Viennese Gender Equality and Pet Tolerance

In the subway, there are two sets of signs which indicate special seats for those who may need special seating. On one set of signs the disabled and parent are male, and on the second set of signs, they are female. The pregnant person is always female. One can only go so far.






As for dogs, you can take them on the subway and into restaurants as long as they have a muzzle and a leash. In observation, they both seem to be optional, especially for chihuahuas and miniature pinschers.




Nobody mentions what one does about the carnivorous zebras




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Art is provocation

David Černý is a bad boy of Czech art. He writes, "Provocation is the amplified reason why the art exists. What's supposed to be called art and not design has to have something behind it. It has to have a message, whatever. It can have a static message, but it has to have a message. It's not a chair." He has done a number of sculptures around Prague, as well as internationally, but he has stirred up a lot of controversy. Oddly enough, though he has had his art work banned in several countries and irritated many, the only piece of art that landed him in jail was the pink tank because they said he had "defaced public property." Here is a selection of his work around Prague.

Babies: these guys are also climbing up the side of a tv tower which was voted by a tourism survey as the second ugliest building in the world.




The Pink Tank for which he was arrested. It now has its own barge out in the middle of the Vlatava River where tourists in little pedal boats can crash into it to the hilarious delight of the observers on Národní Bridge.



Hanging man: this is Sigmund Freud, hanging out. Černý said this represents the choice we all need to make, which is to hang on or let go.



Peeing men: this is outside the Kafka Museum, as noted in an earlier post. I later learned that you can instant message the statues to pee quotes into the pool.




Wenceslas on a dead horse: this is hanging in a cinema and makes fun of the patriotic sculpture of Good King Wenceslas out in the middle of Wenceslas Square so I include the statue for your comparison.







The pointed guns: this is a sculpture of four pistols all pointed at each other, and it is hanging in a small museum off Karlova street, but we forgot to photograph it. Drat.

I really enjoy these sculptures because while they are strong political statements, they are funny. It's like Jon Stewart: you get the bad news, but in such a way that one feels like one can bear it and not have to jump off a bridge because there is no hope.

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Vienna v. Prague

Vienna was the political hub of the Empire until the 20th century, and Prague was the Bureaucratic hinterland. How cool to compare the architecture of power between the two! In Prague there is this big lump on a stoney hill where the rules came down to the town from on high. In Vienna, this is was where the Emperor centralized his control, and his is where the boyz from Prague came to get the rules. So to get a handle on the material culture of this contrast, we went to the Schönbrunn to see the summer palace, which they claim has no relation to Versailles, but any careful observer looks at it and thinks, "Yeah, right."



We went on the "imperial tour" which means short, least expensive tour that goes through the first set of apartments only. The crowds were artfully managed, there were automated ticket machines, and the progression of movement was gently organized with velvet ropes. It was smooth and admirable. I wonder very much what the curriculum is at the international hospitality science program is. Does it include crowd management and satisfaction? It seemed that the brilliant addition of the audio tour resulted in slow but continuously moving zombies who were very quiet and controllable. Debbie and I got the written guide, and we had constant running chatter on the rooms (discretely of course), but our audio guide colleagues shuffled slowly from room to room in silence. I'm sure the audio tour is very good, but it seemed to raise tourist passivity to a whole new level. I will admit that it was a little creepy to be passed by a silent slow moving tide of people with vacant expressions and electronic devices glued to their ears.


The gardens are great! (and reminiscent of Versailles, shhh). Gardens that were once the demesne of aristocrats, it are now a public garden where people sun themselves, soothe their unhappy children, read books, eat lunch, and chat. The shift from elite to plebeian is hilarious and complete. But being one of the plebes, I enjoyed the gardens greatly. Debbie and I put up our parasols, which conveniently double as umbrellas at need, and walked around the gardens our own personal shade. While the palace exudes power in it's grand sweep, elegant gilt decoration, and almost mythic history, the gardens are also an expression of power.


