Archive for January 2001

26/1 (Australia Day)–Prague

I’ve been in Prague almost a week now and for most of that time I’ve been ill. Something’s attacking my eyes, nose and throat. The worst of it passed a few days ago, but there hasn’t been much improvement since. (Last night, after playing two games of chess with an Andrea, I was forced to retire to bed. (This was about 8 o’clock.) I was planning to just nap but ended up sleeping for 12 hours.) So this is why I haven’t seen much of the city.

I have been reading. I read Henry James’s novella “The Aspern Papers” (a weak, ridiculous mystery with a one-sentence plot and lame conclusion, populated with pathetic characters who say and do almost nothing for weeks on end) and then I read Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (much more worthwhile, I must have liked it because I read the last 80 pages or so in bed, by torchlight) and then, most recently, all but two stories of Milan Kundera’s “Laughable Loves” (also excellent).

But, I have seen some of Prague. Prague is very pretty and is filled with many beautiful things. I have scrappy, uninteresting, notes on several things that I won’t type: the Charles Bridge deserves its fame; Prague can be relatively cheap; there are a large number of not-very-good Italian restaurants in Prague, and a surprising number of Chinese ones (run by actual Chinese people).

One of the most noteworthy things about Prague is the size of the English-speaking population. I don’t know why there are so many expats here. Perhaps one of the reasons is that it’s very easy to feel wanted here. As an English-speaker in Paris, say, you don’t have shit Parisians want. But here in Prague, they want your money, they want your English-speaking skills (one guy I spoke to got a job teaching English by saying No, he didn’t have any teaching experience but Yes, he thought it was something he’d enjoy), they want your Western sophistication. It’s nice to feel so wanted. And you also get to feel smug: as someone coming from a rich Western country, you can look down upon Prague’s fleet of unscrupulous taxi drivers and corruptible police force. You can think “nice try” when you hear their experiments with rock music. The Czech Republic got capitalism, but she wants to learn English, to drink Coke and eat at McDonald’s, to join the EU, to become more Western–in other words, to become more like you. All this is both attractive and reassuring to young, unattached, undecided, twenty-somethings. I’m over-stating my case in the name of provocativeness and hell, I’ve been here less than a week (and talked to less than 10 expats), but this is the thought that occurred to me this morning as I ate breakfast and I figured I should record it.

I realise I didn’t quite finish the bike story. The info about the boys I got from the woman in “Granta Coins and Antiquities”, who saw the whole thing from across the road. And it doesn’t have an unhappy ending: I’d paid a £25 deposit, but Geoff of “Geoff’s Bikes” returned it even though the bike was gone–he figured that he’d eventually get a call from someone who’d found it dumped in their garden. This was rather decent of Geoff, I think.

The thing is, I’d resolved to dislike Geoff after the pedal crank of the first bike he rented me fell off and it took 45 minutes to walk back to the shop to get it fixed. And there were a couple of other problems with the bike too, resulting in an often-exciting ride.

I don’t know why, but it often seems to happen that whenever I have someone figured for the hottest fires of hell they do something that puts me in their debt. Annoying.

Misc. travel notes–II:

1. In Amsterdam, even the beggars speak English.
2. Someone called John Ford, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a play called “‘Tis Pitty Shee’s a Whore.”
3. I want this play!
4. It’s described as “enduring” and “decadent” and is further “virtually the only imaginative treatment of the themes of incest in the English literature of the era.”
5. If you buy a stripey top, and you love it very much, you might like to read the instructions before washing it, in order not to shrink it.
6. Spain, of all the places I’ve been to, has the best coffee.

20/1

It snowed in Cambridge today, but that wasn’t the most noteworthy event of the day: my bike got nicked! At 2:45 I left my (hired) bike just outside the entrance to Magdalene College (pronounced “maudlin”; Caius College is pronounced “keys college”). At 3:30 it was gone, stolen (I later found out) by two snot-nosed kids as I was inside admiring the Pepys library.

This is my first run-in with crime. At the hostel in Barcelona, in just about every room, someone had been pick-pocketed. Scott, in my room, had his wallet lifted by a hash dealer who’d pushed up against him as he made to demonstrate how he’d sustained a soccer injury. (This experience lowered Scott’s opinion of hash dealers. Previously, he told me, he’d held them in high regard, since they were the providers of an important and necessary service. But this side-line they have in petty crime didn’t go down well.)

Cambridge was fun. I stayed there for 10 months when I was seven, so I went back to the flat where I stayed, checked out the trees I’d climbed (now unclimbable–they’re covered in vines), and rode my red bike (with nifty front basket attachment) a few miles down Maddingly Road to Coton, the village where I’d gone to school. I was a little sorry I only remembered these places about as well as if I’d studied pictures of them–I didn’t remember anything new, or get any new sensations. The colleges are grand, and pretty. It would have been nice to study somewhere similarly august. But, no regrets: I’m 24, that should be quite enough to start “producing.”

I’m kinda getting into Madonna’s “Music” album. I heard most of it in a bar in Amsterdam and I have to admit that there, at least, it “worked.”

Misc. travel notes:

1. You see a lot of nuns in Spain.
2. Many Spanish women dye their hair, often inappropriately.
3. You see a lot of people on in-line skates in Paris.
4. Dog turds are common, in France, and Spain.
5. The French for “SALE” is “SOLDES.”
6. There are many motor scooters in Spain, and many bicycles in Amsterdam.

I go to Prague in a few hours.

