BFT23 - Walking Around Prague

 

In my experience, Prague is a grey wet city full of colorful public art.

It rained pretty much every day we were there though it was never enough to stop us from doing anything and there were periods where you could just walk around in the sunshine before it clouded over again. I love this weather, so it only added to my fond memories of the place.

We spent a lot of time just walking around the city, marveling at being in a new place, taking it all in. You can do that there. It’s a fairly compact city, well populated at all hours, safe, and generally interesting, and if you get tired there’s always a tram coming by in a minute or two to take you back to your apartment. This is how cities should be, and we took advantage of it. I know there are little personal trainer demons that live inside everyone’s cell phones these days whose job it is to count your steps as you go through the day and I kept meaning to ask them how I was doing but never did. I know there were a lot of steps, though.

You see interesting things when you look up.

You see interesting things when you look down.

And sometimes you just stumble across people doing interesting things right about at your level. Kim, Oliver, and I found ourselves across the street from an international 3x3 basketball tournament at one point – which explained the groups of uniformed young adults that we would see throughout the city – and Oliver went over to watch the for a while. He reported that they were interesting.

We went to the Castle one day – more about that later – and spent a day wandering around in one of the highest places in Prague. They build those things on top of easily defended hills, after all. At one point we found a staircase that didn’t really seem to go anywhere so, being on vacation and having nowhere in particular to be at any given time, of course we followed it and eventually it led us out onto a broad sort of plaza where you could look out over the entire city. It’s a great place to sit and let the city wash over you for a while.

The Vltava River runs through Prague and you can’t help but walk across it or by it when you’re there. It’s a wide, slow river at that point and it’s crossed by a number of bridges and traveled by a wide assortment of boats. We spent a fair amount of time just staring out across the river at various points, enjoying the view.

One of the interesting things about walking around Prague is that it is kind of nested in on itself. You’ll be walking along a street and notice a little pathway or an arched entryway just sitting there unobtrusively and if you decide to go through it you’ll find yourself in an entirely new place, lined with shops and other buildings that you couldn’t see from the main road. We’d cut through alleyways or lobbies, drift around tiny little parks or odd statues, walk down long narrow plazas, and eventually make our way back out into the larger city. You can spend a lot of time just kind of aimlessly exploring these hidden corners.

Lauren and I had a half day to wander around on our own at one point. Kim and Oliver had gone to explore the historic Jewish quarter of the city, with its gorgeous synagogues, crowded graveyards, and deeply rooted history and we decided to let them do that while we did other things. They had a lovely time, and as it turned out so did we.

We started out by walking around our neighborhood, poking into whatever shops might be open. There were a few minimarts and we loaded up on snacks, but we were doing this on a Sunday and if you’re outside of the more touristy areas this means that most things are actually closed then, so eventually we set out for the Old City again.

You see the darndest things in the Old City.

These ducks were all over. There were at least three separate stores devoted entirely to rubber ducks painted to look like various famous people, fictional characters, stereotypical types, or just figments of a broad and somewhat overheated imagination, as well as fairly large displays in several other stores. I’m not sure whether this says that Czechia is the rubber duck capital of the western world or just that the local crime syndicates have figured out a new and whimsical way to launder money, but we did go in to look at them and even though we returned to America with no additional rubber ducks I have to say we did consider it. Being a tourist makes your brain do weird things.

We also found an extraordinarily colorful kitchenware shop which we enjoyed because Shiny. Later we brought Kim and Oliver there and Kim pointed out that our ice cream scoop at home was made by the same people so we felt a certain amount of vindication.

While Lauren and I were walking around the Old City we somehow got into a discussion regarding the Aperol Spritz. If you’ve never had one of these, it’s quite possibly the most summertime beverage on the planet. You take three parts prosecco (a sweet, bubbly Italian white wine) and mix it with two parts Aperol (a bright orange bitter liqueur) and one part seltzer and then add a slice of orange, and as we walked around this began to sound like more and more of a capital idea and it was at that point – almost as if by magic – that we happened to pass a place advertising them for sale and so it seemed pretty much ordained that we should stop in and have one.