The trees are bent to make great green walls, the roses are macramé vines, and the flowerbeds are perfectly geometrical. Here is Man bending Nature to His will. Nonetheless, the lesser creatures are taken care of.


Here is a duck ramp in one of the fountains so that ducks can get out. We witnessed a duck use this nice concession. The sad history of assassination and suicide of the inhabitants of the palace, and the incomprehensible opulence made me happy to be an unnoticed ordinary person with a tiny postage stamp of a garden. Life is so much easier this way, and, frankly, with fewer hedges, my hedges are better trimmed than the hedges at schönbrunn. They are currently restoring the main hall for 2.3 million€ so I think they have laid off some gardeners. There were many hedges that were in desperate need of a trim. However, they were very polite about the reconstruction and put on their signs "we apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment our renovations may cause." How sweet! I have ever had a tourist venue apologize for any disappointment.


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Prague Castle

Prague Castle is a big lump on the hill overlooking the city. The castle is really a complex of different buildings that accreted around a site up on the hill, so it is a hilarious jumble of architectural styles. The cathedral is crunchy gothic on the outside with creamy baroque on the inside.


The Basilica of St. George is frothy Baroque on the outside with chewy Romanesque on the inside. St. George slays his dragon left and right, and the palaces are filled with reproductions, the originals of which appear to all be located in Vienna. There were never really kings at this castle: it was full of minor officials who did the bidding of kings in...other places like Vienna. So this was a small tower of bureaucrats, the really dangerous people. Kafka talked about that. He said that bureaucracy was dangerous because they hid the punishments and made torture a depersonalized mechanical process. He said the worst thing is that they made oppression efficient. Well, this "castle" seems to have been all about this.

It is a big warren of buildings that makes lot of money for the state. Several thousand people per day must pass through the doors of this stone island. The passage ways are jammed with people rain or shine, and there are a lot of languages to be heard. Most of them waddle at a glacial pace, and they stop suddenly to photograph each other. Americans just stand where they are and smile, but the European tourists have special poses. It is great fun to watch the various poses they take: it is like low level voguing for all ages.


The cathedral is properly huge, but all the buildings of the "castle" complex cluster around it's knees and rather dampen the effect by hemming it in. It peeks out over the tops of the bureaucratic buildings in a kind of irritated way. Inside, it recovers its dignity since it doesn't need to compete with the scribes on its own territory. The windows are painted with art deco scenes, and there are statues of dead bishops in all the little chapels. The principal grave that is the highlight of the visit is the grave of St. Nepomok, a religious person who was martyred by being thrown off the Charles Bridge. There is a plaque on the bridge now that people rub for good luck.

I also noticed that there is a plaque with a dog on it on the bridge that is also very shiny so people must pet the bronze dog as well. If you look at the statue of Franz Kafka in the Jewish Quarter, people seem to rub the tips of his boots.


The most exciting room of the main "castle" building, where there were audiences and records and replica crown jewels (which are in Vienna), was the room of defenestration. In a Catholic/Protestant dispute, three castle officials were thrown out the window of this room, but they landed on a compost heap and survived. Some versions of the story say it was angels, others say it was just providential poop, but either way it was not a short fall. We stood in the little, fateful room and marveled at how small it was and how it was essentially a dead end. The castle regents were totally cornered. It must have been a terrifying time. Look under the windows: you will see a monument to the regents where they landed on the compost pile.

The palaces one can tour seem like they were cold and dark. They seem like they were grim places to live, but with all those aristocrats and their bureaucrats, there had to be servants, and theses servants lived in little houses along the castle wall on a street called Golden Lane. The houses were one and two room affairs with low ceilings and small windows that look out on the royal gardens.


They seemed like they were quite cozy. Kafka's sister owned number 22, and Kafka wrote "The Country Doctor" there. It is a bookshop now, but it was delightful to go into that small space after all the big spaces of he cathedral and palaces because it was such a human scale. It was comfortable and cheery, though quite small. It was easy to understand how Kafka could write in this space.