16/1

Back in Paris. Yesterday, I took a train from Amsterdam to Brussels, arriving in Paris at 6:00 last night. There was a wait of a few hours in Brussels; I wanted to go into town but the station wasn’t in a particularly helpful location. Also, I had no Belgian money. So I sat in this fast food place and read the Times. I mostly buy the Times to do the crossword–I know this lass who’s much better at crosswords than me. I can’t allow this! She can be better, but not that much better. So I’m practising. On a good day I can get maybe 80% of the words, on a bad day a little more than half. (This is the “quick” crossword.)

On the train from Amsterdam to Brussels I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s not a bad little book. And you can read it fast too–I did the 220-odd pages in a bit under two hours, although when I got to the hostel in Paris I discovered that big-brained roommate Philippe was reading Tropic of Cancer…

About Amsterdam: Amsterdam is famous for three, maybe four things–sex, drugs, tulips and windmills. Two of these are “exportable” but it’s not tulip season; I didn’t export any of the other. In my new spirit of recklessness I considered taking a small package of magical dried weed back on the train to Paris, and then to London, but the two people I spoke to about this thought it was perhaps not such a good idea. So far though (I’m on the Eurostar, going from Paris to London) I’ve seen no drug-sniffing dogs, no law enforcement officials, no x-ray machines. So, I hope to hell I’m damn well strip-searched at Waterloo Station, otherwise I shall be sore. [I wasn't, but they were more, well, vigilant in London, so I'm not sore.]

Anyway, last night. Last night I went to the Pompidou Center. I got there at 8:20, just as it was closing. (There weren’t even selling tickets, although everything was open until 9:00.) So on to this Japanese place and some sushi, I’m getting to really like sushi. Walked back to the hostel. Stopped at this bar (English, it turned out) and ordered a Ricard, recommended by this guy I met in Barcelona. It’s a greeny, yellowy colour, but tastes (strongly!) of aniseed–it tastes awful. Stay away. “Shakespeare in Love” was on the TVs for some reason and I spent quite a while trying to remember the damn actress’s name. I still can’t remember. Brad Pitt’s ex-girlfriend. Didn’t she get an Oscar for it? I can’t recall.

Today, before 16:07 (when the train left) I wanted to see Notre-Dame, the Mona Lisa (at the Louvre), and the catacombs. Notre-Dame is about a 10 minute walk from my hostel. At 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning there’s hardly anyone there–there was no queue for the Tower, or the cathedral proper. (A few weeks ago, it took about 30 minutes to get into the cathedral, and–I’m guessing, because I didn’t wait–several hours to go up the tower. Incidentally, the last time I come it was a Sunday and though a service was being held, tourists were still allowed in. Is this disrespectful? On that Sunday I stood in line next to a graphic designer from Sydney who’d done the Tim-Tam packet. She wore very purple gloves, and a matching purple scarf.)

The tower’s worth climbing, at least if you don’t have to wait hours in line to do it. Folk of the 12th Century, even if they thought that the earth was flat, that heavy things fell faster than light things and that you could turn dirt into gold, could still stack rocks pretty good. I went into the cathedral again too, and “purchased” two more votive candles. You’re supposed light them, then say prayers over them (or something) and then leave them in the cathedral (”The candles will bear witness to your prayer when you are gone.”) but I don’t believe in God and I figured they’d make a nice memento. (Catholics have assured me that doing this was not blasphemous; this question bothered me slightly–I am not religious but I do try to be respectful of it.)

After Notre-Dame, the Louvre. Of course, being Tuesday, it was firmly shut. So I sat, and smoked, and watched some tricked-out guys clean the glass pyramid. I’ve spent a lot of time watching people work this trip. There’s a nice line in “Three Men in a Boat” (Jerome K. Jerome), that goes something like, “I like work, it fascinates me. I can sit and watched it for hours.” That’s me.

Leaving the Louvre, I walked through Paris for a bit, then took the Metro to a station near the catacombs where I ate a decent, honest, ham and cheese omelette. Good omelettes are hard to do; I am still learning.

The catacombs are worthwhile. You first go down a spiral staircase (maybe 150 steps), then walk for five minutes along dimly-lit, 6′ high corridors. (My theory is that this walk is not geographically necessary–it’s just to build tension.) Then, you get to the bones!–thousands of them, neatly stacked from floor to ceiling, layers of femurs, then skulls, then femurs, then skulls. (I’m not sure what happened to the other bones, perhaps they decay faster.) So many bones, so many people. There are so many that you forget that each of the skulls once belonged to a person who worked and lived and loved.

Coming out of the catacombs, I walked in the wrong direction for a little while (you don’t end up where you start), which was a little annoying–I had less than an hour to collect my bag from the hostel and get to the train station. But, I did make it.

Comments transcribed from the guestbook for “Epiderm”, a collection of photographs by Larry Clark exhibited at Galerie Kamel Mennour, 60, rue Mazarine, Paris. Larry Clark’s work verges on the pedophilic–there are sections called “Smoking Boys”, “Teenage Lust”, and “Blue Boy”. He also directed the movie “Kids” (1995).

DADDY NEVER UNDERSTOOD
pauline

Mr. Clark, your photos is a punch in the stomach. You’re the most pervert photograph I’ve ever seen…
P.S. And I don’t think you’re the most talented photograph in N.Y.
Katerina Tsilimidon
Greece

Is anyone’s life made better?
Giao da Mike (?–obscured)

I get hard looking at your photos. Thanks Larry. cu/Paris
(I get soft, too.)