Prague Fall

The Czech Republic’s ancient capital holds a special place in the hearts of all of us 1960s buffs. Prague’s famous spring of 1968 may have been the most dramatic rebellion of a season that fostered dozens of them. “Socialism with a human face” was a new concept for the Eastern bloc. It didn’t last, of course. By the end of the summer, Soviet tanks had rolled over the city. Despite the defeat, this event has more of a hold over me than the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989. Maybe it was the lack of mullets the first time around. (Check out Mark Kurlansky’s book 1968 to get a sense of the heightened reality that took hold everywhere that year.)

Even more noteworthy to my mind was what happened after that. In the 70s, the country’s dissidents rallied around a rock band, a crew of Zappa-heads known as the Plastic People of the Universe that the government had forced underground. Vaclav Havel and others took up their cause and formed the core of a political movement that would take over the government in 1989. It seems unbelievable now that a rock band—a good rock band—could have had that kind of real-world effect.

Anyway, the point of the above history lesson is that I’d read and heard a lot about Prague but never seen the thing itself. (Well, that’s not entirely true: I had seen Mandy Moore in Chasing Liberty, where, as the daughter of the president of the United States, she helps make the city and much of Europe into a U.S. colony (of partying down!). Not as inspiring as Prague Spring perhaps, but it was something.) Two weeks ago, a friend and I visited the city for five days and took a train to Vienna for two. I didn’t take many photos—I never remember to pull out the camera at the opportune moment—but I’m hoping this post will serve as a memory bank of sorts. I’ll take it element by element.

The Flight: As anyone who has read this blog before knows, airplanes and I don’t mix. I can get myself on one, but it isn’t easy. In the days leading up to our Sunday afternoon Czech Airlines flight, I had reached a point where I was pretty much assuming the plane would crash. But I did a last-minute Wikipedia search and found that the only snafu the airline had had in recent years was a plane that overshot a runway in Canada last year. That didn’t sound too bad. Oh, that TB guy was on a Czech flight…ah well, probably not going to happen again, right?

As this plane rolled down the runway—why does it always take just a second longer than I think it should to get off the ground?—two thoughts came into my head. They were the same ones I always have at this point: “Why the hell am I doing this?” followed immediately by “Is it too late to get off?” After that, though, I was surprisingly relaxed. It may have been because the wine was free.

The Cab Ride: Any journey from the airport into a new European city is a little off-putting. You’re utterly dislocated and hurtling at top speed. I can’t imagine what I would think coming to New York for the first time and being greeted with a desperate, seemingly life-or-death yellow-taxi ride through the outer boroughs’ half-collapsing, overcrowded, just-plain-ugly expressways. I guess I wouldn’t expect anything less.

Coming into Prague we buzzed through early rush-hour traffic. It was dark. It was 20 degrees colder than it had been in New York (my light jacket was clearly not going to cut it). The cabbie looked like a hard man. He spoke no English, we spoke no Czech. We had no idea how much the cab ride was supposed to cost.

Let the vacation begin!

The Hotel: Classic Europe. Elevator for one, mysteriously cursory bedding that I never got the hang of (oh for a night in a bed at a Days Inn in Ohio). Stories of California burning on TV—exciting! I mean, awful, sorry. Ham and cheese slices for breakfast. Good coffee. A highly efficient woman at the front desk; she was 10 times more proactive than anyone else around. She was German.

The Weather: Chilly, damp, gray, low clouds. That pretty much sums up every minute of the week. I kept thinking of an old Talking Heads song where David Byrne searches for a city that’s “dark—dark in the daytime.” He obviously hadn’t checked out Prague. But the weather made a certain kind of sense. We had no qualms about stopping in a pub for a couple hours each afternoon. There was no sun to make us feel guilty.

The Sights: The tourist-friendly sections of Prague are in a compact zone around the Vltava River. To American eyes, the buildings here are movie-set-medieval—certain neighborhoods almost look fake, like you could walk up to a building and push it down. Who do you see in this area? Out-of-town Czechs, Germans, U.S. frat dudes, older American couples doing blitzkrieg tours of Europe. At dinner one night I overheard a man from Texas ask his wife, “What city are we in again?”