The insight of the day came from visiting the portrait gallery and the national gallery. Both places have extensive collections of neoclassical 19th century paintings, and it is a rather second rate collection. As we walked through the collections, I realized that I was bored by the neoclassical style. It felt stati and like nothing was happening. Sure it was pretty, but it didn't really speak to the moment. I was not interested in the moral education of a bygone era that was harking back to a bygoner era. Then, around a corner, we hit the paintings of an impressionist, and it was lovely. There were only three in this sea of Right and Proper neoclassicism, but I suddenly understood why people got fed up with it and why the expressionism of the early 20th century seemed so radical and so necessary. The past was no longer the guide, what was important was the experience of the present. Intellectually, I has understood that, but trudging through the neoclassical doldrums of the national gallery to suddenly drift up on the impressionists was a jolt of personal recognition of the problem. It was so exciting I had to sit down for a moment and recover. This is what gothic lit is about: throwing off the chains of a restrictive past and transgressing the old mores for more free expression. This old dog has finally learned how this trick works.


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Early morning in Prague

I will tell you who is up early in Prague: drunks (who never went to bed), homeless people, and serious photographers. I fell into the last category as I went out at 5:30 this morning to take some specific photographs without the hordes. Across the Charles Bridge drunken young people swayed and sang in small disheveled groups. A young man crawled across the old town square until some police officers came to see if he was okay. Another young man flew in little airplane circles making airplane noises while his friends hooted. The homeless people ignored them and shuffled through the streets with their plastic bags of possessions, chatting amiably. I and my photographer colleagues politely and earnestly clicked away at the nice clear places, although in some of the movies I took, it was impossible to avoid the drunks as they randomly reeled into the frame. When you watch my slick production video, see if you can spot the two drunks who made it into the final cut.



Early morning sorts things out. When there are fewer people out, what one is doing is made more visible. When Debbie and I walked home at midnight from our visit with her friend at a cafe, the crowds were still out, and it felt safer and more anonymous. This morning, I felt more exposed and certainly more on guard. I like the early morning because it seems to expose a city and make it clearer, although I was not prepared for early morning to seem less safe. I suppose it felt less safe because I have never been in a place where there so many early morning drunks. Their behavior was random, which made them more difficult to deal with.

An assignment that I will give to the students is to do a photo essay of the beautiful, the ugly, and the authentic sides of Prague. This entire assignment can be done quite quickly at 6:00 am as it is all concentrated at this time.


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Prague, this is a crone with claws

Kafka says you have to yield to Prague, or else. In so much of the analysis of his writing, and in his writing itself, the reader gets the sense of a divided love/hate relationship with the city. But it is sometimes funny. The Castle is truly funny in places, and all over the city there are humorous pieces of sculpture. In front of the Kafka Museum are these two guys peeing into a basin at their feet that is in the shape of the Czech Republic. Debbie and I sat waiting for the museum to open this morning and watched people react to this fountain. As these large copper men pee into their fountain, their hips swivel and their winkies raise and lower such that the water sprays all around. People hold their winkies, pat their bottoms, and put their hands into the "pee" streaming into the fountain. This fountain is so blatant about an essentially unspeakable and basic performance that it is powerfully attractive to the passing audience. It is positively magnetic. On our way home from a cafe last night, Debbie and I witness a gentleman merrily peeing between two parked cars, but the fact that he wasn't made of copper and he wasn't peeing into a symbolic basin just left him being disgusting in public.




So with this hilarious sculpture, the Kafka Museum starts with a bang. After the copper boyz, there is a big K. Here are Debbie and I doing interpretive tableaux with the K. For reasons of good taste, we did not do any interpretive tableaux with the copper boyz.


