Prologue: Being Mindful of one’s possessions
I screwed up. This was the rapidly dawning truth.
When I explained the situation to Mike in the days following he seemed hardly surprised at all.
“How do you always manage to do something like that?” went his reply.
I couldn’t fault him for his reaction, as I was perfectly cognizant of the growing trend of seemingly inexplicable errors I tended to make when traveling: despite my self-professed wanderlust and experience as a world traveler. Whether it was leaving my debit card at a bar in the DFW airport before a flight to Argentina, or “falling asleep” on a park bench in Spain and getting my phone and wallet stolen, the theme tends to remain the same; it was always the little things that always seem to trip me up.
For days friends and coworkers had been asking if I was packed for my trip.
“Have you started packing?”
“Are you all packed now? How’s the packing going?”
This was on Monday before my Saturday flight.
I’ve never understood the preoccupation with packing, as if the act itself of gathering one’s things and placing them in a container could physically take more than an hour or two. Why would I pack on Monday for a trip that begins on Saturday? So I could place everything in a bag and let it sit where I couldn’t access it for 5 days?
“No” I replied, “I just mail individual packages of clothes to all my destinations so that I don’t have to pack”.
A few drinks following work on Friday and I was finally ready to head home to begin placing items into a bag, the so called packing ritual that everyone wanted to make such a big deal of. My flight for Prague was leaving the next afternoon and I was finally ready to embrace the fact that I was officially on vacation for the next two weeks: off to discover Central and Northern Europe for the first time with intents of eating and drinking my way through the Holy Roman Empire.
I got home, turned on some good music, and set to work. Above my closet I reached for my pack, a sturdy, internal frame backpacking pack that had served me well for almost a decade in both the mountains as well as on the road. It wasn’t there.
“Ah” I thought, “it’s under my bed”.
It wasn’t there either.
Neither of these spots contained my pack, despite the fact I rechecked them multiple times, my slightly inebriated state refusing to believe what my sober side was starting to realize. My pack wasn’t here at all, but rather, lost in the shuffle of moving three times in 2 years, it was sitting at my parents’ house in Iowa, some 375 miles away.
It was Friday night, I was supposed to catch a bus to the airport at 10:30AM the next morning, and I had left my car at work for the duration of the trip. Once again, I had let something seemingly obvious and simple throw a wrench into my plans.
I attempted to reason out the possible solutions and consequences. If I wasn’t able to purchase a pack by 10:30AM tomorrow morning, then my only other option was to use my roller suitcase and click-clack around Europe for two weeks. I was cursing the cobbled streets already.
For a moment I fretted that this annoyance might cause some local to attack me as I rattled past, but then quickly realized that Mike would have done so well before we made it all the way down the first street.
The one hope I had rested in the hands of a local sporting goods store which happened to be located just down the street from my apartment.
Laacke and Joys, situated in an old 4 story brick warehouse along the Milwaukee River, had been only a few blocks away for the full year I lived at my apartment, but I had never actually stepped foot inside the store. However, without a car and needing to be ready to catch a shuttle bus to the airport at 10:30AM, the option of driving out to a sporting goods store in the suburbs was no longer an option. This was my one chance.
At 10:00AM, the exact minute the store opened, I walked through the front doors. I ran upstairs to the packs, picked out two that happened to be on sale and that looked like they get the job done. A clerk came over and inquired if I needed any help. “I have 5 minutes to buy a pack before I need to leave to catch a flight to Europe” I replied. “Any recommendations?”
“Well that one is a woman’s pack” he said, indicating to the one in my right hand.
“I’ll go with this one then”, my left hand raised in understanding.
At 10:06AM I walked out of the store with a new pack, 40% off list price no less. At 10:11AM I was back in my apartment and finally ready to pack; I had 10 minutes. But when the act of packing involves just quickly shoving everything into the bag as fast as you can, it can be done quite quickly. 10:20AM and I was out the door and into a waiting cab, on my way to the bus station to begin a day of travel that I could only hope would end with me arriving in Prague.
