Boy Falls in Love -- Prague, Czech Republic

I'm starting this post from the cobbled, colorful main square of Old Town, Prague. A busker strums his guitar to my left, playing one Beatles song after another and accepting gratitude in his worn out red hat. An enormous statue of Jan Hus, predecessor  of Martin Luther, stands behind me. A performer on stilts wearing a black bowler hat tries to wrangle himself a crowd. It's easy to tell that he's been doing this kind of work for a long time... his voice sounds like a hundred groups of Asian tourists have trampled his cords, stopping to take cheesy selfies every step of the way. 

I wonder how well he survives off his earnings in a place like Prague -- in a place where there are talented street performers to be found on every corner, in every passageway, in every square and completely taking over the Charles Bridge. Where you can't walk across Old Town square without walking through a storm of rainbow bubbles. 

Between every street performer in Prague, there kneels a beggar.  Elbows, knees, forehead pressing into the hard, filthy cobble, hands clutching a hat or a bowl with a few coins glinting inside. No eye contact. No words. No sign. 

Just a quiet, humble display of need. 

My heart breaks a little every time I pass one of these people. In the US, beggars stand on street corners with signs. Some funny, like, "Alien stranded on earth. Need money for space ship repair." Some more mundane, like, "Anything helps, God bless." Sometimes the beggars look defiant, sometimes they look dazed, sometimes they look hungry, sometimes they look exhausted... but they always look... like they have the right to be there. 

In Prague, it almost feels as if they're apologizing for being there. 

When Boy and I were walking down a narrow alley near Old Town Square, we spotted a man who had lifted his head from the cobbled street. But it wasn't to have a conversation, to eat a sandwich or to look at the view. 

It was to sop up the blood flowing from his nose. 

Boy went up to the man and asked if there was anything else he needed. The man said no, and we carried on our way. 

"Do you think he was kicked?" I asked Boy.

"Maybe accidentally," my optimistic Boy replied. "There's a lot of traffic down these alleys and their faces are just so close to the ground..."

What about a culture creates the idea that people need to be THIS ashamed of asking for help? 

Boy and I took a four am bus to Edinburgh airport on the morning of the 9th, careful not to wake up Millie as we tip-toed out of Graham's flat. Our flight departed on time, and we breezed through passport control, collected our bags, bought bus tickets and boarded our bus with only a few language barrier related mishaps.

Our eight day stay in Prague had been divided among three hosts. Host number one was Jakub, a Czech psychologist and journalist whose Couchsurfing Mission was to "Never fail to follow the white rabbit," and whose "Home" section proudly stated, "Experience the smallest flat in Prague!" Host number two was Fabio, an Italian tour guide and puppeteer whose "About Me" section stated that he was a "galactic hitchhiker stuck on planet earth" and that the most amazing thing he ever did was make his puppet ride a mini-pony. Our third host was Petr, a Czech mathematics student who could calculate the day of the week you were born on in his head.

Jakub left work during his lunch break to meet us at the metro station. He let us dump our backpacks at a nursery he and his girlfriend had built together and then led us to a nearby cafe. Where we had originally planned to get coffee, but when I saw that cider was cheaper than a cappuccino, I decided to be a good budget traveler and buy the alcohol instead.

Our host had to return to work, so we made plans to meet up at the nursery later in the day, and Boy and I set off to wander Prague. After walking up a torturous amount of stairs, we arrived at Prague Castle. Which didn't seem so much like a castle at all -- just a nice sort of neighborhood on a hill with an enormous cathedral right in the middle. As it was fairly early in the afternoon, the whole castle grounds was a sluggish coagulation of tourists posing in front of gates, fountains, cafes, and viewpoints, so I didn't bother taking pictures. Just of this -- a statue who gives you luck if you touch his man parts.

You always know which part of the statue is lucky by the bit of gold. Statues like this turn gold when they're rubbed too often.

Tourist after tourist walked up and gave his bits a rub, getting their pictures taken with their hands around the wang. Then a little girl passed by and tried to reach the golden penis, but couldn't quite make it.

"Mummy, help me!" she cried, fingers desperately reaching for the glinting dick.

Mummy did not help the little girl touch the metal prick. Mummy shooed the little girl away as quickly as possible as Boy and I collapsed into a fit of giggles. 

It drizzled on and off for the rest of the day, and Boy spent the entire afternoon under his black umbrella in a state of supreme bliss. We wandered narrow alley after narrow ally, listened to street musicians and schemed about how to one day move to Prague for a spell.

 

Jakub introduced us to traditional Czech food that evening, driving us to a restaurant where we purchased a pork knuckle dinner.

