Day Thirteen, in Which the Narrator Travels to Kutná Hora

The skeletons left by communities propelled to great economic, architectural, and cultural heights by an unexpected boon before withering and dying when their lifeblood curdles are, for lack of a better word, awesome. Kutná Hora in central Bohemia is one such community. This is how one gets there from Prague:


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The discovery of silver around the turn of the first millennium was followed by centuries of mining in which Kutná Hora grew politically and economically. By the 14th century, half of the silver produced in all Europe came from Kutná Hora. It came to rival Prague as Bohemia's crown jewel, and a procession of Wenceslauses pirouetted across the city's burgeoning political stage.

However, a catastrophic flood and political unrest in the 16th century tarnished the city forever. Today, the town limps along largely on remnants of medieval glory. To wit:



Among these glories lurks reality:



But also more glory!



Kutná Hora also contains Sedlec Ossuary, one of the world's most terrifying ossuaries. As an ossuary is a reliquary for human bones, it does not come to this title lightly. This chandelier contains at least one of every bone in the human body:



The bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 persons cover the walls and ceilings of the ossuary.



The experience was deeply unnerving. This picture didn't come out how I intended, yet somehow captures the atmosphere better than any of the others I took:

Day Twelve, in Which Prague is Described Via Pluviā

About halfway up the Eastern European troposphere, a convective cell cycles merrily over Prague. Globules of water coalesce and become heavy enough to fall. Like cumuli Icari, they approach terminal velocity in the wintry air.

Spires come first, topped with icons baroque, medieval, renaissance, as though someone had torn out the pages of every architecture textbook in the world and stitched them into the sky with soot and snow. The spires are chased by steepled roofs obscured by slush waiting to be sluiced. A bit farther down and they’re no longer alone: a modern esoteria—knotted cables, television antennae, corrugated vents sighing industrial effluvia—gyres into they sky. Hamburger-shaped droplets (a raindrop at terminal velocity is not, in fact, teardrop-shaped, but more of a flattened, watery pâté) splatter on superannuated trelliswork and modernity’s refuse without discrimination. The lucky ones miss and find themselves flitting downward with buildings on either side. The backdrop rises, softly fluorescing a rainslick history: façades, art nouveau peccadilloes, ogives, columns, Soviet concrete. The last bit of precipitate lands and seeps into the miry slop by which the cobblestone is eclipsed.

King Wenceslas doesn’t blink as drops run down his soot-blackened face. If Wenceslas Square's post-Communist neon shroud doesn’t bother Bohemia’s patron saint, why should a little rain?

Day Seven, in Which the Narrator Realizes There Are Some Things of Which He Will Never Tire

To wit: hearing the rules to King's Cup repeatedly explained in Czech; rereading Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age a million times; mléko; hearing Czech spoken with a thick Vietnamese accent; Czech English speakers who insist on using the present progressive tense for everything; Slovaks; rooming with a dude who reads Gogol and Chekhov in the original Russian; dancing for the sake of dancing; the exchange rate; Yevgeny Zamyatin; occasionally taking a night off; and the view from my room:



Things I may tire of but haven't yet: getting to the club at ten-thirty and leaving at four-thirty; T-Mobile CZ.

Things I've tired of already: the quantity of shattered glass on Czech dance floors. Unless one is wearing shoes with diamond-plated soles (Diddy?) the dully gleaming carpet of smashed glassware will lace the cracked rubber of your Cons with its tendrils, boring upward toward tender, tumescent feet. Glass-removal breaks every 90 minutes are indispensable. Oh, and British people. Quite sick of them.

Vocabulary: díky (thanks), ovlouvam se (sorry--a reflexive verb [!]), pivovar (brewery)

Day Two (Evening) and Day Three, in Which the Candle is Burned at Every Conceivable End

My clothes have become a metaphor for my existence. Rumpled, prematurely careworn, covered with a slick patina of cigarette smoke, heavy beer, perspiration, Czech crowns, street slush and myriad other substances attendant to days and nights in Prague.

