Jesse and I took an airplane to Prague for the weekend. It’s crazy that just under an hour of flying I can enter a country where people speak a different language (from a different language family), with a very different atmosphere because of its Slavic cultural history.
The first thing that struck me was the escalator in the metro station – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNvNy4bj0g . The posters on the walls were running parallel with the slope of the escalator, instead of their usual orientations in escalators, parallel to the axis of a standing person. It was disorienting, and in hindsight I think this first memory of Prague is a perfect representation of the city’s character.
As we continued exploring the city, we kept running into peculiar objects:
and another fountain featuring threeelegant and relaxed dinosaurs spitting water with great force, in the middle of a small plaza with surrounding restaurants:
and instead of finding beautiful courtyards when peakinginto a doorway on the street like in Milan, I instead saw people drinking beers at bars (more like dimly litbasements with like one yellow wall lighting fixture on a deep mahogany colored wall).
The variety of different styles of architecture there also felt like an accurate description of how Prague is right now: there is an odd balance/coexistence in Prague of tourists from around the world and Czech natives (who speak a fairly small language and share a very particular culture). Likewise, there was an eclectic mixture of building styles, with new/international jutting up next to historical ones, next to Wes Anderson-like buildings, next to Cubist-inspired ones:
Maybe I’ve just had a previous idea of Prague and it made me look at everything with a lens (that everything is disconcerting and odd). But I really think that’s what Prague is about, from everything I described to the language itself (objectively, the way the letters form together in words clash).
