8 july 2005

Today was gray and rainy, a perfect museum day, so I went to the Prague History Museum. I love museums that are forlorn, aloof, outdated, obscure, or otherwise uninviting to the general public. The Prague History Museum did not disappoint.

With its case after case of glassed-in relics accompanied by lengthy explanations in Czech, attendance was predictably low. Between the cashier, the coat clerk, the entrance guard, and the dispersed security, the staff to guest ratio was roughly 6:1. Fortunately a few arbitrary exhibits had been adopted in recent years with the public in mind: black and white photos of Prague in the 1950s, a chronicle of the 6-day Czech resistance uprising at the end of WWII, and a meticulous 3D model of the city, barely visible in the room kept dark for its preservation.

I tried to go to the Muchovo Museum as well, but the cashier was so mean to me that I left. I try to keep in mind that if I had lived through Stalinism I might not be brimming with pleasantries either.

Instead I found Anagram Books, the kind of book shop I would spend all afternoon in back home, with an excellent collection of regional authors and works. I sat out the rainy afternoon in a coffeeshop, reading, writing, and nursing a single, tasty, overpriced latte.

Now I am doing the same, in a different cafe, with a beer and my uplifting new book The Fall of Yugoslavia.

Central Prague at nite is filled with tourists: couples leanining into each other, young partying mobs from the UK, big families from Spain and Japan. I don't really want to meet any of them so I've just been observing. They take alot of predictable photos, crowd noisy ugly bars, and wander in and out of souvenir shops selling scarves and glass and t-shirts that say Czech Me Out. I realize that this is not really Prague, that real Prague is outside this appropriated core, but the core also happens to be the old part, the part with the cobbled streets and windy alleys and startlingly ornate buildings. So for now, for three days, Im just being a tourist.