I wasn’t sure if I should feel disconcerted by my lack of preparation or fortuitous for how everything worked out in the end. “Eh” I muttered, “I’ll just take it as a sign that everything is going to work out just fine.”
Chapter 1: Prague might be known for its spring, but the summer’s not bad their either.
I stepped out from the Prague metro into a drizzly, cloudy day in the Czech Republic. It would be several hours before Mike would arrive, and then a few more past that before we would meet up with our host. Unfortunately that meant my new pack, which I had so joyously purchased only one continent ago, would be weighing down upon my back for the rest of the day, inhibiting my mobility like a small child clutching to the torso of a parent. Nevertheless I decided it would be worth a look around to begin getting my bearings.
It doesn’t take one long to realize why Prague is known as such a beautiful and historic city. It’s filled with small, picturesque streets, forever arching and turning through the old part of town, and lined with baroque and neoclassical buildings that told the story of a city that rose to prominence along with the Hapsburgs many centuries ago. And their expansive tram system provides a moving background of transportation that continually flows in the background, though quietly thanks to the electric energy upon which they feed. The entire city is not “old” as they say though. Modern constructions, stores, and technology populate the streets as well, but they mostly maintain a respectful attitude towards the city’s historic past.
Being that it was Sunday, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that many of the shops were closed and that the center of the city was almost completely devoid of anything but wandering bands of tourists. The beauty and charm of Prague, combined with a now open society and stable economy, was turning it into a booming tourist attraction.
Actually, the boom had already come and established a new tourist friendly economy to the point that, as I witnessed a large tour group of Koreans waddle into, of all things, a Korean restaurant near the center of town, I began to realize that Prague was no longer the underground destination for experienced travelers. Prague had been discovered. But I was ok with that, because upon first glance, it seemed worth discovering.
After a few hours of hobbling around with my sweaty child on my back, I decided, as any parent would in that situation, that it was time for a beer. I settled down at a nice open air beer garden near the Florenc metro stop where Mike and I had arranged to meet.
Our travel plans had began during the winter, when we both professed desires to make a trip to Europe over the summer, and decided to see if we could work out a trip together. Mike, my two times ex roommate, was in graduate school for Psychology and still had the luxury of some time off in the summer for a 2 week trip to Europe. Despite having lived together before and being close friends since college, we had never really traveled together much, and I could only presume that we could get along while on the road, but traveling with someone requires a degree of companionship much beyond that of just living in the same apartment.
If anything, we were only going for two weeks, which meant that the probability that we would come back hating each other or with regrets for not having taken the opportunity to smother the other with a pillow in the night were pretty low. The worst that could happen, I figured, was he would annoy the shit out of me for 2 weeks and then we would get our separate lives back upon return and everything would be fine.
The route had occurred by happenstance as much as anything else. I spent several weeks during the dead of winter inputting various combinations of European cities into Airfare search engines and seeing what all was available, partially looking for deals and partially trying to mentally escape the Wisconsin winter outside my frozen window. In the end, the cheapest, most interesting option was to fly into Prague, and then depart from Copenhagen 2 weeks later. The route in between represented a new area of the world for both to discover, and just like that we booked tickets and the trip began to take shape.
While we managed to get the cities coordinated alright, circumstances meant we would be arriving on different flights. Despite the seemingly endless access to technology and communication we enjoy back home, traveling to a continent where our cell phones did not work meant things had to be done the old fashioned way (so to speak).
I had checked my email at a hostel earlier in the day and the lack of any message from Mike theoretically meant that his flight had been on time and he should be arriving as scheduled into Prague that afternoon. I had proposed a 4:30pm meet up at a tram stop nearby where we would be staying.
My newfound beer garden was in shouting distance of the metro stop where he would be connecting to the tram. It wasn’t exactly where we were supposed to meet, but I figured I would be able to grab his attention before he transferred from where I was seated, without even having to take my hand off the cold pilsner I just ordered.
I envisioned it as something corny and falsely witty. “Hey Mike?! What are you doing here? Won’t you join me for a cold one?” I would surprisingly shout from across the street. Well, perhaps not quite that, but surely something would strike me when the moment came. And so came the moment, or rather the time at which point we were supposed to meet, and no sign of him.
