Just a few random things about Praha (Prague).

There are just hundreds and hundreds of very beautiful young women running around Prague. My best guess is that classic good looks and healthy bodies are in the Czech DNA. It’s a treat for an old rake like me to wander through Wenceslas square and just look at all the pretty girls.

Czech food is not for the faint of heart. At one restaurant, operating in a basement that looked like a medieval torture chamber, I ordered the “Prague platter” and was presented with a platter, not a large plate but a platter, and on it was a chunk of ham, a thick slice of beef, and a quarter of a roast duck Along with sauerkraut, and some little medallions of bread that are called dumplings by the Czech”s. The waitress advised me that if I wanted vegetables or salad or “other things” that it would be extra. The look on her face told me that she’s gotten a hard time from earlier Americans who expected to dine like Americans even though they were sitting in a restaurant in a cellar of a building that was likely built in the Middle Ages. I ate it all without complaint. It was really good. A liter of beer washed it all down nicely.

There is an astronomical clock Built into a tower overlooking the Praha town square. It was built by a famous mathematician and engineer of the time, Master Hanus, and it is a wonder to behold. At first glance it looks like an clock tower, but look at it for more than a few seconds and you see it tells the time on a 24 hour scale, the time of year, phases of the moon position of the sun. And if that isn’t amazing enough, above the clock face are some figures, among them a skeleton holding a bell. Every hour the clock chimes and its the skeleton doing the chiming on his bell and nodding his skull, and at the same time, two doors open above the clock face and the 12 apostles appear two at a time. And to really put a button on this tidbit. Once the clock was completed back in 1410, the Prague town fathers decided they did not want Master Hanus to create another clock for another city. Rather than having him sign a non-compete agreement, they blinded him instead. I wonder about the alternate plans that were scuttled in favor of the more measured approach of blinding the guy.

“Let’s kill him,”

“Kill him? No Janus. To kill him would be barbaric. After all this is the 15th century.”

“Cut off his hands?”

“Och!”

“But Master Hanus might build another clock in Budapest, a BETTER clock”

“True, that is a great risk, but rather than kill him, or maim him, let us blind him with a hot iron. A blind man can live a long pious life, and never build another clock. We are sensible men who do not always resort to the sword”

“You are such a wise man Janek”

Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka used to hang out together in Praha. There is even a bronze plaque near the coffee house where the two would meet and talk. You gotta wonder how those conversations went.

Went by the John Lennon wall and looked at all the graffiti and listened to a lone singer who seemed to be going through the Beatles catalog one song at a time all by himself. Young Czech’s spontaneously gathered here to mourn after Lennon was murdered. Apparently this place became a gathering spot for dissidents and free thinkers as well. Remember this was back in the Soviet era. The government wanted to crack down on this gathering spot, but could not because it was right in front of The French Embassy and the security cameras would have caught the whole mess. So they let it stand, and the Soviet Union crumbled. “You say you want a revolution…”