"I have a lot of surfers who are super hippie, vegan and rainbows," Jakub commented as we ate, "and they want to try traditional Czech food. And I just say... "I'm sorry!" There isn't any traditional Czech food like that."

We met Fabio at his flat the next day before he went to lead his beer tour at 5:30.

"An Italian leading beer tours in the Czech Republic?" I furrowed my brow, trying to find anything that made sense in that scenario.

"They needed English speakers. Most of the people taking the tours are American," Fabio said, matter of factly.

"How long have you lived here, though?"

"About two months."

"And you can already lead tours? Don't you need to know history, culture, all that stuff?"

"No, just about the beer."

Fabio's apartment was very close to Old Town, so Boy and I abandoned the tram and walked into the city the next morning, stopping at a cute marketplace for some cheap breakfast.

Troy and I can't pronounce this Bohemian Specialty. So we just refer to them as "turtlenecks".

The churches in Prague are extraordinary, but many of them charge an entrance fee and even more of them charge an extra fee if you want to take pictures. As I refuse on principle to let the Catholic Church make any money off of me, Boy and I only entered the free churches and took pictures when we didn't have to pay a few crowns to capture a few memories.

We returned to Fabio's fairly early and surreptitiously slipped under our sleeping bag. 

"We're going out for drinks," Fabio introduced us to his Spanish friend. "You want to come?" 

"Umm... we're actually pretty tired. And we want to wake up early to see the sunrise on the Charles Bridge before all the tourists get there. But thanks for asking us." 

I feel so lame whenever I just want to go to bed. Like I'm such a disappointment. Why aren't there more old people on Couchsurfing? AGH. 

I went to my profile and updated the "About Me" section. It now reads:

I don't like clubs. Or bars, really. In fact, I'm the oldest 27 year old ever. I have an annoying habit of passing out well before midnight and waking up at ungodly hours (sometimes before the sun), and taking luxurious naps in the afternoon.
I also play a lot of cards and listen to classical music and drink red wine.
See? Old person.
I adore dinner parties. They may very well be one of my favorite things. Just expect me to pass out on the couch if the party lasts past midnight. I'm like Cinderella that way.

Boy and I woke before the sun and raced to the bridge. 

We began to notice that Prague is a city supersaturated by random little (not free) museums.

The Apple Museum.

The Film Special Effects Museum.

The Museum of Historical Chamber Pots and Toilets. 

The Museum of Bricks. 

We went on a free Sandeman walking tour and heard about Kafka's time in Prague, 

Can you find Kafka's lucky bits?

We learned about Nicholas Winton, a British humanitarian who quietly saved the lives of 669 children during WWII by arranging their safe passage to England and finding them new families.

A statue of Moses in the Jewish district

We learned that the only reason Prague's Jewish district is still intact is because Hitler wanted to keep it as a kind of museum. To show people of his new civilization how the extinct Jewish race once lived.

Jan Hus was also featured on this tour, as his statue is the largest and most prominent in Prague's most touristic square. Mister Hus was a priest, philosopher, and a key predecessor to Protestantism. He was burned at the stake for heresy against the Catholic Church in 1415. Because he said people should be able to speak to Jesus without the intersession of priests and thought that indulgences were a load of manipulative crap.



Our guide pointed out a statue of Don Giovanni, an opera Mozart had composed whilst living in Prague.

After a quick dinner at Fabio's, we returned to the center to see the city lights at night.

We relocated to Petr's on the 12th, walking an hour and a half out of the city center to meet our enthusiastic, considerate new host (who told me I was born on a Sunday) at his apartment.

"We have another guest just for tonight," Petr informed us. "He just shared with me his whole life story, and he's a little, well... you'll see..." 

Never know what you're going to get with Couchsurfing... this could be its slogan. "You'll see..." 

The other guest was a bearded Irish chap named Conor. He reminded me of a little of the excessively spiritual people I'd met at The Healing Sanctuary in La Punta, Mexico. The people who wouldn't eat on Mondays and sprinkled cow manure on their smoothies, because since they'd meditated while burning it, the poo had somehow become holy.

He just seems so disconnected. Like he's floating inside a bubble. 

Boy and I offered to cook dinner for the group, so we walked across the street to a cheap grocery store and purchased potatoes, cheese, tomatoes, sausage and eggs.

"I can make some sort of gratin," I told Boy as I showed him my shopping basket.

"Is there anything you guys don't eat?" Boy asked Conor and Petr.

"I eat everything," Petr replied.

