morning we "worked", bought tickets to see the symphony later that evening, spend the afternoon at the Mucha Museum, made dinner, dressed and saw the symphony, hit up a cafe where I illegally over-indulged in chocolate (should've been a crime) and we begin writing "Dear Stranger" notes furiously on Cafe Louvre stationary. We left one for our waiter with our bill, and the rest we poked around in little secret places around Prague during out walk home in the (light) rain. Dear Stranger notes are special notes to strangers. We started writing questions to these strangers and then decided to make a website where these strangers could answer the questions. We put the website on the note, but when we got home and tried to create the site, it domain was already taken, so I made a site with a similar name to what we wanted, but that didn't help our cause. [I distributed a bunch of these notes around Helsinki on my last day there and I put the appropriate website address but no one has yet responded. I know that in order to do this seriously I have to mass produce these letters, but I didn't really have the means to do that at the time. Perhaps I will do that in the future].

The next day Alison departs, I take care of some odds and ends, meet up with my friend Saarah's friend Drake (Saarah I also met in India) and people at a Beer Garden near Bri's, we migrate to a place with an excellent dj where I befriend a hilarious Irishman and then crash at Bri's. The next morning Bri and I do breakfast, I depart to move to Drake's (because Bri is leaving for China in the evening) where we enjoy a charming lunch in his big open window, head out on a search for a particular bar, come upon an old, breath-taking random church, drink fantastic beerS at a bar with the largest beer menu in the CR (here i had Budvar, the orig budweiser maybe..?), I lose my sunglasses, we tour an offbeat part of the city sufficiently buzzed, end up at Bukowski's (where D has been wanting to go because he, like myself, it a huge and awesome literature nerd). Here I have a great chat with an Indian-American girl about India and about South America (and they sort of crossed over). We go back to D's for dinner and then I opt to stay in while he goes back out, because the room is lit so well. I do yoga and finish the epic Ashbery work (the perfect place to finish it if Prague was good for nothing else).

Next morning Mallory goes on an excursion solo, crossin the Charles and over to Petrin Hill to finish Praha with an Unbearable tribute. I make my way to the top of the Hill, experience what I suddenly sense to be the beginning of fall (it hits me). There is this lady kneeling and praying on this precipice that overlooks all of the orange city. It’s an overcast day and she’s crying. I spot, from SO far away, an orange bag flying in the air (like in American Beauty) and it’s weird because the city is orange—so it matches—and this lady is crying and weeping over the beauty or her life or some sudden catastrophe, whatever it is, I can’t believe how poetic and cinematic a scene it was. I felt like I was let in on some cinematic secret. Like I wasn’t supposed to catch all those things at the same time and have them line up like they did, but I did, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Then I found a strangey field with all of these fruit trees and chatted with some local about how he does and I can actually pick any of the fruit (“and eat it!”). I promptly pluck two pears (one ripe and one rare), take some photos for an Indian couple in a rose garden (sophie…), and head out to meet drake at this sick bookstore/coffeeshop called The Globe (check it out if you’re in Prague!) I secure my ferry trip from Stockholm to Helsinki whilst at this shop, chat with a dawg from Ar-hay (in Spanish, por su puesto), and Drake and I buy matching books (written by a Polish lady, published by a Prague-based press) soas to begin our adorable 2-person book club. We hurry back to his apartment and I shoot like lightening (I’m getting good at it) to catch my overnight bus from Prague to Berlin.

Rad Travel Quotes

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do..."– Mark Twain

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

“Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.” -?

“I am not the same having seen the moon rise on the other side of the world.”~Mary Ann Rademacher

My current favorite:

"If you arrive in a strange land,

bow

if the place is bizarre

bow
if the day is utter strangeness
surrender--
you are infinitely more peculiar"
-Orides Fontela

And a classic: “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac. Always love a good old friend.