You can see the city’s first major sight, Prague Castle, from anywhere. It’s on a hill, and its looming spires set the tone for the town. The castle, which is really a walled-in complex of palaces and churches, was home to the city’s kings and the spot where the Nazis rolled in at the start of World War II.

I liked two out of the way places near the castle. The first was the Royal Gardens, which had been the front yard of the rulers’ old summer home. There were only a couple people roaming the grounds, and it was the peak of fall. Kind of a long way to go to see leaves change (it’s a tough thing to catch in NYC), but nice nevertheless.

The other highlight of the castle visit had nothing to do with the palace or the church or the gardens, or anything particularly historic. It had to do with beer. We found a traditional pub that had been recommended to me, U Cerneho Vola (The Black Ox). When we walked into its two small, square, smoky rooms, I thought perhaps we had left the tourist trail behind for a second. The waiter spoke no English, and the ubiquitous sign for Pilsner Urquell, which pops up at least three times per block in the rest of the city, was nowhere to be found (or at least it was well hidden). Was this the tourist’s Holy Grail, the “real” Prague? Alas, not quite. There were plenty of foreigners taking pictures of each other at the bar’s traditional banged-up long tables.

We’d been told not to ask the waiter/bartender at a Prague pub where to sit or, God forbid, try to flag him down. “He knows you’re there.” Sure enough, after a suitable amount of time the guy in charge found us in the far corner. Another hard-bit man—the place seems to specialize in hard-bit—he said something in his native language. I started to ask, cheerfully, as an American will, “What beer do you have on tap…” He cut me off with a grunt that I thought meant “OK,” walked into the other room, and came back with two big mugs of dark beer. It was good, to say the least; I could have drunk the stuff all afternoon. Kozel dark: I’d try to find it in the States, but something tells me it wouldn’t taste the same.

That’s how the days were spent: long, foot-straining walk (my retro Nikes didn’t cut it either), lunch and beer at a pub, nap, dinner, night walk through the lit-up, cobblestone-street city. Here are a few of the highlights we saw along the way:

—A cavernous, Art Nouveau, Viennese-style café, the Kavarna Obecni dum, in the city’s symphony building. Love the dessert cart, which seemed to be wheeled 24-7.

—The Museum of Communism, a small, homemade set of exhibits chronicling the Czech Republic in the 20th century (for some reason, we were the only people there not from France). It’s located, naturally, right above a McDonald’s and behind a Benetton.

—Vysehrad, an 11th-century fortress with a view of the city

—A basement blues and rock club in the Mala Strana section. In my imagination, the city’s dissident rock shows in the 60s and 70s were always held in secret basements, so this dark, narrow little room fit the bill. It didn’t matter that the guy playing was a white Chicago bluesman I never would have paid money to see in New York.

—The ancient Karluv most (Charles Bridge) at the heart of town. It was begun in the 14th century and still has massive statues of Christian iconography along its sides. The view from west to east, into Old Town, is the one pictured above, and one featured on many tourist-book covers. On our last night in town, we walked back over the bridge from east to west. For a few moments, as we looked back into Old Town, there was no one else in sight.

It’s oddly exhilarating to be the only person in the presence of something very famous, something you’ve seen a thousand times in reproduction. I once had a friend who worked in the bookstore of the old Museum of Modern Art. One Wednesday, when the museum was closed, a guard let us walk through the entire place alone. How strange it was to think that you were the only person at that moment looking at Matisse’s Dance, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Dali’s Persistence of Memory. (The latter was small enough that we both felt we could have slipped it into our backpacks. I settled for touching it for a millisecond with a flick of my fingernail (earlier I had come perilously close to giving Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel a spin). When we walked outside, the guard was literally asleep in his chair. Ever since, I’ve looked at the wall above my bed and thought, The Persistence of Memory could be right there.) How many college students were looking at reproductions of all these paintings in dark classrooms at that very moment? But for a few minutes we owned the real things.

That’s how I felt on the Charles Bridge that night. For a few seconds, we owned a world-famous view. This is pure tourism at one level; seeking something out simply because it’s already famous. But on the other hand it felt like the trip’s Holy Grail. Do you go to a city like this to see the “real” Prague—in other words, the local Prague—or do you go to make the world-famous version of Prague your own?