So we carried the ingredients back to Petr's and after an hour and a half of chopping and baking, the sort-of-gratin was ready. I dished up the plates and handed them to the boys.

"Thanks and sorry, but I don't eat meat," Conor said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Boy and I gushed. "It would have been so easy to make without the sausage. Why didn't you tell us?"

Conor didn't really explain why he didn't tell us, but a couple of hours later he asked to borrow some money so he could run to the shop and buy his own food. Cheerfully on the outside and grumbling on the inside, I counted out 130 crowns and gave it to him.

It's not the money that bothers me... it's that we offered to cook dinner, we made more than enough for four and because he just didn't tell us he doesn't eat meat, we have to give him another five dollars so that he can buy food. Choosing to live like a vagabond on the generosity of others doesn't leave much room for pickiness. Oof. But I'm probably overreacting because I'm a low-budget traveler who just gave money to another low-budget traveler, and it somehow doesn't feel fair. Maybe he's still learning how to communicate. And I was probably just as annoying when I started traveling, too. With feeling too nervous to communicate my needs at first and then only telling people what's really going on when I got desperate. 

 Despite the meal mix-up, we really had a gorgeous evening drinking wine, listening to music and playing Cards Against Humanity. 

Jakub had invited us to brunch at the flat of the Canadians for whom he was house sitting, so Petr generously gave us a ride into town and we spent the next three hours cooking and laughing and drinking Czech red wine from a plastic bottle.

these are the couchsurfing moments I live for.

Boy and I kept busy for the rest of our stay in Prague, exploring with Petr, meeting up with Jakub and company for a dinner on the Canadian's balcony, and relishing the sensation of strolling through streets where every building has an old story to tell.

The John Lennon Wall. This tourist attraction was an ordinary grey wall until the 1980s, when young Czechs transformed its blank surface into a canvas of their grievances about Gustav Husak's communist regime. After Lennon's murder in 1980, he became a hero for these pacifist Czech's, and they used his portrait and lyrics from his songs to paint the wall. And because Western images and symbols were banned during Husak's regime, the artwork was quickly covered by the secret police. But the art kept reappearing. And reappearing. And remained even after the regime had fallen. .

Segways are one of my least favorite parts of Prague, and they're everywhere -- even though the government has made them illegal in most center city zones. Other least favorite parts of Prague include all the churches that charge an entrance fee and all the parks that forbid frolicking on the grass.

Boy and I caught a sunset near Charles Bridge.

After which we sat with Petr in the Old Town Square, drank cider and beer, watched the street performers and cursed Prague's lack of free public toilets.

"I love that you can drink in public here, though," I said, thinking about how nice it would be to take some drinks into a park in Colorado. Without having to worry about hiding the wine in a dark colored nalgene so the cops wouldn't see it.

Not that I've ever done this.

"Yeah, I had a friend once," Petr started his story, "and we went to Saint Vitus Cathedral. He had a beer and was wearing a cap, you know. He wasn't sure whether or not he'd be allowed in the cathedral with the beer, so he asked the guard on the outside. The guard didn't know about the beer, so my friend just went in. But a little bit later, a priest approached the guy and said, "stop being so disrespectful! Remove your cap!" You see? In Prague, you can drink beer in a cathedral, but you can't wear a cap."

As we watched puppeteers, bubblers, musicians and ladder walkers, we talked about how we celebrate holidays in the US and in the Czech Republic.

"How do you celebrate Easter?" Petr asked us.

"Well, we hide eggs outside -- in my family, they were filled with candy and sometimes money. And we always had a fun little basket of presents that was hid inside the house. Chocolate bunnies are pretty common. And anybody with any sort of religious inkling usually goes to church Sunday morning. What do you do?"

Then Petr told me how Czech's celebrate Easter. And I haven't been nearly so shocked since Maud told me about Christmas in the Netherlands. You know, where if you're naughty, Saint Nicholas and his 6 - 8 black men (they can't seem to get an exact number) hit you with sticks, put you in a sack and kidnap you to Spain.

On Easter Monday in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Dutch men arm themselves with young willow branches and buckets of cold water. Then they knock on doors of friends and complete strangers alike, find the women in the house and hit them with the willow branches and douse them in cold water. This is done in belief that if a woman is hit and doused, she'll remain young and fertile.

The women then reward the men with money and alcohol.

I don't even know... I can't believe... what the fuck?

Boy and I caught a sunrise in a small vineyard near the castle.

I thought Boy would cry when we left this beautiful city.

"You'll be back," I tried to comfort my disconsolate boyfriend as we boarded our bus for Ceske Budejovice. "If you like it this much, you know you'll be back."