Verdict: tasty. I spent much of the remaining days of the summer enjoying them back home, in fact.

The other thing you’re supposed to do in Prague, apparently, is try a chimney cake. They’re traditional, which as a historian I know is often a code phrase for “this is the best our ancestors could do under the circumstances and now we consider it a delicacy because the weight of history demands we do so,” but in this case they were actually quite good. They’re basically hollow tubes of pastry baked on hot rollers and coated in crunchy sugar on the outside and then slathered on the inside with something else sweet – in this case, Nutella.

So there you go: chimney cakes and Aperol Spritz – the meal of champions. You heard it here first. No need to thank me, good citizen. It is a service I provide.

You can’t walk around the Old City for long without finding yourself in front of the Astronomical Clock eventually and we enjoyed watching the Golden Chicken strut its stuff a second time. There is no such thing as too much Golden Chicken.

Our plans were to meet Kim and Oliver for lunch and after an abortive attempt at one place (“You don’t have a reservation?” “It’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, were we supposed to?” “Of course, sir.” “Ah. Well, thanks anyway”) we found a table at the Restaurace Mincovna, pretty much back at the Astronomical Clock again. The clock has that magnetic pull, much like Wenceslas Square.

This was really the most Czech-ish food we had while we were in Prague and it was good if a bit heavy. We caught up on our various days over goulash, sausages, pretzels, and pickled cheese and felt properly Eastern European which is a very different thing than Southern European, especially when you’re basically just an American just trying to fit in.

One of the great joys of walking around Prague is that the city is full of public art. Czechs seem to place a great deal of value on art in their public spaces and pretty much everywhere you turn there is something to see.

There are a lot of statues, for example – and not just the heroic kind like we saw in Wenceslas Square though there were some of those, but also whimsical ones, abstract ones, and more than a few of Franz Kafka who will be getting a large chunk of a post for himself soon so you’ll have to wait for those.

This was one of the heroic ones, which was about halfway between Mincovna and the Clock, and it was pretty impressive right up close.

On the whole, though, I think I preferred the weird ones.

Some were weirder than others.

And I couldn’t quite tell if this was weird or not. It’s all in your perspective, I suppose.

Perhaps my favorite of the sculptures, though, was one that was exceedingly difficult to spot, mostly because you have to look high up in the air between buildings.

If you look closely, it appears to be Sigmund Freud just kind of dangling there, not really concerned about his predicament at all when you get down to it.

We stopped and stared at it for a while and as any psychology major knows when you stop in a public place and look up and point you will gather a small crowd who will do the same and eventually there will be a large crowd looking and pointing and you can slip off on your own while they continue to look up and point and this probably says something about human nature but it has been a long time since I majored in psychology and I no longer remember what it is. It did seem appropriate to be doing this with a statue of Freud, though.

Not all of the art is that formal. Some of it is just part of the buildings. Many of the buildings in Prague are either painted with intricate designs and artwork or simply adorned with sculptures that you will miss if you don’t raise your eyes from the street now and then.

This one was one of the first ones we saw, walking down our street toward the Old Town. The neighborhood is not particularly touristy or artsy, and yet this was there. It speaks well of a place that they care about such things.

Even just the signs and entryways were often artistic.

And not every bit of art was really supposed to be there. European cities seem to tolerate a level of graffiti that American cities rejected in the 1980s, in part I suspect because it is often of fairly high quality – not the garden variety tagging that means nothing to anyone not already in the know, but some interesting bits of artwork.

Of course not everyone enjoys that. But even there, there is art.

Every once in a while you come across art that actually performs. One afternoon as we crossed one of the bridges over the Vltava we found ourselves face to face with these guys.

