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.