Week recap

Sunday, March 19, at ten in the morning, we took the train from Holesevice (really fun to say: Holy shevitzay!) to Vienna, a four hour trip. Stayed in Vienna for just under two days. Vienna is grand and pretty and clean, but not genuinely beautiful. All its grande facades were built in the 1800s to impress visitors and itself with its Austro-Hungarian power. The city's previous layers were deemed unfit in a wide sweep of chronological snobbery. Prague never did that to itself. So it remains a little smudgier, and a lot prettier. But the weather in Vienna was so beautiful! We could leave the hotel without our scarves! We could walk around without rushing to a cafe for warmth! People were reading in the park, walking their dogs, riding bikes! I could feel my spirit lift under the ballast of Prague's winter. When we got back Sona told me it had been nice and pretty while we were gone. Of course.

I would've stayed in Vienna the whole trip, I didn't want to leave. But Bratislava, by train on Tuesday the 21st, was pretty, too. It was squat and quaint compared to Vienna, but it still wore a few midieval churches and a castle. We stayed in the castle for our hotel. Met with Mirka, one of the admin people at Bilboart, a Bratislava-based art group that posts political commentary and art on bilboards around Slovakia. As she smoked and sipped her espresso and drawled through a few examples of kickass stick-it-to-the-man activism at this little cafe on the square (the only place I could find P-Funks for sale), well, I promtly developed a girl-crush on her. I could go back to Bratislava? No problem.

Then on to Brno on Thursday, where we spent very little time but managed to meet with Czech performance artist Tomas Ruller (http://ruller.ffa.vutbr.cz/dis-en.html). He told us a few stories about living in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime, like being tried for public nudity (part of a performance piece, and not technically true since it was dark) by a government trial, but really it was because they found his name on a cigarrett paper in a political activist's house. The trial continued for three years, and ended with the revolution, like so many pointless things. Also, in '88, he set himself on fire while on a walk with friends. All in a day's art.

And today I am so travel-sore. And they are playing Phil Collins at the cafe and it's a good day. Spring is coming, slowly.

Where they go

Travel-writer and critic A.A. Gill says that first impressions are all you get of a place. Time does not clarify the foggy concepts, only fogs what you saw clearly from the start. I can see what he means after just two weeks in Prague, and I'm kicking myself for not capturing it in the first few days. This is my first time outside of the U.S., my first plane ride over the big ocean, a new big city to live in, an alien language to learn, a new weather system to acclimate to; a new beginning.

I left Austin in a huff, mad at the stress it put me through (or that I put me through and blame on place). I came here for a break, to learn to love being a student again, to learn to appreciate the good life that I have there yet have lost all sense of appreciation for. My sentences end prepositions in.

Prague is incredible. It's full of juxtapositions of old beauty and new grafiti, of centuries-long tradition and a few decades of Communism, ending only 15 years ago. The culmination of this semester will be a novella of an academic paper. Here, I've got room to think. It is all that I wanted and more. Day trips I couldn't have imagined in a day dream. My host family, on move-in day, brought me to Don Giovanni, managed to get me a ticket at the last minute. The performance was at the Narodni divadlo, the National Theatre, the same building with original baroque decor (or maybe rococco?) where Mozart directed the first performance about 300 years ago. Next week we go to South Bohemia to celebrate Masopost, which is sort of like the country bumpkin's version of Mardi Gras. We're going to make traditional masks, bake traditional sweets, make pottery, visit a castle. You know, the usual.

But I am blogging next to Maggie, new schoolmate, from inside Villa Incognito, which professes inspiration from the Tom Robbins book. Never read it. Don't much care. Robbins is all over the walls, only English-speakers loudly speaking. Stevie Wonder emits from the badly-adjusted speakers. The barista loudly squeals the milk wand, which is completely unnecessary. My coffee-snobedness multiplies to new measures in this place. Good thing I ordered the green tea with jasmine.