Arc Tangent

A quick post, because I’ve been busy and not updat­ing my blog as well as I should’ve. Only way to get back into the habit is to keep writ­ing, right?

So, a few inter­est­ing things I learnt in the Czech Republic:

• You’ve prob­a­bly heard that Prague is beau­ti­ful. The descrip­tions are not doing it justice.

Old Clock Tower, Old Prague

• Watch­ing Opera (Dvorak’s Rusalka) is much more enjoy­able when cap­tions are pro­vided. Goes dou­ble if the per­for­mance is in Czech and you’re not a native speaker.
• Any coun­try where beer is cheaper than water (~25 kro­nes, or AUD$1.50, give or take) is fan­tas­tic fun — but hard on the liver!
• Czech food is extremely rich and dense (and deli­cious). I have a the­ory that this is some­thing to do with the colder months of the year and need­ing high energy input tra­di­tion­ally to stay warm. Cita­tion needed. If you can find a good, trust­wor­thy restau­rant, you MUST try tatarak.
• Many Czech peo­ple speak Eng­lish to some degree or another; most of them are quite ner­vous about actu­ally using their English.
• Every­body appre­ci­ates it when you speak at least a few words of their lan­guage. In Czech, this seems dou­bly so.
• Lots of peo­ple (at least in Prague) have dogs, even if they don’t have a back yard. This seems vaguely cruel to me.
• Any pub that’s been around since the 14^th cen­tury is Doing Some­thing Right.
• Lucerna is a fan­tas­tic night­club full of very friendly, drunk Czech party ani­mals — if you like music from the 80s. And I don’t mean the best of the 80s. I mean 80s music, all of it, even the stuff that wasn’t very good.
• Really good cof­fee can be hard to find. (I highly rec­om­mend Café Lam­borgh­ini, around the cor­ner from the Lazarska tram stop — the food is a bit expen­sive but the cof­fee was solid! Ser­vice is great too.)
• A large num­ber of Czech peo­ple that I encoun­tered did not seem par­tic­u­larly opti­mistic about their lot in life. I believe this to be a holdover from Com­mu­nist oppres­sion, and sus­pect that the Czech peo­ple will become extremely entre­pre­neur­ial over the next 10 years and that the rest of Europe should watch out. The folks I met who were opti­mistic and/​or ambi­tious were pow­er­houses of hard work and talent.
  

  Stat­u­ary atop the State Theatre

• There was a Czech movie a few years ago about a simple-​minded young man who wore big head­phones around every­where. Walk­ing around Prague wear­ing a pair of Tech­nics head­phones will earn you strange wry grins from peo­ple that will baf­fle you ini­tially — all because of this movie.
• Every­body smokes, every­where. Get used to it.
• Accord­ing to pop­u­lar leg­end, the Russ­ian mafia own a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of busi­nesses in the Repub­lic. Pol­i­tics and crime are closely inter­wo­ven. Despite this, petty crime on the streets, at least in Prague, seems quite uncommon.
• Tea houses are a fan­tas­tic way to unwind if you a) like tea and/​or b) like shisha pipes. They’re turkish-​style dens of relax­ation, usu­ally very quiet and a great place to sit with a friend and talk. Def­i­nitely need more of these in Australia!
• Hav­ing a higher pop­u­la­tion den­sity in an area makes a lot of really cool things pos­si­ble that you just can’t do in a place like Aus­tralia (re: pub­lic trans­port, util­i­ties, busi­nesses), where every­one is accus­tomed to hav­ing a back yard and a lot of space. Not hav­ing a yard really isn’t that big an impost, in my opin­ion, and we should be build­ing up rather than build­ing out where possible.

Finally, the key words of the lan­guage for a trav­eller: pivo (beer), prosim (please), dekuji/​diky (thank you/​thanks), dobre [den|rano|vecer] (good day|morning|night), vyborny (fantastic/​delicious). Guar­an­teed to get a smile if you can use some of these.