Vienna

In the middle of the week we took a four-hour Eurrail ride to Vienna and stayed for a day and a half. After the ancien, post-Soviet atmosphere of Prague, Vienna looked frighteningly upscale at first glance, like a Continental outdoor mall. On the cab ride in, we counted three H&Ms in a two-block stretch. We were back in the West.

The clouds were even grayer and lower here, and there was a cold drizzle during most of our visit. But through all that, the city cast some kind of mysterious, unexpected spell—we both quickly wished we had more time to spend there.

First, there were the absolutely colossal government buildings, museums, and opera house. (The interior of the city’s major art museum, the Kunsthistoriches, was similarly eye-popping and over-the-top.)

Built during the city’s empire years, some of these structures take up entire blocks and are invariably topped by a series of massive classical statues. Our guidebook joked that if anyone came to Vienna from outer space they would immediately think they had landed in the capital of the planet after seeing the buildings. It’s true: New York’s buildings are taller, but they’ll never match Vienna’s footprint.

Like Prague, Vienna became more intriguing at night, even in the two-block radius we managed to cover. A twisting cobblestone alley led us to a good dinner at a café filled with Euro-tourists and their cigarettes, then to the venerable Café Alt Wien around the block for a beer (and a lot more cigarette smoke). Guys and girls in turtlenecks, sitting at tables surrounded by 60-style posters; I missed that look in New York.

Finally, there was the trip back on the vaunted European railway. The second-class coaches, where you’re boxed in with strangers, are where American travelers are supposed to have romantic, even life-changing adventures, right? Isn’t Vienna where Ethan Hawke met love-of-his-life Julie Delpy in a movie way back when? I wondered what fascinating person would enter our lives.

We had one of the coaches to ourselves for a few stops, but once we were back in the Czech Republic the train got crowded. At one stop, a small, odd-looking man peered into our coach and raised his eyebrows. He kept going down the hall; for some reason I was relieved. A few minutes later, though, he was back, opening the door, sitting down, and raising his eyebrows even higher at us. He smiled and said something in Czech. We smiled and went back to our magazines. Then we looked at each other. There was a new smell in the room. The guy had taken off his shoes.

I won’t try to describe the smell of the coach from that point on. I will just say that our fascinating new friend was staring—with his eyebrows raised halfway up his forehead—at a curiously slim promotional pamphlet the entire way back. Then he was talking on his cellphone in his high-pitched voice for 30 minutes. Then my friend and I got out of the coach and paced up and down the hallway for as long as we could. When we got back, he was still talking. His shoes were still off. When we arrived in Prague, we got our bags and began to trudge out the door. He smiled cheerfully at us and said good-bye. We didn’t look at him.

When it was over, I mentioned the pamphlet that our fascinating friend had been reading. My friend, who had been sitting next to him, informed me that he had had a porn magazine inside it the whole time—guess that explains the constantly raised eyebrows. In the end, it hadn’t been a romantic experience—he was about as far from Julie Delpy as it’s possible for a human being to be—but it may have been life-changing. Next time I’m shelling out for first-class.

We got back to Prague for one night and went to a popular American-style cocktail bar called Tretter’s. After a week in smoky pubs with no background music, it felt good to be sipping a strange concoction and hearing vintage James Brown at top volume. Here again was an example of the power of the U.S., which was more obvious to me in Prague than it is in our own country, or even in Western Europe. Our stars are indeed the stars of the world, or at least this part of the world. Bruce Springsteen’s mug is on city billboards; the radio plays the same 80s pop ours does; and Vienna’s version of US Weekly is called Aha! (great name for a gossip rag). It features Britney and Brad and Jen. I would say that’s a bummer, but in a bar like Tretter’s I could understand the appeal of our country’s energy, and, for lack of a better term, our iconography of money.

Not that there were many people from Prague actually in the bar. To my right were four frat dudes from Australia psyched up to do absinthe shots; to my left were two Italian horndogs in leather jackets buying champagne for a bunch of young women from Texas. At one point, the James Brown stopped. A song came on that I recognized and loved but couldn’t identify. When the singing started, it came to me as a shock: the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” (no, it has nothing to do with the teen movie named after it). James Brown belongs to the world, but this song still belonged to me. I’d only been gone a week, but it was enough to make me homesick. It was another, less-ambitious tourist Holy Grail: To be gone just long enough to appreciate your own life again.