The museum is set up so that the viewers can experience Kafka's work through the disorientation that he creates in his texts. It kind of missed the humor, but maybe I am just a nut to find some of the surrealism humorous. There are two excellent short films, one that shows Prague from his twisted, modernist, cubist point of view, and another that is a brilliant summary of the The Castle. Whoever did the text was brilliant because the English, and I guess the Czech, narrative plaques were both poetic and informative. I felt like I had a better feeling for the texts after going through the museum where we are urged by a sign to let the space show us and the sound guide us through Kafka's parallel universe Prague.

In the part about the horror of bureaucracy, there is a hallway of filing cabinets most of which do not open. There are two phones, one does not work, the other has a voice reading The Trial, and there is a third phone one hears ringing but cannot be found to be answered. I tried to open some if the shut filing cabinets and laughed when I couldn't because it reminded me of my filing cabinet that I often can't open. They are full of information, but I can't get it, so I essentially don't have it. The cognitive dissonance could be frustrating, but it is also funny. Debbie and I stood amongst the filing cabinets that wouldn't open, listening to the phone ringing which could not answered, and laughed because of the feeling of urgency created by the phone that was artificial, but real, but futile. Good metacognition can result is really funny moments.

On our way home, we stopped at The Slavia Cafe for coffee. This is a slightly faded art deco cafe of the old French style where the room is large but crowded with little tables. The waiter was so sweet to speak to us in English, because he could, and let us order in "Czech". "Dva kavu prosim" resulted in two coffees from the lovely waiter who said, "That's easy!". This cafe was a place where Kafka and his art and music buddies would meet for coffee. A local person we met the other day said that all the other cafes in Prague raised their prices but the Slavia forgot.



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Continuing Adventures in Czech Language and Culture

As I was hiking up the hill with the other middle-aged ladies out Doing Business, a woman came up to me and said a rapid sentence in Czech. I understood two words, and they were both street names. I guessed that she was asking for directions, and I repeated the street name I recognized, Narodni. Ano, she said, and then called something to her friend that I guessed was, "Hey, she's got a map!". I showed this person the map and pointed to Narodni Street. Ze? She said pointing down the street. Ano, I said, Ze. I think this meant something like, yes, that way. I recognized the work Djekui as thank you, and I just smiled and waved because I do not yet have the Czech for, you're welcome, in my brain. Nonetheless, that worked out well.

Alas my next attempt at interaction with the grocery store clerk went less well. Grocery stores cause me great anxiety because I was yelled at once in a Swiss grocery store because I did not weigh my apples and mark them before I got to the register. This negative feedback on my lack of grocery cultural competence taught me to do a great deal of observation before getting to the register. I had already observed that you do not get your change in your hand. Instead you let the change be put into a little indentation on the counter and then pick it up, unless it is at a street cart where there is not a cup. Anyway, I got my stuff, and spent a few minutes watching people check out. I noticed that the checkout lady didn't like to make change as well.
I also noticed that she weighed the stuff herself, so I didn't need to weigh anything myself. I had read that I needed my own bag, and I had that. With all my planning ready, I prepared to effect my grocery buying plan.

I put my stuff on the belt, and she ran it all through. She said a long sentence to me that started with Dobry Den and I think that she wanted to know if I had a Tesco savings card. unprepared for that, I was silent, but I should have said Dobry Den back. I'll try that next time. She then pushed all my stuff through and took out a plastic bag for my stuff! Neh, I said and held up my bag. She put the bag away and let me bag my stuff. That seemed okay. Then came the exchange of cash. It was 171 koruna. I pulled out a 100 note,and started to fish for change, since I thought this is her preference. It was, but I was too slow. She leaned over and took the right change out of my hand. It happened really fast! I was sad I was so slow. The numbers came up quickly, I wasn't wearing glasses, and I had to read each coin. *sigh*. Next time, I will be better aware of my coins, and I will greet properly. Was it instrumentally successful? Yes. I got my groceries. Was it socially successful? No. I look forward to the day when I have an service interaction with a Czech person where I do not annoy that person.