They played a few songs, much to the amusement of the small crowd that had gathered, and then everyone headed off to be harangued by men in sailor uniforms trying to sell us tickets to a riverboat cruise, whom we eventually managed to evade.

We walked along the riverfront for a while after that, and eventually found a tram back to the apartment.

Pass the Chicken, One Last Time

 

It’s the end of an era.

We’ve been raising chickens since Lauren decided to get involved with the 4H Poultry Project a decade ago. And today we sent them off with a friend who has promised to let them stay with her chickens and/or give them to a friend who is in need of chickens and isn’t that concerned with egg production or the age of said chickens. Because some of these birds are five or six years old, after all.

They’ve never lived here at our house, despite Lauren personally speaking before the City Council here in Our Little Town to get that law passed. Our friend Lois volunteered the use of her barn when we started this project, and we kitted out first one stall and then another for them. We’ve always had too many chickens for us to bring back into town. You’re allowed a few hens here in town (not roosters – nobody likes roosters, not even hens) but there never seemed much of a point to bringing that many home and leaving the rest at the barn.

They’re a good flock. There’s an assortment of breeds – Ancona, Barred Rock, Silky, Salmon Faverolle, and so on, and at least one random hen from Lois' flock that kind of wandered in and got adopted. Pretty impressive diversity for a flock that numbers an even dozen. There’s even a rooster who is perhaps the most low-key cockerel I’ve ever seen, which is why he never went to Lois’s friend to become Lucky Rooster Soup. He crows now and then, but otherwise he just kind of hangs out and doesn’t get aggressive. He even had a rooster buddy for a while until that one went to the big Colonel’s Bucket in whatever sky chicken souls go to.

We’ve been looking to get out of the chicken racket for a while now. Lauren aged out of 4H a couple of years ago and hasn’t lived at home since. Mostly it’s just been me and Lois taking care of them these days.

It will be strange not having them, though.

Many of the most absurd sentences that have ever fallen out of my mouth have concerned poultry, either the chickens or the turkeys that we also raised at the barn for a few years. I know far more about the accursed nature of chicken wire than I ever thought I would. The eggs have been wonderful, though. We’ll definitely miss those.

But it was time.

We went to the barn today and boxed them up for the long ride up to northern Wisconsin where our friend lives. They’re probably running around up there now. We left the chicken equipment and feed for Lois, since she still has chickens and she might find some use for it. I did snag the sign Lauren made way back when she was in fourth grade and just starting out with this project.

Fare the well, chickens. You were ridiculous and companionable animals. I wish you scratch grain and sunny days.

Måneskin!

 

I’m still working on the BFT posts and I’ll get to the end of them at some point soon, if only so I don’t forget the stories. But life continues to happen, often emphatically, and there are other stories to remember as well.

Kim loves Måneskin.

If you’re not familiar with them, they’re the Italian band that won Eurovision in 2021 with their song, Zitti e Buoni, which literally translates as “quiet and good” but more or less means “shut up and behave.” It is, as the kids say, a banger, or at least I think they still say that. I lose track of the lingo pretty easily these days. In any event, it’s a good old fashioned straight ahead pulse-thumping rock song that essentially dares you to sit still and it was the clear and deserving winner that year. They were reasonably big in Italy before that and they’ve since made it big on American radio and other services as well, and now they’re on a world tour that actually does encompass more than just Europe and the US – they’ll be in South America, Asia, and Australia as well. You have to love the thoroughness.

They’re also a lot of fun in interviews, as they have clearly imbibed the No Fucks Given spirit of rock that often gets lost in this corporate world. Their very existence gives heart palpitations to all the people who still think that gender is binary, and for that alone you have to admire them. The fact that they make great music just adds to the appeal, really.

I can’t say I listen to them all that often, to be honest – my tastes tend to run in other directions these days – but I do enjoy them when I run into them.