“Damnit Mike” I muttered to myself, figuring that he was probably late, but all the while knowing that technically I wasn’t where we were to be meeting. I paid my bill and hiked off in the direction of the tram stop, child and all.
He was standing there: right where we were supposed to meet, having gone the other way out of the metro stop and walked the back route to the tram stop a half mile down the road. Despite this small inconvenience, our meet up had worked almost to perfection. It hadn’t turned out to be the movie reunion I had hoped for, but hell, we were both safely 4,500 miles away from home and had managed our rendezvous in Prague without the use of cell phones: a modest achievement in today’s age of instantaneous communication I thought.
“Shall we get a drink?” asked Mike after we had done the obligatory quick recap of one’s travel.
“I just so happen to know a place” I slyly replied, making it sound just as corny as I had envisioned.
. . . . . . . . . . .
We slept for 12 hours that night. Despite my best effort to sleep on the plane, I had managed only a few hours of uncomfortable and intermittent dozing during the flight. The fact that the world’s loudest baby just happened to be in my section had not helped either, though I later realized that it was in fact not the world’s loudest baby, but rather two of the louder babies on earth, who engaged in a call and response style of crying for much of the 8.5 hour flight.
We awoke late Monday morning, rested and ready to begin seeing the city for real. The weather had improved considerably, and the clouds and drizzle had been replaced by clear skies, a bright sun, and upper 70 degree temps. Without much of a real plan, we figured it was best to begin the day by wandering towards Stare Mesto, the medieval center of the city which coincidentally happens to translate to “old town”.
Despite being a fairly large city of over a million people, the older, historic center part of Prague is wonderfully compact and can be traversed more or less by foot. And with the roads being medieval in nature, twisting and turning down narrow stretches and intersecting seemingly at random with one another, cars have lost much of their appeal in the center part of the city. The silence in which this left many of the streets we wandered down gave the air of a much smaller European town that the capital city of 1.2 million people.
Towering above the city, across the Vltava River, stands the Prague Castle (Prazsky hrad) and the gothic spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, which together comprise the biggest castle in the world. We sighted the Hrad as our destination, and began an ambling passage through several neighborhoods, parks and over the wide and lazy Vltava River towards it.
The neighborhood below, Mala Strana or Little Quarter, was even more picturesque than the ones we had walked through to get there. Perched along the hill, its small, cobbled streets lined with houses and shops rose quickly with the terrain and provided plenty of unique vistas and sights. Unfortunately, all this wonderfulness meant that most of the shops were selling souvenirs and “authentic Czech Cuisine”, but I was willing to overlook that for now.
We made a quick tour of the castle grounds and cathedral, opting to pass on any of the “pay for” parts of the site. After looking around for a bit I felt that we had made the right decision, as the castle grounds, while impressive, did not seem to be hiding any secret hidden gems. Rather, much of it was under construction or renovation, which detracted slightly from the vintage of the area, but then again that almost always seems to be the case in Europe.
The visually stunning gothic cathedral of St. Vitus, started in 1344 but amazingly not finished until 1929, proved to be quite the intimidating spectacle of architecture that I’m sure its original architects had intended it to be. Though centuries of weathering and pollution had left most of its outer façade colored in black and soot, work was underway to restore it to past grandeur. The visual effect of looking at the restored stone, adjacent to the untouched, gave a clear indication of just how much of a beating this poor building had taken over the years.
The same evidence of pollution was visible on many of the statues lining the Charles Bridge as we made our way back to Stare Mesto over Prague’s most famous crossing of the Vltava. Despite serving as the only point of crossing between the two sides of Prague for over 400 years, the bridge is now most famous for its array of impressive, baroque stone statues that line either side. The original statue was erected in 1683, and following that a continuing series of sculptures were created, most following the Christian inspired mode of the first.