I haven't stopped moving since the moment I arrived four days ago except to briefly crash on my USSR bed (about two inches of padding) to chase few hours of elusive sleep. The experience thus far has been some combination of affecting, bewildering, challenging, and amazing. I'm searching for a word that refers to the process of internalizing a staggering amount of experiences and input all at once, constantly. There's probably a Czech word for it. The learning curve for this city and language is nearly vertical but I'm scaling it feverishly. Czech is inscrutable but fragments nevertheless stick on occasion. Especially when those fragments mean the difference between making it home and wandering in Vinohrady for three hours.

More later. Promise.

Vocabulary: děkuji (thank you), ze (from), do (to), prosím (please), pivo (beer)

Day Two, in Which the Narrator Attempts to Pass for a Local

My sleep schedule having been obliterated long ago, I woke at about seven a.m. After eating breakfast, I decided to kill time with a predawn walk. One might think that wandering in a foreign city alone, in the dark, would meet study a abroad adviser's definition of "unsafe behavior."

One would be completely correct. In any event, I had a mission. The constant, instant labeling as an American by the locals (as deserved as it was) had motivated me. I wanted to successfully have an interaction with a Czech and have him or her come away with the impression that I was a local. As I speak no Czech, this was no mean feat. I would have to successfully make an initial impression that didn't disqualify me from being Czech, and then artfully maintain the deception through a series of well-timed grunts and noncommittal noises, all with the air of someone not merely confident in his environment, but utterly bored by it. I knew that my age and American shoes would work against me while my last name (clotted with Slavic consonants), closely-cropped hair, and ability to project cynicism as a facial expression would help me.

My target was the hapless cashier of the Tesco Express around the corner. I strode into his store from the predawn inclemency as though I had done it a thousand times before. As though I had any idea what a Tesco Express sells. I paused in front of a display of milk (mléko) and surveyed it disdainfully before, with blind decisiveness, selecting a bottle. I placed it on the counter and nodded to the clerk. There was a moment of tension in which I waited expectantly.

Success. He let loose a brief burst of incomprehensible Czech and rang up the milk. I watched the display for the amount of crowns and paid with a banknote, responding to a sustained enfilade of Czech with a grunt. It sailed through beautifully. I took my change, and brusquely marched out the door, relishing the simple Czech farewell that followed me into the darkness.

I drank my victory milk at a tram stop and watched kids across the street throw snowballs at one another in the rising light.

New Vocab: ahoj (hello), mléko (milk), pardon (excuse me)

Day One, in Which the Narrator Arrives

Writing about my experiences abroad is a constant struggle to avoid meandering, uninteresting ruminations about minutiae. The audience (let's assume there is one [humor me (please)]) doesn't care about the way Lufthansa's airplane's tray tables are latched or how toilets flush in Europe. (Do they?)

Having said that, experiences abroad are a collection of trivial, individually insignificant moments that coalesce into a transformative experience one can use to bore people at parties later on in life. Also, you can overpronounce foreign words.

I arrived via Frankfurt and, after a prolonged ballet involving luggage and orientation and introductions--the primary outcome of which is to make me forget the person's name less than a second after I hear it--there was time for a healthy meal at a Czech pub. Our choice of drink ran the gamut from "large beer" to "very large beer." Over a gently steaming plate of boiled potatoes and chicken fillet, I talked with a my new Czech friends about Hannah Arendt, stereotypes of Americans, residual resentment of communist ideology, American music from the 80s, and a few other things that got stuck somewhere in the barbed spines of the language barrier and bled to death between clusters of consonants and accent marks. Slowly.

Crashed early, drained by 20 hours of continuous travel.

New Vocab: Absolutely nothing. Tried to learn please and thank you, only succeeded in enunciating my own idiocy.