This could be something great or something terrible, but I have taken to traveling Prague without a map.
I pick a direction or landmark, and I walk. Strangely enough, this has proved to be extremely beneficial, since Ugly and I have toured the King’s Gardens, walked the Golden Row, and stumbled upon two Baroque Palaces. Not to mention he actual Castle we were looking for.
That Castle. It’s a weird one. The compound is huge, and it’s quite the architectural history exhibit. Sadly for the aesthetic of Prague, and happily for the tourists, it’s like every king of Prague who decided he liked the new architecture better than the old didn’t remodel, he just build a whole new layer of buildings. The effect is a bit like walking backwards through time in a series of courtyards. Worth the visit just to stare at the window scones, and if you have the money on hand, the tours inside the various parts of history are rather spectacular.
I’m not going to remember the Castle for the scones though; I’m going to remember it for ‘Fly Like an Eagle.’ Strange, I know, but let me explain. On my long bus ride to Prague I met a group of American men who were on a ‘man trip’ to Europe. They weren’t in my section of the bus though, so our exchange was brief. I did hear them laughing about the issue of finding people who spoke English. One of them joked that you should just sing a really catchy American song, and whoever sang along must be American. That then sparked a debate over the universality of American music that I fell asleep during.
Jump forward to the Castle, where I am leaning over a second story balcony overlooking the courtyard and a terraced section of garden. Suddenly, echoing below me I hear the chorus of ‘Fly like an Eagle’ being sung. Sure enough, beneath me the three Americans stand, one singing in a rather nice voice and the other two laughing hysterically.
I chime in on ‘let my spirit carry me.’ They stop, they search the crowed square. The singer looks up and we make eye contact. I wink. He starts to cheer, and there is a myriad of high fiving and excitement. He calls up a ‘thank you’ and explains that I just won him a bet. They invite me to drink with them and I decline from two stories above, but agree that if we see each other again in the streets of Prague I will treat them to a round of beers. Maybe I should have said yes, they might have been wonderful new friends to explore with, but the idea of drinking with three men in a foreign county set off warning bells.
I departed the Castle in the afternoon, and set off through the peacock infested parks winding back in the general direction of my hostel by the river. In the early evening a squall hit, the rain torrential and warm, like a storm in the Bahamas or Florida. It was only about ten minutes long, but when the water subsided, small rivers ran down the streets, and my ponytail was dripping onto my soaked shoulders. It was wonderful, a welcome relief from the heavy heat that blankets the streets at this time of the year. I didn’t take shelter, but stood on the St Charles bridge in the storm, grinning like a child with a small group of other tourists and locals, a few of whom had the green lollipop sticks protruding from their mouths that I’ve come to recognize as Cannabis Candies.
The rest of the evening was spent in a beer garden, reading what few pages of an English newspaper I could find and weighing whether or not I wanted to see Hamlet performed in Czech. I eventually decided against it.
There was something else that happened today of note though. At around 2:00, I found myself wandering through a green by the river toward the Contemporary Sculpture Museum. Now, while large naked sculptures of crawling men with videos of politicians playing from their rear ends hold little appeal for me, it might be totally up your alley, in which case the CSM is welcome to you. For me it was just a marking point to the beach of swans and the grocers where I could buy toothpaste. In that same park though, there are a few more classical sculptures of legends and political figures for the empire.
When I strolled through at around two o’clock, I noticed an elderly man in a wheelchair sitting under a tree, regarding solemnly a statue of a young woman carved in white stone. An hour later when I came back the same way he was still there, alone and unmoving. An impulse crossed my mind, and I bought two bottles of water from the street vendor selling ice cream and beer on the grass by the river.
I then spent a full five minutes on the other side of the tree behind the man in the chair arguing with myself. What if he got insulted? Or mad? Did normal people do stuff like this? I lost my courage, deciding I would keep both bottles for myself. Two steps from the tree an image of my father in his wheelchair flashed across my mind. The amount of times people on the street had helped my mother, or my sister, or me with a door for him; some even picking up the chair to help us over bumps and curbs.
I barreled round the tree, stopping just short of the man and thrusting out my hand with the sealed bottle in it. “Excuse me?” Wizened eyes turned to me in shocked surprise. “I got this for you,” I said. “I thought you might like it.” Not my most tactful delivery, I’ll admit. He scowled, turning back to the statue. “Not homeless.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. Color rose in my cheeks, my throat closing threateningly. I wanted to stomp my foot, throw the water at him and cry, “You’re the reason ‘normal’ people don’t do nice things! Its because other ‘normal’ people make them feel like it’s wrong!”
I swallowed, letting the water drop slightly but not lowering it all the way. “You don’t have to be homeless to be thirsty, Sir. I’m sorry.” He raised bushy eyebrows at the unresponsive statue, then turned back to regard me. I didn’t say anything, just retreated mentally to the house in Helena and told myself not to let this ruin my day.
The man held out one gnarled hand. I tripped over my left shoe in my rush to put the cold bottle in it. He nodded to me, but made no move to take off the blue plastic cap. I took a few steps away, pulling out my camera to take a few quick snaps of the statue before I took my awkward retreat.
“She looks like my daughter.” His English was very broken, the words slurring and the consonants slightly warped. I glanced back at him in the shade of his tree. The blue cap was in his hand, the water bottle still sitting on his knee though, undrunk.
“Your daughter must be very beautiful.” He smiled, crooked and wrinkled, before raising the bottle to salute me and putting it to his thin lips. I grinned in return before turning around and walking away.
I can’t help but wonder though, at what point in our young lives did we start looking at everyone else and seeing “them” instead of “us?” What’s the real difference between a friend and a stranger?
In the moment that I thought of my father, an elderly Czechoslovakian man in the wheelchair became a shadow of someone dear to me. And I think that when he looked at the statue that reminded him of his daughter right after talking to me, I became the shadow of someone dear to him. We were, for an instant, a strange little shadow family. It was awkward, and strained, but there was something beautiful in it. Does the fact we’d never met before and we’ll never meet again make us any less of a family?
adventuresofugly 