I feel like I’m not doing these days in Czech justice so far. Probably it’s because it was like four days ago and there was so much happening (and a lot of beer) that now it seems like a blur. Let me stress that we were A) super happy to be with our friends, B) very impressed with Czech food, and C) in love with the peace and beauty of Prague.
On our third day we visited the Walshtein gardens. We had seen it from afar and noticed a grey wall that looked from a distance like it was built of howling faces. Up close it was more like random patterns in lava, but every here and there were indeed hidden faces. There were peacocks, then we took a furnicular up to a tower that looked sort of like the eiffel tower. It was a long way up it, and Colin hopped the entire way. He certainly earned his beer that day, wheuf.
It started out as a beautiful sunny day, and I wore my little dress from southwestern Turkey and my new leather strap sandals. I just developed about five pictures of myself, so vain. But after we came back down from the tower, the clouds finally came together over us and the sky broke open. It poured! We scurried for cover in a mirror maze and took hilarious pictures of ourselves as three foot tall gnomes with cone heads and beasts with long dangling gorilla arms. We also saw the Cimrman museum in the tower basement. Cimrman was a fictional person, a pseudnom for political artists around the time of the revolution. In the museum we witnessed his made up life as an inventor of such devices as the gentleman’s travelling chamber-pot and a clip that secured your glasses to your hat so neither would fly off.
The rain only got worse as dinner approached so we eventually had to make a run for it. Out of the park, down the furnicular, across to the metro and back to the castle we ran from cover to cover. Nobody was expecting rain and only Colin had a waterproof jacket with a hood. By the time we made it across the bridge to the restaurant we were soaked through. Poor Jeff was starving and looked like a wet cat. We wrung out our clothes, hung the outer layers up to dry and started with a round of hot grog. Colin and I shared goulash in a bread bowl and for once we weren’t too stuffed for desert.
We hit up the brewpub (pivovar) Fleku next door where they only had one type of beer. Servers wandered table to table with platters of the dark and tasty brew and shot glasses of bitter yellow liquid. An old guy with an accordion and a wide smile played Long Way to Tipereli and Yellow Submarine and everyone sang along. It was touristy but we didn’t care; we were dry and warm and the rain had stopped outside. Good beer and friends: all was right with the world.