Really the only statue that stood out to both Mike and myself, a non-practicing Christian and non-practicing Jew together, was the statue of the crucifixion with the words “Holy, Holy, Holy, our Lord of the Multitude” inscribe in Hebrew above, having been paid for by a 17th century Prague Jew who was ordered to do so after being found guilty of blasphemy by the Church. It wasn’t the nicest story behind a work of art, but I enjoyed seeing something unique as compared to the usual Christian propaganda.
Like many of the main sites in Prague, the bridge was teeming with tourists, and subsequently the vendors who chase their money, staked out below many of the now famous sculptures: caricature artists, people selling homemade necklaces and jewelry, and other trinkets and souvenirs. It was a cadre of things that you would expect to find at any souvenir stand or tourist destination around the world. For the life of me, I’ll never understand why people spend so much time and money to travel to new places and then, when there, buy the same cheap crap they could purchase at any other place in any other part of the world.
But so it was in Prague, as it is everywhere else. The beauty of the city was undeniable, and in the center neighborhoods one could walk down any number of gorgeous streetscapes lined with centuries old buildings, hopefully with a tram darting down the center to complete the landscape. But there were also often stodgy people with cameras, or young adults with child sized backpacks huffing down the sidewalk as well. It made me wonder if the people of Prague ever get frustrated by the hordes of tourists overrunning the most beautiful parts of their city.
That night Mike and I headed for some dinner at a place our host, Jiri, had recommended. Already we had been eating quite well in Prague, and now I was beginning to understand what people meant when they said that it was a “pork and beer” type of cuisine. We had managed to have pork belly, pork knuckle, pork sausage, blood sausage, ham, and pork schnitzel. And this was all just in 2 days!
What made it even more palatable was the mustard and horseradish that appeared to be a near ubiquitous accompaniment for all the pork dishes. No matter the restaurant it was always the same, a stoned-ground dark mustard and a mild horseradish that paired perfectly with the hearty meats, vegetables and cheeses that made up the foundation of Czech cuisine. Washed down with a cold, crisp finishing Czech Pilsner, it made for quite the meal.
For two days we had basically just wandered to bars, ordered a few beers and a plate or two of food and just saturated ourselves on pork and beer. From what I could gather, the idea of eating in genuine restaurants seemed somewhat of an unknown practice in Prague. Most of the places to eat, at least those that offered something beyond high end gourmet fare, had more of a pub atmosphere than anything else. This might have had something to do with the fact that Prague is the number one place in beer consumption per capita in the world, but either way it was clear that when dining in Prague, a good Pilsner is the requisite beverage of choice. For us, it meant complaints were hard to come by.
Our final night in Prague we were joined by Jiri for a few beers and conversation before our departure for Poland the next morning. Jiri had been an excellent host, and I was grateful not only for the hospitality, but also the chance to have some real conversations with someone from the Czech Republic. The topics drift all over the place, from hockey and soccer to American politics and then to Czech politics as well (of which we knew nothing).
As best I could tell, Jiri embodied the new Czech Republic. For a good part of his childhood and all of his adulthood the Czech Republic had been an independent nation with an open economy and political system. He worked for a US company in Prague and was studying Mandarin because he had a Taiwanese girlfriend. He enjoyed the freedom to work, travel and live wherever he wanted. Even on the subject of the division between Slovakia and the Czech Republic he seemed to reflect a new generation. His view being that a unified country would offer the possibility of a much stronger national hockey team. I could only imagine how much different this style of life was from just a generation before.
We capped off our night by climbing over a small wall at the Vysehrad, an old fortress perched atop a hill just south of the center of Prague. From this vantage point we could look out over much of old Prague, with a cityscape that at night was still very much dominated by castles, churches and cathedrals. It was a hidden gem that we would have otherwise never have known without the help of Jiri, and proved a fitting end for our stay in Prague.
Filled with just the right amount of pilsner, and sitting serenely on a wall looking out over the landscape, I was in a good place. So often our travels and experiences are normalized by our expectations, and to this I felt Prague had measured up. Was I ready to move to Prague, learn how to draw caricatures and plant myself on the Charles Bridge? The truth was probably not. I can’t sketch worth a damn anyways.
But I was glad to have visited. Prague was a very nice city to visit.
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