They came to Chicago on Friday, or at least to near O’Hare International Airport and that was close enough to southern Wisconsin for us to go down for a concert on a weekend night, so six of us – Kim, me, Oliver, Lauren, and Lauren’s friends Anita and Chase – all piled into the van, hit up the local burger joint for a mobile dinner, and headed off into the night in search of music.

The Allstate Arena usually hosts minor league hockey games and the set up for the concert reflected that. They put the stage at one end, let the Standing Room ticketholders hang out on what would have been the ice in front of them (with the sound and light guys set up where the goal would be), and then everyone else sat in the seats. We were way up toward the back, maybe ten rows from the roof, but directly in front of the stage so we had a great view of things.

Other than the photos of us, almost all of the pictures in this post come from Oliver since his phone camera takes pictures that mine can only dream of. I should upgrade my phone. Perhaps I will soon. We’ll see.

There was no opening act. At some point the lights went down and they just started playing behind the red curtain.

Eventually the curtain dropped, and from there it was about an hour and a half of high-intensity music, with interludes of commentary from the lead singer and occasional forays by all of the musicians except the drummer into the crowd in front of them.

Damiano, the lead singer, noted during one bit of commentary that when the band was first forming they’d think about a US tour and they’d end their practice session with “Thank you, Chicago!” for some reason, so they were glad to be there. I don’t know if they say that in other cities too, but the crowd loved it and in fact they did end the show by saying “Thank you, Chicago!” and we all cheered.

There was no intermission, but they did manage to work in little breaks here and there – a necessity given the immense amount of energy that they were expending. The standard of showmanship was extremely high, and you have to remember that for all that it is entertainment it is also hot, sweaty work and you need a break in there somewhere. At one point, for example, Damiano and the guitarist, Thomas, wandered down to the tech area where there was a tiny little stage set up for them and they did a couple of songs from there before heading back up to the main stage, which gave Victoria (the bassist) and Ethan (the drummer) some time off.

Oliver and I spent a lot of time looking at the lights, because that’s what we do. The main lighting rig over the stage was truly impressive and kept moving in and out, up and down, as the cues required. Also, at one point Damiano picked up a pipe with a couple of stage lights on it and waved it around during an extended instrumental section and this is how you know that stage lights are LEDs now. Trying to do that when I was still doing lighting, back in the Jurassic period, when lighting instruments had halogen lamps in them and thus a) extremely hot and b) made of steel that could withstand those temperatures rather than aluminum and thus very heavy on top of it, would not have ended well. We also noted the spotlights, which were in the back corners and not that much higher than the stage. This is what happens when techies go to shows.

Lauren has also ran spotlight and done other tech, but since she was on the other side of Kim (vs Oliver, who was right next to me) I couldn’t really talk with her during the concert about that, or anything else. The concert was EXTREMELY LOUD. SO, SO INCREDIBLY LOUD. We all wore earplugs to dampen it a bit, even sitting as far from the stage as one could get and still be inside the venue. I will admit that I took them out for Zitti e Buone – the one song of theirs that I can identify by title – but that was enough. I’m old. I need to protect my hearing. And so did everyone.

Because it went on without a break for quite a long time.

And we enjoyed it thoroughly.

For their last official song (i.e. before the encores that everyone knows are coming) they actually had members of the audience come up and join them onstage for what looked like a dance party or mosh pit. It was kind of nice, really.

They don’t bother trying to tell people not to record shows anymore. The model for the music industry has changed, and trying to tell people not to pull out their phones – which have more sophisticated cameras and recording equipment built in than you could have gotten in a studio back when I was in college – is a lost cause. Everyone had their phones out, sometimes with the flashlights swaying the way people used to do with lighters, but mostly either taking pictures or recording snippets here and there. At one point I noticed that all of the various screens facing me had turned orange and it took me a second to realize that this was because the stage lighting had turned orange as well, so the whole effect was to reinforce the mood, which was a nice bonus I think.

There were a couple of trips to the merch booth afterward and then we were back on the road, into the night, one concert to the good.

Thank you, Chicago!