Back in Prague
The 2016 Easter Market in the Old Town Square of Prague
On the day I crossed the border into the Czech Republic from Germany things seemed to loosen up in a way they hadn’t since the beginning of my 2016 trip. It’s hard to explain. Czech’s can have their problems in the world. But there is a sense of things being relaxed in way that France, Scotland, England, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany are not. Not that the Czechs are like the Polynesians or the Caribbeans. They certainly don’t have that tropical insouciance. It’s just that the rules, if they are at all known, don’t seem to always apply. I didn’t have a train ticket to cover the stretch of track from the Czech/German border at Děčín to Ústí nad Labem (about a fifteen minutes travel). I also wasn’t really concerned about it, not like I would have been in Germany. And sure enough the conductor didn’t come to punch my ticket until after Ústí.
Parking Faces?
Being my fourth time in Prague, my arrival at Residence Green Lobster in Malá Strana (the Little Quarter) below the castle, the Hradčany, went off smoothly without event. I was back in Praha now for ten days. At first it seemed like I might have too much time on my hands. In the end I was scrambling to get everything done, and due to an unexpected fever near the end I had to simply give up on a few things.
Irish Setter show at the Prague Easter Market.
After a stroll over the relatively uncrowded Charles Bridge, which can be an absolute cattle crossing, I walked into the Old Town Square, passing the booths being set up for the Czech Easter Markets, and found the only truly reputable currency exchange in Prague. As a rule you should only get your money directly from a banks ATM. Generally when in Prague you have to be extremely cautious about currency exchange rip offs. Once in 2005 I was taken badly by a dishonest shop advertising CHANGE. I looked into it and discovered that this situation is epidemic in the city. They have dozens of little tricks to weasel bad rates out of you when you think you’re getting a fair rate. You literally can’t win. It’s like three card monte. But the place called EXchange.cz on Kaprova Street is indeed reliable. And so I took the euros that I had and turned them into koruny. And then after buying a month long transportation pass I was ready to start circling Prague ca. 2016, a deal for effortless travel around the city and even to the airport.
Hand Painted Wooden Easter Eggs
Things to do: There were plenty. Among the first was to make contacts with various friends and acquaintances. There was Nina Malíková from Loutkář (Puppeteer) Magazine, Radek from Buchty a loutky (More on them in coming updates.), Eliška whom I met working at the Alchemy Museum in 2012, Nina who translated my interview with Jan Švankmajer in 2012 and Jue from China who was a composer who had found me online and realized I would be here where she was studying. Not only that my translating French puppet friend Paulette was going to drop by for a couple of days on her way to puppet festivals in Greece. So lot’s of communicating needed to get done. I also saw that there was an interesting Czech horror film, Polednice, or Lady Midday, about the Czech legend of the Noon Day Witch, that screamed to be seen. Plus there was music to locate, films to hunt down on DVD and of course puppet shows to see.
A strangely Muffled Character from Mucha’s Slav Epic at the Prague National Gallery. This is just a tiny fragment of the whole.
One thing I did early on during my Prague sojourn was to visit Alfons Mucha’s Slav Epic at the Galeria Narodowa w Pradze (Prague National Gallery). (Mucha is pronounced moo-kha – the ch is like the ch in Bach.) This massive undertaking by Art Nouveau artist Mucha was made in his later years and tells a poetic version of the great moments in Slavic history. It had recently arrived in Prague after years of wrangling. And when I say massive I mean it. Twenty immense painting take up a room the size of an airport hanger. Being part Polish and Ukrainian myself I could only feel the passion Mucha must have felt trying to impart a sense of the importance of the Slavs beginning millennia ago as a tribe out on the Steppes.
Nun on a Tram
Another thing that always strikes me about Prague is the fascinating street performers and music particularly clustered near the Old Town Square. One man did and absolutely brilliant performance as puppet baby with a swazzle in his mouth for good measure. The swazzle is a device put in one’s mouth during a Punch and Judy show to give the voice a high pitched humorous rasp. In fact more than one living statue had added this accessory, which I had never seen in Prague before. Then there were the guys doing an Indian levitation trick. They just sat still seemingly impossibly hanging in the air. Musically I made one exciting discovery of a Czech musical unit called the Bohemian Bards, who played Scottish war pipes, a double necked acoustic guitar and an African drum while doing Medieval inspired dance music and Czech folk songs at a breakneck paced. I immediately bought their CD and talked to the guys between sets.
The Bohemian Bards getting down.
And they played during the Easter Markets which I soon discovered happened everywhere in the Czech Republic and featured Old Czech Ham roasting on spits, painted wooden Easter eggs, special cakes, honey wine, hot wine, very salty cheese, thick sausages on grills, local students dancing and even an Irish Setter competition, among many other possibilities.
The Old Levitation Trick
Many discoveries were made during my time in Prague. Polednice, turned out to be a quality Czech film with favorable similarities to the Babadook. I discovered excellent Czech Baroque and folk music in the stores. Several satisfying local meals were digested. And I discovered in a Czech mall, to my horror, that images from 3-D cameras could be fed into into a 3D printer to create miniature versions (idols?) of real people… which had many strange implications.
Puppet Baby! There’s a full grown man in there.
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